REFLECTION (July 27) Ask and it will be given you?
The prayer which Jesus taught his disciples is recorded in two Gospels – Matthew and Luke. And as you might expect each version is a little different.
Matthew’s version tends to follow standard Jewish liturgy. Luke’s version is the shorter and probably earlier form of the Lord’s prayer. It is typical of the style of Luke which is more colloquial.
Both Matthew and Luke appear to have used the same collected sayings of Jesus to write their gospels as well as sources of their own. The Lord’s Prayer in the collected ‘sayings’ was probably in its original form but expanded by Matthew for liturgical reasons and modified by Luke for reasons of style and theology.
So, let’s look at the two versions:
| MATTHEW 6: 9-13 Our Father in heaven,hallowed be your name.Your kingdom come.Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.Give us this day our daily breadAnd forgive us our debts,as we also have forgiven our debtorsAnd do not bring us to the time of trial,But rescue us from the evil one. | LUKE 11: 2-4 Father,hallowed be your name.Your kingdom come.Give us each day our daily breadAnd forgive us our sinsfor we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to usAnd do not bring us to the time of trial. |
Matthew’s version asks God to “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors.” This uses the debts/debtors metaphor for sins/sinners which was familiar to Jews. After all Matthew was writing for former Jews who had become Christian followers.
Luke, on the other hand was writing for gentiles who were not familiar with the Jewish double meaning for debts, so he replaces the word “debts” with “sins” in the first half but retains “debtors” in the second half.
Whatever its iteration, down through the ages the Lord’s Prayer has been used as a means of not only connecting ourselves with the Jesus story, but also in connecting us with each other.
I would say a lot of people have a problem with prayer at some time or other. Like being told the reason for your prayer not being answered is because you are not showing enough faithful persistence. Or the hypothesis that all prayer is answered. We just don’t always see the answer, and it may not be what we expect.
And all the other reasons given for unanswered prayers. Or the recognition that when people are in dire trouble – in storms, or floods or lost in the desert, when things are completely out of our control – most people, religious or not, will resort to prayer.
Rev Andrew Prior recalls,
The key thing was a tacit recognition of the fact that prayer is often not answered. No one was saying, but we all knew, that when it really mattered, when prayer was the only hope we had in a situation, it mostly didn’t get answered.
Really!
We can reasonably ask why, if God is all-powerful and all-loving, why doesn’t he prevent terrible things happening like plane crashes and wars and world-wide pandemics.
We are no longer satisfied with the response once offered up by religion.
God works in mysterious ways.
The church we belonged to in Doha even kept a book in which they recorded all the prayer requests, and when, not if, they were answered.
Prayer has often been a vexed question.
When the disciples asked Jesus for a prayer, he replied with an answer in three parts:
- a sample prayer
- a parable
- some sayings about prayer
And this is the reading we heard this morning
Part 1: THE SAMPLE PRAYER:
Father
In Luke’s version we hear from Jesus that God is father. Not God on high, about whom one should be most cautious and afraid. God is father. The kind of supportive relationship Jesus had with the Father is a model of the relationship we can all have.
That is made possible because of the kind of god ‘God’ is. Compassion and caring are central.
Jesus would have known about abusive fathers, just as he knew about abusive rulers. He used the ambiguous images of king and father because they were part of his Jewish tradition. He was not averse to criticising the Jewish tradition, and chose to deliberately disown its violence and assert its love. We need to do the same in our time where there are many people, both men and women, for whom the image of father is almost irrecoverably destructive.
God is love.
Hallowed be your name
Fundamental to our relationship with God and to all other relationships are “hallowing”, treating as holy.
New Testament scholar Bill Loader says,
Acknowledging the holiness, the dignity, the otherness of the other must not be reduced to a metaphor of cringing before one who is more powerful even if that is dressed up respectably as obeisance before the almighty. For then it reinforces the assumption that might is right and the bigger and stronger is the better. Such thinking often results in abusive relationships.
There is an awe in relationships which flows from profound respect and love.
It stands at the heart of our church. We strive to be a Christ-centred, relational church. We stand together, not the one before the other, in service and mutual care.
Your kingdom come
remains in the same realm of ambiguity. We share communion, remembering Jesus’ last supper with his friends where he told them to ‘remember me’. And we look to the great feast where all are included, a time where swords become ploughs and spears become pruning hooks.
How are we doing do you think?
Give us today our daily bread
And forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us
Day by day human need has a firm place in Jesus’ prayer. There is no separation between visions and life in the here and now. The same need for food and forgiveness is fundamental to every human being. That is why it is part of the vision of the kingdom of God.
Save us from the time of trial
Jesus does not expect us to be heroes; we are told to pray to not have to face hard times. This is as much personal as it is linked with any adversity we may face for following Christ.
It encompasses,
‘Please God, don’t let me be tempted to fall into unforgiveness. Don’t let me hold a grudge.’
For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory
As a footnote, notice that neither Matthew nor Luke include this ending to the Lord’s Prayerwhich is so much a part of tradition.
It did not appear in the original Aramaic or Greek writing.
This appears to have been added to Matthew’s gospel in the King James version of the Bible.
The Lord’s Prayer has to be one of the most studied texts in the Bible. The question we might ask is, ‘Is this really what Jesus said?’ If we remove the added ornamentations of Matthew and the changes in style by Luke, we can arrive at a version of The Lord’s Prayer which must be very close to the prayer which might be called ‘the voice of Jesus’. This has been done for us by an eminent biblical and Aramaic scholar, Joseph A. Fitzmyer, in his book The Gospel According to Luke.
And this is the result of his study and research:
Father
Holy is your name
Your kingdom come
Our daily bread give us today
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors
and do not allow us to come to the test
You will see this is probably closer to the Luke version than Matthew’s. And perhaps easier to remember?
The original form of The Lord’s Prayer was short, succinct and less than two dozen words, absolutely perfect for this current age of social media like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter (or X).
And here it is, courtesy of a student at York University.
| THE LORD’S PRAYER: SMS version dad@hvn, ur spshl. we want wot u want & urth2b like hvn. giv us food & 4giv r sins lyk we 4giv uvaz. don’t test us! save us! bcos we kno ur boss, ur tuf & ur cool 4 eva! ok?Condensed version by Matthew Campbell of York University |
Part 2: THE PARABLE:
Jesus did more than just give his disciples the prayer. He also, as was his way, told them a story to explain more about prayer – this is the parable of the persistent friend.
The parable has just three sentences.
‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’
‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked. My children are in bed with me and I can’t get up and give you anything,’
Even though the “friend” won’t get up and give him anything, because he is his friend, if he keeps asking his “friend” will finally get up and give him what he needs.
His persistence will be rewarded.
It is typical of Jesus to argue theology by using parables of everyday life. You might say it’s an argument of reasonableness. The argument works like this:
‘everyone’ knows that a friend will help another out in a situation like that, even if reluctantly.
Why can’t we think of God being like that?
The same logic is implicit in the parable of the prodigal son.
‘everyone’ knows that this is what a father would do
‘everyone’ knows something about compassion
Why can’t we think about God like that?
Jesus always locates his teaching in human relationships which we all know and all experience. Through prayer, our relationship with God becomes a model for all our other relationships.
And so, through the parable, Jesus’ second response to the disciples’ request for a prayer is:
be persistent in prayer
Part 3: THE SAYINGS: A-S-K
The third part of this reading is a series of sayings which underline what has gone before. Again, this passage is one most people will probably have heard.
As a storyteller, the key to the structure of this section is the word ‘ask’
| A ask S seek K knock |
So, Jesus says it, not once but twice:
Ask and it will be given you;
search and you will find;
knock and the door will be opened for you
and then, as he so often does, he says it again:
for everyone who asks, receives; and everyone who searches finds;
and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened
It is a set of commands and a statement of the results.
Again, persistence in prayer is what Jesus’ words ultimately encourage.
It’s the same theme developed elsewhere in the gospels, (John 14)
Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it for you.
We don’t have to pray long, convoluted prayers.
Jesus suggests that when we pray, the prayers be short, simple and direct. We should not hesitate to pray, we should not worry about being inadequate, we just have to pray. It’s as easy as talking to a close friend.
We live in response to the leading of Christ. Even here, in this place, we may not always perceive that leading in the same way. We may not always believe or do exactly the same things. But in Christ we are one people, and except when there is overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we trust that others in this body, the Church, are living out a faithful response to the love they have received in Christ; even if they’re doing it quite differently to us.
And this prayer, The Lord’s Prayer, is something that we all have wonderfully in common. This is our prayer, the prayer of the Church, given to us by the Lord of the Church.
I could not put it better than this:
This is the prayer we would live, and the life we would pray. AMEN