Lord's Prayer (1) - God Cares

THE LORD’S PRAYER

(1) GOD CARES

High on a hill, outside the walled city of Jerusalem, stands the Paternoster Church. It claims to have been built on the site where Jesus taught his disciples the Lord's Prayer. Around the walls of that church, the Lord's Prayer is inscribed in 70 different languages. This reminds us that the Lord's Prayer is the common universal prayer of Christian people.

This was brought home to me in 1997 when the Archbishop of Canterbury invited, not only those present in Westminster Abbey for the funeral of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, but all those watching or listening at home to the service throughout the world, to pray the Lord's Prayer in their own language. I think it would be true to say, that at no time in the history of humankind have so many people prayed the Lord's Prayer at the same time.

The prayer forms part of a common core of all Christian worship and even those who seldom come to church are able to recite it by heart at Baptisms, Weddings and Funerals. And that is why any revision of the prayer must be treated with extreme caution since it is an anchor of security in a sea of change within the life of the church.

And yet there is no evidence in the New Testament of it ever being used. There is no reference to it outside the two versions of it given in the gospels of St. Matthew and St. Luke. It is also a prayer that can be said by any devout Jew, since there is no reference to Jesus in it.

Why then did the disciples of Jesus ask him to teach them how to pray, as John the Baptist also taught his disciples to pray? After all, prayer was already central to the Jewish faith, not only for Jesus, but also for his disciples and the early Christians who were brought up within the Jewish tradition. What then makes this prayer so unique?

This Lent, I shall endeavour to answer that question in a series of addresses in which we will look at each clause of the Lord's Prayer.

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And so today we shall start by trying to flesh out the significance of those opening words "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name".

First of all then, "Our Father''. What is so special about the word "father"?

After all, the practice of calling God "Father" was not unique to Jesus. The Old Testament describes God as Father at least fourteen times.

The uniqueness of this description of God is to be found in the Aramaic word Jesus used for "Father”, namely "Abba". The German New Testament scholar, Dr. Jeremias cannot find another instance of its use as an address to God in the whole field of Jewish literature. It is always "my father", “our Father" or "our Father in heaven" but never "Abba”.

What then is the significance of this unique description of God as father, as contained in that single word "Abba".

The word "Abba" comes from the language of children. It has been variously translated as "Daddy" or "Papa". It expresses the warmth and intimacy of the fatherhood of God and our consequent childlike dependence upon him. A God who cares, who understands and who knows each one of us intimately. Above all, a God to whom we can turn in simple trust and confidence just as a little child turns to a father whom it knows, and loves and trusts.

This is an image of a God, far removed from that of the Greek Stoic and Epicurean philosophies of the New Testament times The Stoics believed that God was unable to experience any feelings such as joy or grief, love or hate because that would mean that God could be influenced by human kind. The Epicureans, on the other hand, believed that since God was complete and detached from the world, he could not be involved in its affairs.

This image of God is also far removed from that of the Jewish tradition which paints a picture of a God which often leaves us terrified and afraid.

One recalls that awesome passage in the Book of Job in Chapters 38 and 39.

"Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Have you commanded the morning since your days began? Have you entered the spring of the sea? Have you comprehended the expanse of the earth? Have you entered the store houses of the snow? Can you bind the chains of Pleiades, or loose the cords of Orion? Do you give the horse his might? Do you clothe his neck with strength?" It is as if God is saying to Job "What right have you to speak to me, and to question me".

I must admit that I find it very difficult to imagine Jesus ever speaking like that to anyone physically tortured or heart broken.

To describe God the Father as "Abba" must have come as quite a shock to his early followers, besides bringing them an immense sense of relief. Here was a God to whom one could chat quite naturally. A God who was genuinely concerned and who was capable of understanding. Here was a picture of an intimate and immanent God to whom, as sons of God, they could turn and address as "Abba".

But before we get too familiar or matey with him, let us look briefly at the next words in the Lord's Prayer.

"Our Father, who art in heaven".

Because God knows and sees everything we tend to think he needs to have some vantage point from which he can do this. After all, one can see much more by looking down from a high rise block of flats, than one can see from standing below on the ground.

In other words, "who art in heaven" often seems to imply the crude acceptance of a three storey universe with God up there and we down here.

The late Bishop John Robinson challenged the whole idea in his book Honest to God in the early 1960s. I considered at the time that he was rather naïve because I did not believe that people took this sort of geographical language about location seriously. And I still don't.

As the Jesuit, Thomas Corbishley, points out, "even the most sophisticated of us go on talking about upper classes and (though less openly) about the lower orders, heavenly day and the underworld of crime, about the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair, without attributing to them any localised significance".

Although the Greeks may have believed that their gods lived on Mount Olympus, the Jews were not so simplistic in their thinking.

As the Psalmist notes:

"If I climb up to heaven you are there

there too if I lie in Sheol;

If I fly to the path of the sunrise

or westward across the sea,

your hand will still be guiding me".

And King Solomon astutely also observes "the heavens and their own heavens cannot contain God".

Heaven is not about the location of God, but rather about a quality of perfection. It is superior to earth in the sense that it lacks the limitations to which we on earth are subject. In other words, we are saying that God possesses - is - all and more than all those perfections which traditional theology ascribe to him.

Instead of saying heavenly, perhaps we should use the word unearthly - in other words he is immaterial and therefore free of earthly limitations; he is uncreated and therefore not dependent; he is unrestricted "by" time or space and therefore he is present everywhere. In other words, he is different from any human being.

Whilst we may use human analogies to help us to describe him, they can never do him justice because he is beyond our human understanding.

As I have said before, trying to describe God with the limitations of human language is like trying to play a Beethoven symphony on a mouth organ. Whilst it would be recognisable it cannot do justice to the full musical score and neither can our words do justice to the character of God.

In other words, it is a warning against that cynical remark "God created man in his own image and man has returned the compliment".

And this brings us to the final words of the first clause of the Lord's Prayer "Hallowed by thy name" and not as one young child once said to me "Harold be thy name!"

The word "hallow" comes from the Hebrew root of the word "holy" which means, "separate from" or "different from".

When we use the word "name" we must remember that for the Jews, a name meant much more than a sort of label which distinguishes one individual from another, as the name David distinguishes a person from Peter. For the Jews, a name described a person's character or function. Hence to change a name indicated a change of destiny. So Abram becomes Abraham since he is to become the father of all nations; Simon becomes Peter which describes his rock-like faith and Saul becomes Paul after his conversion.

Now when we put these two words together, and say "hallowed be thy name" we are acknowledging that God's character is separate or different from anything we may know or experience here on earth.

Whereas the word "Abba" speaks of the immanent God, the hallowing of God's name speaks of the transcendent God.

He is transcendent to his creation because he is utterly independent of it. At the same time he is also the immanent God because creation is totally dependent upon him. The prophet Hosea expresses this paradox with the words "I am the holy one in your midst".

This then is the God to whom you and I pray when we say "Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name."

Next week, we shall consider the clause "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven".