CHAPTER FIVE
The Lord’s Prayer
The Sermon on the Mount, as we have seen, draws a comprehensive portrait of the right way to live. It aims to show us how to be a human being. We could sum up its fundamental insights by saying that man can be understood only in light of God, and that his life is made righteous only when he lives it in relation to God. But God is not some distant stranger. He shows us his face in Jesus. In what Jesus does and wills, we come to know the mind and will of God himself.
If being human is essentially about relation to God, it is clear that speaking with, and listening to, God is an essential part of it. This is why the Sermon on the Mount also includes a teaching about prayer. The Lord tells us how we are to pray.
In Matthew’s Gospel, the Lord’s Prayer is preceded by a short catechesis on prayer. Its main purpose is to warn against false forms of prayer. Prayer must not be an occasion for showing off before others; it requires the discretion that is essential to a relation of love. God addresses every individual by a name that no one else knows, as Scripture tells us (cf. Rev 2:17). God’s love for each individual is totally personal and includes this mystery of a uniqueness that cannot be divulged to other human beings.
This discretion, which is of the very essence of prayer, does not exclude prayer in common. The Our Father is itself a prayer uttered in the first person plural, and it is only by becoming part of the “we” of God’s children that we can reach up to him beyond the limits of this world in the first place. And yet this “we” awakens the inmost core of the person; in the act of prayer the totally personal and the communal must always pervade each other, as we will see more closely in our exposition of the Our Father. Just as in the relationship between man and woman there is a totally personal dimension that requires a zone of discretion for its protection, though at the same time the relationship of the two in marriage and family by its very nature also includes public responsibility, so it is also in our relation to God: The “we” of the praying community and the utterly personal intimacy that can be shared only with God are closely interconnected.
The other false form of prayer the Lord warns us against is the chatter, the verbiage, that smothers the spirit. We are all familiar with the danger of reciting habitual formulas while our mind is somewhere else entirely. We are at our most attentive when we are driven by inmost need to ask God for something or are prompted by a joyful heart to thank him for good things that have happened to us. Most importantly, though, our relationship to God should not be confined to such momentary situations, but should be present as the bedrock of our soul. In order for that to happen, this relation has to be constantly revived and the affairs of our everyday lives have to be constantly related back to it. The more the depths of our souls are directed toward God, the better we will be able to pray. The more prayer is the foundation that upholds our entire existence, the more we will become men of peace. The more we can bear pain, the more we will be able to understand others and open ourselves to them. This orientation pervasively shaping our whole consciousness, this silent presence of God at the heart of our thinking, our meditating, and our being, is what we mean by “prayer without ceasing.” This is ultimately what we mean by love of God, which is at the same time the condition and the driving force behind love of neighbor.
This is what prayer really is—being in silent inward communion with God. It requires nourishment, and that is why we need articulated prayer in words, images, or thoughts. The more God is present in us, the more we will really be able to be present to him when we utter the words of our prayers. But the converse is also true: Praying actualizes and deepens our communion of being with God. Our praying can and should arise above all from our heart, from our needs, our hopes, our joys, our sufferings, from our shame over sin, and from our gratitude for the good. It can and should be a wholly personal prayer. But we also constantly need to make use of those prayers that express in words the encounter with God experienced both by the Church as a whole and by individual members of the Church. For without these aids to prayer, our own praying and our image of God become subjective and end up reflecting ourselves more than the living God. In the formulaic prayers that arose first from the faith of Israel and then from the faith of praying members of the Church, we get to know God and ourselves as well. They are a “school of prayer” that transforms and opens up our life.
In his Rule, Saint Benedict coined the formula Mens nostra concordet voci nostrae—our mind must be in accord with our voice (Rule, 19, 7). Normally, thought precedes word; it seeks and formulates the word. But praying the Psalms and liturgical prayer in general is exactly the other way round: The word, the voice, goes ahead of us, and our mind must adapt to it. For on our own we human beings do not “know how to pray as we ought” (Rom 8:26)—we are too far removed from God, he is too mysterious and too great for us. And so God has come to our aid: He himself provides the words of our prayer and teaches us to pray. Through the prayers that come from him, he enables us to set out toward him; by praying together with the brothers and sisters he has given us, we gradually come to know him and draw closer to him.
In Saint Benedict’s writings, the phrase cited just now refers directly to the Psalms, the great prayer book of the People of God of the Old and New Covenant. The Psalms are words that the Holy Spirit has given to men; they are God’s Spirit become word. We thus pray “in the Spirit,” with the Holy Spirit. This applies even more, of course, to the Our Father. When we pray the Our Father, we are praying to God with words given by God, as Saint Cyprian says. And he adds that when we pray the Our Father, Jesus’ promise regarding the true worshipers, those who adore the Father “in spirit and in truth” (Jn 4:23), is fulfilled in us. Christ, who is the truth, has given us these words, and in them he gives us the Holy Spirit (De dominica oratione 2; CSEL III, 1, pp. 267f.). This also reveals something of the specificity of Christian mysticism. It is not in the first instance immersion in the depths of oneself, but encounter with the Spirit of God in the word that goes ahead of us. It is encounter with the Son and the Holy Spirit and thus a becoming-one with the living God who is always both in us and above us.
While Matthew introduces the Our Father with a short catechesis on prayer in general, we find it in a different context in Luke—namely, Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem. Luke prefaces the Lord’s Prayer with the following remark: Jesus “was praying in a certain place, and when he ceased, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray…’” (Lk 11:1).
The context, then, is that the disciples see Jesus praying and it awakens in them the wish to learn from him how to pray. This is typical for Luke, who assigns a very special place in his Gospel to Jesus’ prayer. Jesus’ entire ministry arises from his prayer, and is sustained by it. Essential events in the course of his journey, in which his mystery is gradually unveiled, appear in this light as prayer events. Peter’s confession that Jesus is the Holy One of God is connected with encountering Jesus at prayer (cf. Lk 9:18ff.); the Transfiguration of Jesus is a prayer event (cf. Lk 9:28f.).
The fact that Luke places the Our Father in the context of Jesus’ own praying is therefore significant. Jesus thereby involves us in his own prayer; he leads us into the interior dialogue of triune love; he draws our human hardships deep into God’s heart, as it were. This also means, however, that the words of the Our Father are signposts to interior prayer, they provide a basic direction for our being, and they aim to configure us to the image of the Son. The meaning of the Our Father goes much further than the mere provision of a prayer text. It aims to form our being, to train us in the inner attitude of Jesus (cf. Phil 2:5).
This has two different implications for our interpretation of the Our Father. First of all, it is important to listen as accurately as possible to Jesus’ words as transmitted to us in Scripture. We must strive to recognize the thoughts Jesus wished to pass on to us in these words. But we must also keep in mind that the Our Father originates from his own praying, from the Son’s dialogue with the Father. This means that it reaches down into depths far beyond the words. It embraces the whole compass of man’s being in all ages and can therefore never be fully fathomed by a purely historical exegesis, however important this may be.
The great men and women of prayer throughout the centuries were privileged to receive an interior union with the Lord that enabled them to descend into the depths beyond the word. They are therefore able to unlock for us the hidden treasures of prayer. And we may be sure that each of us, along with our totally personal relationship with God, is received into, and sheltered within, this prayer. Again and again, each one of us with his mens, his own spirit, must go out to meet, open himself to, and submit to the guidance of the vox, the word that comes to us from the Son. In this way his own heart will be opened, and each individual will learn the particular way in which the Lord wants to pray with him.
The Our Father has been transmitted to us in a shorter form in Luke, whereas it comes down to us in Matthew in the version that the Church has adopted for purposes of prayer. The discussion about which text is more original is not superfluous, but neither is it the main issue. In both versions we are praying with Jesus, and we are grateful that Matthew’s version, with its seven petitions, explicitly unfolds things that Luke seems in part only to touch upon.
Before we enter into the detailed exposition, let us now very briefly look at the structure of the Our Father as Matthew transmits it. It comprises an initial salutation and seven petitions. Three are “thou-petitions,” while four are “we-petitions.” The first three petitions concern the cause of God himself in this world; the four following petitions concern our hopes, needs, and hardships. The relationship between the two sets of petitions in the Our Father could be compared to the relationship between the two tablets of the Decalogue. Essentially they are explications of the two parts of the great commandment to love God and our neighbor—in other words, they are directions toward the path of love.
The Our Father, then, like the Ten Commandments, begins by establishing the primacy of God, which then leads naturally to a consideration of the right way of being human. Here, too, the primary concern is the path of love, which is at the same time a path of conversion. If man is to petition God in the right way, he must stand in the truth. And the truth is: first God, first his Kingdom (cf. Mt 6:33). The first thing we must do is step outside ourselves and open ourselves to God. Nothing can turn out right if our relation to God is not rightly ordered. For this reason, the Our Father begins with God and then, from that starting point, shows us the way toward being human. At the end we descend to the ultimate threat besetting man, for whom the Evil one lies in wait—we may recall the image of the apocalyptic dragon that wages war against those “who keep the commandments of God and bear testimony to Jesus” (Rev 12:17).
Yet the beginning remains present throughout: Our Father—we know that he is with us to hold us in his hand and save us. In his book of spiritual exercises, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits, tells the story of a staretz, or spiritual advisor of the Eastern Church, who yearned “to begin the Our Father with the last verse, so that one might become worthy to finish the prayer with the initial words—‘Our Father.’” In this way, the staretz explained, we would be following the path to Easter. “We begin in the desert with the temptation, we return to Egypt, then we travel the path of the Exodus, through the stations of forgiveness and God’s manna, and by God’s will we attain the promised land, the kingdom of God, where he communicates to us the mystery of his name: ‘Our Father’” (Der österliche Weg, pp. 65f.).
Let both these ways, the way of ascent and the way of descent, be a reminder that the Our Father is always a prayer of Jesus and that communion with him is what opens it up for us. We pray to the Father in heaven, whom we know through his Son. And that means that Jesus is always in the background during the petitions, as we will see in the course of our detailed exposition of the prayer. A final point—because the Our Father is a prayer of Jesus, it is a Trinitarian prayer: We pray with Christ through the Holy Spirit to the Father.
OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN
We begin with the salutation “Father.” Reinhold Schneider writes apropos of this in his exposition of the Our Father: “The Our Father begins with a great consolation: we are allowed to say ‘Father.’ This one word contains the whole history of redemption. We are allowed to say ‘Father,’ because the Son was our brother and has revealed the Father to us; because, thanks to what Christ has done, we have once more become children of God” (Das Vaterunser, p. 10). It is true, of course, that contemporary men and women have difficulty experiencing the great consolation of the word father immediately, since the experience of the father is in many cases either completely absent or is obscured by inadequate examples of fatherhood.
We must therefore let Jesus teach us what father really means. In Jesus’ discourses, the Father appears as the source of all good, as the measure of the rectitude (perfection) of man. “But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good” (Mt 5:44–45). The love that endures “to the end” (Jn 13:1), which the Lord fulfilled on the Cross in praying for his enemies, shows us the essence of the Father. He is this love. Because Jesus brings it to completion, he is entirely “Son,” and he invites us to become “sons” according to this criterion.
Let us consider a further text as well. The Lord reminds us that fathers do not give their children stones when they ask for bread. He then goes on to say: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mt 7:9ff.). Luke specifies the “good gifts” that the Father gives; he says “how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Lk 11:13). This means that the gift of God is God himself. The “good things” that he gives us are himself. This reveals in a surprising way what prayer is really all about: It is not about this or that, but about God’s desire to offer us the gift of himself—that is the gift of all gifts, the “one thing necessary.” Prayer is a way of gradually purifying and correcting our wishes and of slowly coming to realize what we really need: God and his Spirit.
When the Lord teaches us to recognize the essence of God the Father through love of enemies, and to find “perfection” in that love so as to become “sons” ourselves, the connection between Father and Son becomes fully evident. It then becomes plain that the figure of Jesus is the mirror in which we come to know who God is and what he is like: through the Son we find the Father. At the Last Supper, when Philip asks Jesus to “show us the Father,” Jesus says, “He who sees me sees the Father” (Jn 14:8f.). “Lord, show us the Father,” we say again and again to Jesus, and the answer again and again is the Son himself. Through him, and only through him, do we come to know the Father. And in this way the criterion of true fatherliness is made clear. The Our Father does not project a human image onto heaven, but shows us from heaven—from Jesus—what we as human beings can and should be like.
Now, however, we must look even more closely, because we need to realize that, according to Jesus’ message, there are two sides of God’s Fatherhood for us to see. First of all, God is our Father in the sense that he is our Creator. We belong to him because he has created us. “Being” as such comes from him and is consequently good; it derives from God. This is especially true of human beings. Psalm 33:15 says in the Latin translation, “He who has fashioned the hearts of all, considers all their works.” The idea that God has created each individual human being is essential to the Bible’s image of man. Every human being is unique, and willed as such by God. Every individual is known to him. In this sense, by virtue of creation itself man is the “child” of God in a special way, and God is his true Father. To describe man as God’s image is another way of expressing this idea.
This brings us to the second dimension of God’s Fatherhood. There is a unique sense in which Christ is the “image of God” (2 Cor 4:4; Col 1:15). The Fathers of the Church therefore say that when God created man “in his image,” he looked toward the Christ who was to come, and created man according to the image of the “new Adam,” the man who is the criterion of the human. Above all, though, Jesus is “the Son” in the strict sense—he is of one substance with the Father. He wants to draw all of us into his humanity and so into his Sonship, into his total belonging to God.
This gives the concept of being God’s children a dynamic quality: We are not ready-made children of God from the start, but we are meant to become so increasingly by growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus. Our sonship turns out to be identical with following Christ. To name God as Father thus becomes a summons to us: to live as a “child,” as a son or daughter. “All that is mine is thine,” Jesus says in his high-priestly prayer to the Father (Jn 17:10), and the father says the same thing to the elder brother of the Prodigal Son (Lk 15:31). The word father is an invitation to live from our awareness of this reality. Hence, too, the delusion of false emancipation, which marked the beginning of mankind’s history of sin, is overcome. Adam, heeding the words of the serpent, wants to become God himself and to shed his need for God. We see that to be God’s child is not a matter of dependency, but rather of standing in the relation of love that sustains man’s existence and gives it meaning and grandeur.
One last question remains: Is God also mother? The Bible does compare God’s love with the love of a mother: “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you” (Is 66:13). “Can a woman forget her suckling child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you” (Is 49:15). The mystery of God’s maternal love is expressed with particular power in the Hebrew word rahamim. Etymologically, this word means “womb,” but it was later used to mean divine compassion for man, God’s mercy. The Old Testament constantly uses the names of organs of the human body to describe basic human attitudes or inner dispositions of God, just as today we use heart or brain when referring to some aspect of our own existence. In this way the Old Testament portrays the basic attitudes of our existence, not with abstract concepts, but in the image language of the body. The womb is the most concrete expression for the intimate interrelatedness of two lives and of loving concern for the dependent, helpless creature whose whole being, body and soul, nestles in the mother’s womb. The image language of the body furnishes us, then, with a deeper understanding of God’s dispositions toward man than any conceptual language could.
Although this use of language derived from man’s bodiliness inscribes motherly love into the image of God, it is nonetheless also true that God is never named or addressed as mother, either in the Old or in the New Testament. “Mother” in the Bible is an image but not a title for God. Why not? We can only tentatively seek to understand. Of course, God is neither a man nor a woman, but simply God, the Creator of man and woman. The mother-deities that completely surrounded the people of Israel and the New Testament Church create a picture of the relation between God and the world that is completely opposed to the biblical image of God. These deities always, and probably inevitably, imply some form of pantheism in which the difference between Creator and creature disappears. Looked at in these terms, the being of things and of people cannot help looking like an emanation from the maternal womb of being, which, in entering time, takes shape in the multiplicity of existing things.
By contrast, the image of the Father was and is apt for expressing the otherness of Creator and creature and the sovereignty of his creative act. Only by excluding the mother-deities could the Old Testament bring its image of God, the pure transcendence of God, to maturity. But even if we cannot provide any absolutely compelling arguments, the prayer language of the entire Bible remains normative for us, in which, as we have seen, while there are some fine images of maternal love, “mother” is not used as a title or a form of address for God. We make our petitions in the way that Jesus, with Holy Scripture in the background, taught us to pray, and not as we happen to think or want. Only thus do we pray properly.
Finally, we need to consider the word our. Jesus alone was fully entitled to say “my Father,” because he alone is truly God’s only-begotten Son, of one substance with the Father. By contrast, the rest of us have to say “our Father.” Only within the “we” of the disciples can we call God “Father,” because only through communion with Jesus Christ do we truly become “children of God.” In this sense, the word our is really rather demanding: It requires that we step out of the closed circle of our “I.” It requires that we surrender ourselves to communion with the other children of God. It requires, then, that we strip ourselves of what is merely our own, of what divides. It requires that we accept the other, the others—that we open our ear and our heart to them. When we say the word our, we say Yes to the living Church in which the Lord wanted to gather his new family. In this sense, the Our Father is at once a fully personal and a thoroughly ecclesial prayer. In praying the Our Father, we pray totally with our own heart, but at the same time we pray in communion with the whole family of God, with the living and the dead, with men of all conditions, cultures, and races. The Our Father overcomes all boundaries and makes us one family.
This word our also gives us the key to understanding the words that come next: “Who art in heaven.” With these words, we are not pushing God the Father away to some distant planet. Rather, we are testifying to the fact that, while we have different earthly fathers, we all come from one single Father, who is the measure and source of all fatherhood. As Saint Paul says: “I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph 3:14–15). In the background we hear the Lord himself speaking: “Call no man your father on earth, for you have one Father, who is in heaven” (Mt 23:9).
God’s fatherhood is more real than human fatherhood, because he is the ultimate source of our being; because he has thought and willed us from all eternity; because he gives us our true paternal home, which is eternal. And if earthly fatherhood divides, heavenly fatherhood unites. Heaven, then, means that other divine summit from which we all come and to which we are all meant to return. The fatherhood that is “in heaven” points us toward the greater “we” that transcends all boundaries, breaks down all walls, and creates peace.
HALLOWED BE THY NAME
The first petition of the Our Father reminds us of the second commandment of the Decalogue: Thou shalt not speak the name of the Lord thy God in vain. But what is this “name of God”? When we speak of God’s name, we see in our mind’s eye the picture of Moses in the desert beholding a thornbush that burns but is not consumed. At first it is curiosity that prompts him to go and take a closer look at this mysterious sight, but then a voice calls to him from out of the bush, and this voice says to him: “I am the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob” (Ex 3:6). This God sends Moses back to Egypt with the task of leading the people of Israel out of that country into the Promised Land. Moses is charged with demanding in the name of God that Pharaoh let Israel go.
But in the world of Moses’ time there were many gods. Moses therefore asks the name of this God that will prove his special authority vis-à-vis the gods. In this respect, the idea of the divine name belongs first of all to the polytheistic world, in which this God, too, has to give himself a name. But the God who calls Moses is truly God, and God in the strict and true sense is not plural. God is by essence one. For this reason he cannot enter into the world of the gods as one among many; he cannot have one name among others.
God’s answer to Moses is thus at once a refusal and a pledge. He says of himself simply, “I am who I am”—he is without any qualification. This pledge is a name and a non-name at one and the same time. The Israelites were therefore perfectly right in refusing to utter this self-designation of God, expressed in the word YHWH, so as to avoid degrading it to the level of names of pagan deities. By the same token, recent Bible translations were wrong to write out this name—which Israel always regarded as mysterious and unutterable—as if it were just any old name. By doing so, they have dragged the mystery of God, which cannot be captured in images or in names lips can utter, down to the level of some familiar item within a common history of religions.
It remains true, of course, that God did not simply refuse Moses’ request. If we want to understand this curious interplay between name and non-name, we have to be clear about what a name actually is. We could put it very simply by saying that the name creates the possibility of address or invocation. It establishes relationship. When Adam names the animals, what this means is not that he indicates their essential natures, but that he fits them into his human world, puts them within reach of his call. Having said this, we are now in a position to understand the positive meaning of the divine name: God establishes a relationship between himself and us. He puts himself within reach of our invocation. He enters into relationship with us and enables us to be in relationship with him. Yet this means that in some sense he hands himself over to our human world. He has made himself accessible and, therefore, vulnerable as well. He assumes the risk of relationship, of communion, with us.
The process that was brought to completion in the Incarnation had begun with the giving of the divine name. When we come to consider Jesus’ high-priestly prayer, in fact, we will see that he presents himself there as the new Moses: “I have manifested thy name to…men” (Jn 17:6). What began at the burning bush in the Sinai desert comes to fulfillment at the burning bush of the Cross. God has now truly made himself accessible in his incarnate Son. He has become a part of our world; he has, as it were, put himself into our hands.
This enables us to understand what the petition for the sanctification of the divine name means. The name of God can now be misused and so God himself can be sullied. The name of God can be co-opted for our purposes and so the image of God can also be distorted. The more he gives himself into our hands, the more we can obscure his light; the closer he is, the more our misuse can disfigure him. Martin Buber once said that when we consider all the ways in which God’s name has been so shamefully misused, we almost despair of uttering it ourselves. But to keep it silent would be an outright refusal of the love with which God comes to us. Buber says that our only recourse is to try as reverently as possible to pick up and purify the polluted fragments of the divine name. But there is no way we can do that alone. All we can do is plead with him not to allow the light of his name to be destroyed in this world.
Moreover, this plea—that he himself take charge of the sanctification of his name, protect the wonderful mystery of his accessibility to us, and constantly assert his true identity as opposed to our distortion of it—this plea, of course, is always an occasion for us to examine our consciences seriously. How do I treat God’s holy name? Do I stand in reverence before the mystery of the burning bush, before his incomprehensible closeness, even to the point of his presence in the Eucharist, where he truly gives himself entirely into our hands? Do I take care that God’s holy companionship with us will draw us up into his purity and sanctity, instead of dragging him down into the filth?
THY KINGDOM COME
In connection with the petition for God’s Kingdom, we recall all our earlier considerations concerning the term “Kingdom of God.” With this petition, we are acknowledging first and foremost the primacy of God. Where God is absent, nothing can be good. Where God is not seen, man and the world fall to ruin. This is what the Lord means when he says to “seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well” (Mt 6:33). These words establish an order of priorities for human action, for how we approach everyday life.
This is not a promise that we will enter the Land of Plenty on condition that we are devout or that we are somehow attracted to the Kingdom of God. This is not an automatic formula for a well-functioning world, not a utopian vision of a classless society in which everything works out well of its own accord, simply because there is no private property. Jesus does not give us such simple recipes. What he does do, though—as we saw earlier—is to establish an absolutely decisive priority. For “Kingdom of God” means “dominion of God,” and this means that his will is accepted as the true criterion. His will establishes justice, and part of justice is that we give God his just due and, in so doing, discover the criterion for what is justly due among men.
The order of priorities that Jesus indicates for us here may remind us of the Old Testament account of Solomon’s first prayer after his accession to office. The story goes that the Lord appeared to the young king in a dream at night and gave him leave to make a request that the Lord promised to grant. A classic dream motif of mankind! What does Solomon ask for? “Give thy servant therefore a listening heart to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil” (1 Kings 3:9). God praises him because instead of asking for wealth, fortune, honor, or the death of his enemies, or even long life (2 Chron 1:11), tempting as that would have been, he asked for the truly essential thing: a listening heart, the ability to discern between good and evil. And for this reason Solomon receives those other things as well.
With the petition “thy Kingdom come” (not “our kingdom”), the Lord wants to show us how to pray and order our action in just this way. The first and essential thing is a listening heart, so that God, not we, may reign. The Kingdom of God comes by way of a listening heart. That is its path. And that is what we must pray for again and again.
The encounter with Christ makes this petition even deeper and more concrete. We have seen that Jesus is the Kingdom of God in person. The Kingdom of God is present wherever he is present. By the same token, the request for a listening heart becomes a request for communion with Jesus Christ, the petition that we increasingly become “one” with him (Gal 3:28). What is requested in this petition is the true following of Christ, which becomes communion with him and makes us one body with him. Reinhold Schneider has expressed this powerfully: “The life of this Kingdom is Christ’s continuing life in those who are his own. In the heart that is no longer nourished by the vital power of Christ, the Kingdom ends; in the heart that is touched and transformed by it, the Kingdom begins…. The roots of the indestructible tree seek to penetrate into each heart. The Kingdom is one. It exists solely through the Lord who is its life, its strength, and its center” (Das Vaterunser, pp. 31f.). To pray for the Kingdom of God is to say to Jesus: Let us be yours, Lord! Pervade us, live in us; gather scattered humanity in your body, so that in you everything may be subordinated to God and you can then hand over the universe to the Father, in order that “God may be all in all” (1 Cor 15:28).
THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN
Two things are immediately clear from the words of this petition: God has a will with and for us and it must become the measure of our willing and being; and the essence of “heaven” is that it is where God’s will is unswervingly done. Or, to put it in somewhat different terms, where God’s will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God’s will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes “heaven” when and insofar as God’s will is done there; and it is merely “earth,” the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that it may be on earth as it is in heaven—that earth may become “heaven.”
But what is “God’s will”? How do we recognize it? How can we do it? The Holy Scriptures work on the premise that man has knowledge of God’s will in his inmost heart, that anchored deeply within us there is a participation in God’s knowing, which we call conscience (cf., for example, Rom 2:15). But the Scriptures also know that this participation in the Creator’s knowledge, which he gave us in the context of our creation “according to his likeness,” became buried in the course of history. It can never be completely extinguished, but it has been covered over in many ways, like a barely flickering flame, all too often at risk of being smothered under the ash of all the prejudices that have piled up within us. And that is why God has spoken to us anew, uttering words in history that come to us from outside and complete the interior knowledge that has become all too hidden.
The heart of this historically situated “complementary teaching” contained in biblical Revelation is the Decalogue given on Mount Sinai. As we have seen, this is by no means abolished by the Sermon on the Mount, nor is it reduced to an “old law,” but it is simply developed further in a way that allows its full depth and grandeur to shine forth in all its purity. The Decalogue is not, as we have seen, some burden imposed upon man from the outside. It is a revelation of the essence of God himself—to the extent that we are capable of receiving it—and hence it is an exegesis of the truth of our being. The notes of our existence are deciphered for us so that we can read them and translate them into life. God’s will flows from his being and therefore guides us into the truth of our being, liberating us from self-destruction through falsehood.
Because our being comes from God, we are able, despite all of the defilement that holds us back, to set out on the way to God’s will. The Old Testament concept of the “just man” meant exactly that: to live from the word of God, and so from his will, and to find the path that leads into harmony with this will.
Now, when Jesus speaks to us of God’s will and of heaven, the place where God’s will is fulfilled, the core of what he says is again connected with his mission. At Jacob’s well, he says to the disciples who bring him food: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work” (Jn 4:34). What he means is that his oneness with the Father’s will is the foundation of his life. The unity of his will with the Father’s will is the core of his very being. Above all, though, what we hear in this petition of the Our Father is an echo of Jesus’ own passionate struggle in dialogue with his Father on the Mount of Olives: “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt”—“My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done” (Mt 26:39, 42). When we come to consider Jesus’ Passion, we will need to focus explicitly on this prayer, in which Jesus gives us a glimpse into his human soul and its “becoming-one” with the will of God.
The author of the Letter to the Hebrews finds the key to the heart of the mystery of Jesus in the agony on the Mount of Olives (cf. Heb 5:7). Basing himself on this glimpse into Jesus’ soul, he uses Psalm 40 to interpret the mystery. He reads the Psalm thus: “Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired, but a body hast thou prepared for me…. Then I said, ‘Yes, I have come to do thy will, O God,’ as it is written of me in the roll of the book” (Heb 10:5ff.; cf. Ps 40:7–9). Jesus’ whole existence is summed up in the words “Yes, I have come to do thy will.” It is only against this background that we fully understand what he means when he says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me” (Jn 4:34).
And in this light, we now understand that Jesus himself is “heaven” in the deepest and truest sense of the word—he in whom and through whom God’s will is wholly done. Looking at him, we realize that left to ourselves we can never be completely just: The gravitational pull of our own will constantly draws us away from God’s will and turns us into mere “earth.” But he accepts us, he draws us up to himself, into himself, and in communion with him we too learn God’s will. Thus, what we are ultimately praying for in this third petition of the Our Father is that we come closer and closer to him, so that God’s will can conquer the downward pull of our selfishness and make us capable of the lofty height to which we are called.
GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD
The fourth petition of the Our Father appears to us as the most “human” of all of the petitions: Though the Lord directs our eyes to the essential, to the “one thing necessary,” he also knows about and acknowledges our earthly needs. While he says to his disciples, “Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat” (Mt 6:25), he nevertheless invites us to pray for our food and thus to turn our care over to God. Bread is “the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands,” but the earth bears no fruit unless it receives sunlight and rain from above. This coming together of cosmic powers, outside our control, stands opposed to the temptation that comes to us through our pride to give ourselves life purely through our own power. Such pride makes man violent and cold. It ends up destroying the earth. It cannot be otherwise, because it is contrary to the truth that we human beings are oriented toward self-transcendence and that we become great and free and truly ourselves only when we open up to God. We have the right and the duty to ask for what we need. We know that if even earthly fathers give their children good things when they ask for them, God will not refuse us the good things that he alone can give (cf. Lk 11:9–13).
In his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, Saint Cyprian draws our attention to two important aspects of the fourth petition. He has already underscored the far-reaching significance of the word our in his discussion of the phrase “our Father,” and here likewise he points out that the reference is to “our” bread. Here, too, we pray in the communion of the disciples, in the communion of the children of God, and for this reason no one may think only of himself. A further step follows: we pray for our bread—and that means we also pray for bread for others. Those who have an abundance of bread are called to share. In his exposition of the First Letter to the Corinthians—of the scandal Christians were causing in Corinth—Saint John Chrysostom emphasizes that “every bite of bread in one way or another is a bite of the bread that belongs to everyone, of the bread of the world.” Father Kolvenbach adds: “If we invoke our Father over the Lord’s Table and at the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, how can we exempt ourselves from declaring our unshakable resolve to help all men, our brothers, to obtain their daily bread?” (Der österliche Weg, p. 98). By expressing this petition in the first person plural, the Lord is telling us: “Give them something to eat yourselves” (Mk 6:37).
Cyprian makes a second important observation: Anyone who asks for bread for today is poor. This prayer presupposes the poverty of the disciples. It presupposes that there are people who have renounced the world, its riches, and its splendor for the sake of faith and who no longer ask for anything beyond what they need to live. “It is right for the disciple to pray for the necessities of life only for today, since he is forbidden to worry about tomorrow. Indeed, he would be contradicting himself if he wanted to live long in this world, since we pray instead that God’s Kingdom will come quickly” (De dominica oratione 19; CSEL III, 1, p. 281). There must always be people in the Church who leave everything in order to follow the Lord, people who depend radically on God, on his bounty by which we are fed—people, then, who in this way present a sign of faith that shakes us out of our heedlessness and the weakness of our faith.
We cannot ignore the people who trust so totally in God that they seek no security other than him. They encourage us to trust God—to count on him amid life’s great challenges. At the same time, this poverty, motivated entirely by commitment to God and his Kingdom, is also an act of solidarity with the world’s poor, an act that historically has created new standards of value and a new willingness for service and for commitment on behalf of others.
Moreover, the prayer for bread just for today also evokes Israel’s forty years of wandering in the desert, when the people lived on manna—on the bread that God sent from heaven. Each Israelite was to gather only as much as was needed for that particular day; only on the sixth day was it permissible to gather enough of the gift for two days, so as to be able to keep the Sabbath (Ex 16:16–22). The community of the disciples, which draws new life from God’s goodness every day, relives in a new way the experience of the wandering People of God, whom God fed even in the desert.
The petition for bread just for today thus opens up vistas that reach beyond the horizon of the nourishment that is needed day by day. It presupposes that the community of his closest disciples followed the Lord in a radical way, renouncing worldly possessions and adhering to the way of those who “considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt” (Heb 11:26). The eschatological horizon comes into view here—pointing to a future that is weightier and more real than the present.
With that we touch upon one of the words of this petition that sounds quite innocuous in our usual translations: Give us this day our daily bread. “Daily” renders the Greek word epiousios. Referring to this word, one of the great masters of the Greek language—the theologian Origen (d. ca. 254)—says that it does not occur anywhere else in Greek, but that it was coined by the Evangelists. Since Origen’s time, it is true, an instance of this word has been found in a papyrus dating from the fifth century after Christ. But this one example alone is insufficient to give us any certainty about the meaning of this word, which is at any rate very unusual and rare. We have to depend on etymologies and the study of the context.
Today there are two principal interpretations. One maintains that the word means “what is necessary for existence.” On this reading, the petition would run as follows: Give us today the bread that we need in order to live. The other interpretation maintains that the correct translation is “bread for the future,” for the following day. But the petition to receive tomorrow’s bread today does not seem to make sense when looked at in the light of the disciple’s existence. The reference to the future would make more sense if the object of the petition were the bread that really does belong to the future: the true manna of God. In that case, it would be an eschatological petition, the petition for an anticipation of the world to come, asking the Lord to give already “today” the future bread, the bread of the new world—himself. On such a reading, the petition would acquire an eschatological meaning. Some ancient translations hint in this direction. An example is Saint Jerome’s Vulgate, which translates the mysterious word epiousios as supersubstantialis (i.e., super-substantial), thereby pointing to the new, higher “substance” that the Lord gives us in the Holy Sacrament as the true bread of our life.
The fact is that the Fathers of the Church were practically unanimous in understanding the fourth petition of the Our Father as a eucharistic petition; in this sense the Our Father figures in the Mass liturgy as a eucharistic table-prayer (i.e., “grace”). This does not remove the straightforward earthly sense of the disciples’ petition that we have just shown to be the text’s immediate meaning. The Fathers consider different dimensions of the saying that begins as a petition for today’s bread for the poor, but insofar as it directs our gaze to the Father in heaven who feeds us, it recalls the wandering People of God, who were fed by God himself. Read in the light of Jesus’ great discourse on the bread of life, the miracle of the manna naturally points beyond itself to the new world in which the Logos—the eternal Word of God—will be our bread, the food of the eternal wedding banquet.
Is it legitimate to think in such dimensions, or is that a false “theologizing” of a word intended only in a straightforwardly earthly sense? There is a fear of such theologizing today, which is not totally unfounded, but neither should it be overstated. I think that in interpreting the petition for bread, it is necessary to keep in mind the larger context of Jesus’ words and deeds, a context in which essential elements of human life play a major role: water, bread, and, as a sign of the festive character and beauty of the world, the vine and wine. The theme of bread has an important place in Jesus’ message—from the temptation in the desert and the multiplication of the loaves right up to the Last Supper.
The great discourse on the bread of life in John 6 discloses the full spectrum of meaning of this theme. It begins with the hunger of the people who have been listening to Jesus and whom he does not send away without food, that is to say, the “necessary bread” that we require in order to live. But Jesus does not allow us to stop there and reduce man’s needs to bread, to biological and material necessities. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4; Deut 8:3). The miraculously multiplied bread harks back to the miracle of manna in the desert and at the same time points beyond itself: to the fact that man’s real food is the Logos, the eternal Word, the eternal meaning, from which we come and toward which our life is directed. If this initial transcendence of the physical realm prima facie tells us no more than what philosophy has found and is still capable of discovering, there is nevertheless a further transcendence to consider: The eternal Logos does not concretely become bread for man until he has “taken flesh” and speaks to us in human words.
This is followed by the third, absolutely essential, transcendence, which nevertheless proves scandalous to the people of Capernaum: The incarnate Lord gives himself to us in the Sacrament, and in that way the eternal Word for the first time becomes fully manna, the gift of the bread of the future given to us already today. Then, however, the Lord brings everything together once more: This extreme “becoming-corporeal” is actually the real “becoming-spiritual”: “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail” (Jn 6:63). Are we to suppose that Jesus excluded from the petition for bread everything that he tells us about bread and everything that he wants to give us as bread? When we consider Jesus’ message in its entirety, then it is impossible to expunge the eucharistic dimension from the fourth petition of the Our Father. True, the earthly nitty-gritty of the petition for daily bread for everyone is essential. But this petition also helps us to transcend the purely material and to request already now what is to come “tomorrow,” the new bread. And when we pray for “tomorrow’s” bread today, we are reminded to live already today from tomorrow, from the love of God, which calls us all to be responsible for one another.
At this point I would like to quote Cyprian once again. He emphasizes both dimensions. But he also specifically relates the word our, which we spoke of earlier, to the Eucharist, which in a special sense is “our” bread, the bread of Jesus’ disciples. He says: We who are privileged to receive the Eucharist as our bread must nevertheless always pray that none of us be permanently cut off and severed from the body of Christ. “On this account we pray that ‘our’ bread, Christ, be given to us every day, that we, who remain and live in Christ, may not depart from his healing power and from his body” (De dominica oratione 18; CSEL III, 1, pp. 280f.).
AND FORGIVE US OUR TRESPASSES, AS WE FORGIVE THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US
The fifth petition of the Our Father presupposes a world in which there is trespass—trespass of men in relation to other men, trespass in relation to God. Every instance of trespass among men involves some kind of injury to truth and to love and is thus opposed to God, who is truth and love. How to overcome guilt is a central question for every human life; the history of religions revolves around this question. Guilt calls forth retaliation. The result is a chain of trespasses in which the evil of guilt grows ceaselessly and becomes more and more inescapable. With this petition, the Lord is telling us that guilt can be overcome only by forgiveness, not by retaliation. God is a God who forgives, because he loves his creatures; but forgiveness can only penetrate and become effective in one who is himself forgiving.
“Forgiveness” is a theme that pervades the entire Gospel. We meet it at the very beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in the new interpretation of the fifth commandment, when the Lord says to us: “So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5:23f.). You cannot come into God’s presence unreconciled with your brother; anticipating him in the gesture of reconciliation, going out to meet him, is the prerequisite for true worship of God. In so doing, we should keep in mind that God himself—knowing that we human beings stood against him, unreconciled—stepped out of his divinity in order to come toward us, to reconcile us. We should recall that, before giving us the Eucharist, he knelt down before his disciples and washed their dirty feet, cleansing them with his humble love. In the middle of Matthew’s Gospel we find the parable of the unforgiving servant (cf. Mt 18:23–35). He, a highly placed satrap of the king, has just been released from an unimaginably large debt of ten thousand talents. Yet he himself is unwilling to cancel a debt of a hundred denarii—in comparison a laughable sum. Whatever we have to forgive one another is trivial in comparison with the goodness of God, who forgives us. And ultimately we hear Jesus’ petition from the Cross: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34).
If we want to understand the petition fully and make it our own, we must go one step further and ask: What is forgiveness, really? What happens when forgiveness takes place? Guilt is a reality, an objective force; it has caused destruction that must be repaired. For this reason, forgiveness must be more than a matter of ignoring, of merely trying to forget. Guilt must be worked through, healed, and thus overcome. Forgiveness exacts a price—first of all from the person who forgives. He must overcome within himself the evil done to him; he must, as it were, burn it interiorly and in so doing renew himself. As a result, he also involves the other, the trespasser, in this process of transformation, of inner purification, and both parties, suffering all the way through and overcoming evil, are made new. At this point, we encounter the mystery of Christ’s Cross. But the very first thing we encounter is the limit of our power to heal and to overcome evil. We encounter the superior power of evil, which we cannot master with our unaided powers. Reinhold Schneider says apropos of this that “evil lives in a thousand forms; it occupies the pinnacles of power…it bubbles up from the abyss. Love has just one form—your Son” (Das Vaterunser, p. 68).
The idea that God allowed the forgiveness of guilt, the healing of man from within, to cost him the death of his Son has come to seem quite alien to us today. That the Lord “has borne our diseases and taken upon himself sorrows,” that “he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities,” and that “with his wounds we are healed” (Is 53:4–6) no longer seems plausible to us today. Militating against this, on one side, is the trivialization of evil in which we take refuge, despite the fact that at the very same time we treat the horrors of human history, especially of the most recent human history, as an irrefutable pretext for denying the existence of a good God and slandering his creature man. But the understanding of the great mystery of expiation is also blocked by our individualistic image of man. We can no longer grasp substitution because we think that every man is ensconced in himself alone. The fact that all individual beings are deeply interwoven and that all are encompassed in turn by the being of the One, the Incarnate Son, is something we are no longer capable of seeing. When we come to speak of Christ’s Crucifixion, we will have to take up these issues again.
In the meantime, an idea of Cardinal John Henry Newman may suffice. Newman once said that while God could create the whole world out of nothing with just one word, he could overcome men’s guilt and suffering only by bringing himself into play, by becoming in his Son a sufferer who carried this burden and overcame it through his self-surrender. The overcoming of guilt has a price: We must put our heart—or, better, our whole existence—on the line. And even this act is insufficient; it can become effective only through communion with the One who bore the burdens of us all.
The petition for forgiveness is more than a moral exhortation—though it is that as well, and as such it challenges us anew every day. But, at its deepest core, it is—like the other petitions—a Christological prayer. It reminds us of he who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into the hardship of human existence and death on the Cross. It calls us first and foremost to thankfulness for that, and then, with him, to work through and suffer through evil by means of love. And while we must acknowledge day by day how little our capacities suffice for that task, and how often we ourselves keep falling into guilt, this petition gives us the great consolation that our prayer is held safe within the power of his love—with which, through which, and in which it can still become a power of healing.
AND LEAD US NOT INTO TEMPTATION
The way this petition is phrased is shocking for many people: God certainly does not lead us into temptation. In fact, as Saint James tells us: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one” (Jas 1:13).
We are helped a further step along when we recall the words of the Gospel: “Then Jesus was led up by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil” (Mt 4:1). Temptation comes from the devil, but part of Jesus’ messianic task is to withstand the great temptations that have led man away from God and continue to do so. As we have seen, Jesus must suffer through these temptations to the point of dying on the Cross, which is how he opens the way of redemption for us. Thus, it is not only after his death, but already by his death and during his whole life, that Jesus “descends into hell,” as it were, into the domain of our temptations and defeats, in order to take us by the hand and carry us upward. The Letter to the Hebrews places special emphasis on this aspect, which it presents as an essential component of Jesus’ path: “For because he himself has suffered and been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted” (Heb 2:18). “For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin” (Heb 4:15).
A brief look at the Book of Job, which in so many respects prefigures the mystery of Christ, can help us clarify things further. Satan derides man in order to deride God: God’s creature, whom he has formed in his own image, is a pitiful creature. Everything that seems good about him is actually just a façade. The reality is that the only thing man—each man—ever cares about is his own well-being. This is the judgment of Satan, whom the Book of Revelation calls “the accuser of our brethren…who accuses them day and night before our God” (Rev 12:10). The calumniation of man and creation is in the final instance a calumniation of God, an excuse for renouncing him.
Satan wants to prove his case through the righteous man Job: Just let everything be taken away from him, Satan says, and he will quickly drop his piety, too. God gives Satan the freedom to test Job, though within precisely defined boundaries: God does not abandon man, but he does allow him to be tried. This is a very subtle, still implicit, yet real glimpse of the mystery of substitution that takes on a major profile in Isaiah 53: Job’s sufferings serve to justify man. By his faith, proved through suffering, he restores man’s honor. Job’s sufferings are thus by anticipation sufferings in communion with Christ, who restores the honor of us all before God and shows us the way never to lose faith in God even amid the deepest darkness.
The Book of Job can also help us to understand the difference between trial and temptation. In order to mature, in order to make real progress on the path leading from a superficial piety into profound oneness with God’s will, man needs to be tried. Just as the juice of the grape has to ferment in order to become a fine wine, so too man needs purifications and transformations; they are dangerous for him, because they present an opportunity for him to fall, and yet they are indispensable as paths on which he comes to himself and to God. Love is always a process involving purifications, renunciations, and painful transformations of ourselves—and that is how it is a journey to maturity. If Francis Xavier was able to pray to God, saying, “I love you, not because you have the power to give heaven or hell, but simply because you are you—my king and my God,” then surely he had needed a long path of inner purifications to reach such ultimate freedom—a path through stages of maturity, a path beset with temptation and the danger of falling, but a necessary path nonetheless.
Now we are in a position to interpret the sixth petition of the Our Father in a more practical way. When we pray it, we are saying to God: “I know that I need trials so that my nature can be purified. When you decide to send me these trials, when you give evil some room to maneuver, as you did with Job, then please remember that my strength goes only so far. Don’t overestimate my capacity. Don’t set too wide the boundaries within which I may be tempted, and be close to me with your protecting hand when it becomes too much for me.” It was in this sense that Saint Cyprian interpreted the sixth petition. He says that when we pray, “And lead us not into temptation,” we are expressing our awareness “that the enemy can do nothing against us unless God has allowed it beforehand, so that our fear, our devotion and our worship may be directed to God—because the Evil One is not permitted to do anything unless he is given authorization” (De dominica oratione 25; CSEL III, 25, p. 285f.).
And then, pondering the psychological pattern of temptation, he explains that there can be two different reasons why God grants the Evil One a limited power. It can be as a penance for us, in order to dampen our pride, so that we may reexperience the paltriness of our faith, hope, and love and avoid forming too high an opinion of ourselves. Let us think of the Pharisee who recounts his own works to God and imagines that he is not in need of grace. Cyprian unfortunately does not go on to explain in more detail what the other sort of trial is about—the temptation that God lays upon us ad gloriam, for his glory. But should it not put us in mind of the fact that God has placed a particularly heavy burden of temptation on the shoulders of those individuals who were especially close to him, the great saints, from Anthony in his desert to Thérèse of Lisieux in the pious world of her Carmelite monastery? They follow in the footsteps of Job, so to speak; they offer an apologia for man that is at the same time a defense of God. Even more, they enjoy a very special communion with Jesus Christ, who suffered our temptations to the bitter end. They are called to withstand the temptations of a particular time in their own skin, as it were, in their own souls. They are called to bear them through to the end for us ordinary souls and to help us persist on our way to the One who took upon himself the burden of us all.
When we pray the sixth petition of the Our Father, we must therefore, on one hand, be ready to take upon ourselves the burden of trials that is meted out to us. On the other hand, the object of the petition is to ask God not to mete out more than we can bear, not to let us slip from his hands. We make this prayer in the trustful certainty that Saint Paul has articulated for us: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it” (1 Cor 10:13).
BUT DELIVER US FROM EVIL
The last petition of the Our Father takes up the previous one again and gives it a positive twist. The two petitions are therefore closely connected. In the next-to-last petition the not set the dominant note (do not give the Evil One more room to maneuver than we can bear). In the last petition we come before the Father with the hope that is at the center of our faith: “Rescue, redeem, free us!” In the final analysis, it is a plea for redemption. What do we want to be redeemed from? The new German translation of the Our Father says “vom Bösen,” thus leaving it open whether “evil” or “the Evil One” is meant. The two are ultimately inseparable. Indeed, we see before us the dragon of which the Book of Revelation speaks (cf. chapters 12 and 13). John portrays the “beast rising out of the sea,” out of the dark depths of evil, with the symbols of Roman imperial power, and he thus puts a very concrete face on the threat facing the Christians of his day: the total claim placed upon man by the emperor cult and the resulting elevation of political-military-economic might to the peak of absolute power—to the personification of the evil that threatens to devour us. This is coupled with the erosion of ethical principles by a cynical form of skepticism and enlightenment. Thus imperiled, the Christian in time of persecution calls upon the Lord as the only power that can save him: “Deliver us, free us from evil.”
Notwithstanding the dissolution of the Roman Empire and its ideologies, this remains very contemporary! Today there are on one hand the forces of the market, of traffic in weapons, in drugs, and in human beings, all forces that weigh upon the world and ensnare humanity irresistibly. Today, on the other hand, there is also the ideology of success, of well-being, that tells us, “God is just a fiction, he only robs us of our time and our enjoyment of life. Don’t bother with him! Just try to squeeze as much out of life as you can.” These temptations seem irresistible as well. The Our Father in general and this petition in particular are trying to tell us that it is only when you have lost God that you have lost yourself; then you are nothing more than a random product of evolution. Then the “dragon” really has won. So long as the dragon cannot wrest God from you, your deepest being remains unharmed, even in the midst of all the evils that threaten you. Our translation is thus correct to say: “Deliver us from evil,” with evil in the singular. Evils (plural) can be necessary for our purification, but evil (singular) destroys. This, then, is why we pray from the depths of our soul not to be robbed of our faith, which enables us to see God, which binds us with Christ. This is why we pray that, in our concern for goods, we may not lose the Good itself; that even faced with the loss of goods, we may not also lose the Good, which is God; that we ourselves may not be lost: Deliver us from evil!
Cyprian, the martyr bishop who personally had to endure the situation described in the Book of Revelation, once again finds a marvelous way of putting all of this: “When we say ‘deliver us from evil,’ then there is nothing further left for us to ask for. Once we have asked for and obtained protection against evil, we are safely sheltered against everything the devil and the world can contrive. What could the world make you fear if you are protected in the world by God himself?” (De dominica oratione 19; CSEL III, 27, p. 287). This certainty sustained the martyrs, it made them joyful and confident in a world full of affliction, and it “delivered” them at the core of their being, freeing them for true freedom.
This same confidence was wonderfully put into words by Saint Paul: “If God is for us, who is against us?…Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?…No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:31–39).
In this sense, the last petition brings us back to the first three: In asking to be liberated from the power of evil, we are ultimately asking for God’s Kingdom, for union with his will, and for the sanctification of his name. Throughout the ages, though, men and women of prayer have interpreted this petition in a broader sense. In the midst of the world’s tribulations, they have also begged God to set a limit to the evils that ravage the world and our lives.
This very human way of interpreting the petition has entered into the liturgy: In every liturgy, with the sole exception of the Byzantine, the final petition of the Our Father is extended into a separate prayer. In the old Roman liturgy it ran thus: “Free us, Lord, from all evils, past, present, and future. By the intercession…of all the saints, give peace in our day. Come to our aid with your mercy that we may be ever free from sins and protected from confusion.” We sense the hardships of times of war, we hear the cry for total redemption. This “embolism,” with which the liturgy enhances the last petition of the Our Father, shows the humanity of the Church. Yes, we may and we should ask the Lord also to free the world, ourselves, and the many individuals and peoples who suffer from the tribulations that make life almost unbearable.
We may and we should understand this extension of the final petition of the Our Father also as an examination of conscience directed at ourselves—as an appeal to collaborate in breaking the predominance of “evils.” But for all that, we must not lose sight of the proper order of goods and of the connection of evils with “evil.” Our petition must not sink into superficiality; even on this interpretation of the Our Father petition, the central point is still “that we be freed from sins,” that we recognize “evil” as the quintessence of “evils,” and that our gaze may never be diverted from the living God.