The Lord’s Prayer Doesn’t Ask for Stuff – It’s a Guided Meditation
Deconstructing Christianity: Jesus meditated and taught his disciples how to meditate. The model prayer is not a list of requests, but a way to meditate.
What was Jesus doing when he went to pray? His disciples wondered the same thing. Luke 11 has this:
He was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” He said to them, “When you pray, say:
Ο Father, may your name be holy.
May your empire come.
May you: Give us day by day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And not bring us into a time of trial.”
Jesus spoke Aramaic, but the only version of his words that we have comes from their accounting in Greek by gospel writers. How the Greek is translated into English—along with the preconceived assumptions of English-speaking readers and hearers—affects the way it is interpreted and thus understood.
The first two lines of the model prayer are a parallel construction, not a statement followed by a request as in, “Your name is holy. We ask that your kingdom would come.” The Greek word related to the translation “holy” or “hallowed” is a verb, not an adjective. It expresses the action of ‘holy-ing’. The best we can do with that in English is “be holy.” The verb in the second, parallel line expresses the action of coming. And importantly, both verbs are imperative. The Greek goes something like this:
O Father,
Be-holy the name of-you.
Come the empire of-you.
This sets the tone for the remaining text:
The bread of-us, the for-today, keep-giving-you us it every day.
And forgive us the sin of-us.
As-also we forgive all owing us.
And not bring us into a trial-time.
The important thing about the first two lines, with their imperative verbs and the tone they set for the remaining lines, is that they are more akin to ‘may it be’ statements (May your name be [considered] holy; may your empire come), rather than either statements of certitude (Your name is holy), or requests for something expected in response (We ask that your empire come; we ask that you give us our daily bread). Because of this, it makes better sense to translate them with the sense of ‘may it be so’. This makes a difference as explained, below.
Check out the ARCHIVE of Faith Shifter posts.
Such a translation is not too far from the likes of the NRSV, NASB, and NIV; indeed, those translations are such that they can be interpreted in a may-it-be-so way. Here is the NRSV:
Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, as we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.
Remember Jesus’ teaching: “...your Father knows what you need...” Understood less as a collection of things for which God is being asked, and more as a set of affirmative wishes, the text becomes less a laundry list of requests for what can be gotten, and more a series of may-it-be-so blessings for what can be given. In this way, the prayer becomes an open-handed exercise in self-emptying, a letting-go of relentless grasping, for how we want people to understand God, for how we want the world to be, for what we need day-to-day, for personal redemption, for others to be sorry for what they have done to us, for a way out of difficulty. Such a shift in thinking from grasping and asking aloud to gentle cradling and releasing of wishes is the beginning of spiritual maturity.
This approach is not unlike wishes held and directed toward oneself, and a successively more difficult series of others in a Buddhist practice of Lovingkindness meditation: “May you be safe. May you be free from inner and outer harm. May you be healthy. May you be happy...” The purpose of these affirmations is not to make those things happen; the purpose is to generate and cultivate kindness and compassion in the heart and mind of the person engaging in the practice.
And so, it is with one’s approach to Jesus’ way of praying. Centuries of preconceived notions about the nature of prayer and misperceptions about what ‘the Lord’s prayer’ is about have downgraded Jesus’ suggested model for contemplative prayer from a maturing, strengthening form of spiritual practice to a self-satisfyingly pietistic list of requests in the context of rote liturgical recitation. But the very fact that Jesus sought to get away from the noise and bustle of crowds and the distraction of his disciples to pray is a strong indication that he was engaging in a contemplative practice requiring quiet stillness, and calm, disciplined focus.
This would have been a meditative practice that cultivated equanimity, peace, and compassion in the face of spiritual and material poverty and indifference; the violent empires of this world; concern over one’s own needs; guilt over one’s regrettable thoughts, words, and misdeeds; mistreatment by others; and fears over what the future may hold. Jesus’ words are meant to help release what we cannot change or control, thereby making us more like Jesus, more like the Divine in whose image our true selves are ever being created.
A similar instruction from Jesus on prayer occurs in the sixth chapter of Matthew. In this version, Jesus is not responding to an inquiring disciple after having been observed praying; rather, his suggestions are given as part of his Sermon on the Mount to the disciples. It includes some additional lines and embellishments. He has just told them when they pray not to make a public spectacle like hypocrites in the synagogues and on the street corners, nor to be wordy like gentiles. He continues:
Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. Pray in this way:
O Our Father in the heavens:
May your name be holy.
May your empire come.
May your will come about; as in heaven, so also on the earth.
May you: Give us today our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, just as also we release our debtors.
And not bring us into a time of trial, but deliver us from what is evil.
As with the version from Luke, this is aptly understood as a meditation for cultivating a peaceful, open heart in the face of the cares, preoccupations, and evils of this world.
After the Luke version comes Jesus’ parable about a man’s persistence in asking his friend for bread to give his guests. This is clearly about persistence in the practice of prayer. Following that is the famous ‘ask, seek, knock’ sequence, and not giving a child a stone if he asks for bread. Jesus is teaching his followers that their Father will give them good things if they persist in the practice of meditative prayer. The same sayings are found in Matthew. The parable about the judge and the persistent widow in Luke 18 also has the same application. Keep up a disciplined practice and the results will follow.