Lord’s Prayer: Lord’s Prayer: Common Prayer For Uncommon Wisdom  

By Janina Gomes  

The Lord’s Prayer ("Our Father Who Art in Heaven...") is the best known and most popular prayer of Christians. Jesus taught his disciples this prayer when they asked him how to pray.

Analysing The Lord’s Prayer, Gerhard Ebeling says that " Abba father", the words Jesus used to call on God, signify "My father" or "our father", which is an invocation we can use when all words fail, when we become speechless. We can approach God in the familiar confident way a child approaches a loving parent.

The word Abba is not the most precise word for father in Hebrew. It is presumably the baby talk of a child, containing all the nearness, affection and love with which the child addresses her father. Jesus taught us to address God in such familiar terms.

Ebeling points out that the phrase, "Who art in heaven" does not signify the remoteness of God but reverses the relationship of God to heaven. That is God is not where heaven is, but heaven is where God is.

The next phrase, "Holy be Thy name ", teaches us that first we have to concentrate exclusively on God. Only after that we should think about our daily needs, our problems and our feelings.

When we say "Thy kingdom come", we are not praying for a kingdom, which is absent, but a kingdom that has come - for, the kingdom, according to Jesus, is already present in our midst, though not yet revealed.

The phrase "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven" is again a reminder that we should accept world events and happenings in our lives as God-world events. The relationship of human beings to the world is an act of God’s will, says Ebeling. Human beings in turn influence events through acts of will and it is these acts of will that give meaning to life.

When we pray that God’s will be done , we are praying that our opposition to God be broken and that we be united with the Supreme - God’s name, kingdom and will. When we pray to God: "Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us", we are praying to God to take care of us; and that we will not be condemned to depend only on our meagre resources.

When we pray for bread , we are praying not just for the most commonplace and matter-of-fact things, we are also praying for spiritual salvation. For, daily bread here refers to those physical, human and spiritual gifts that sustain us. Praying for forgiveness and forgiving others is made possible only by the grace of God. Ebeling points out that "Lead us not into temptation" is a prayer for Divine protection from human follies.

Once again when we pray to the Father "Deliver us from evil" we pray for everyone and for the world. We find ourselves in a world where people have undergone untold suffering - concentration camps, ethnic cleansing, starvation - we do not exclude any of these when we beseech God to deliver us and other human beings from evil.

And finally when we pray "For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory" we are really stating that we must let God be God; that God and his kingdom takes priority and that we do not appropriate for ourselves the things that rightly belong to God alone.

The Lord’s prayer - though it sums up the teachings of Jesus - is not meant only for Christians; it is for everyone who sees and experiences God as his father or mother and for whom God is a close confidante. As someone put it, "When we pray his prayer, his spirit becomes our own".

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See also: Lord’s Prayer , God and Religion, Peace on Earth, Peace of Mind, Love and Happiness, Life and Beyond, Body Mind and Soul

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