Reflections on the Lord's Prayer

by Andrew Gleeson

James Tissot, The Lord’s Prayer, 1886-1896

Today is the birthday of D.Z. Phillips (1934-2006), a Welsh philosopher of whom I’m confident you have never heard. The author of Philosophy’s Cool Place was theologically unorthodox in many respects, but I nonetheless like to think that he’s made it to the Good Place.

Andrew Gleeson is not an uncritical admirer of Phillips, but he does regard Phillips as a major influence on his own philosophy (see his “God and Evil: A View from Swansea”). One need not be convinced by Phillips’ theological views in order to benefit from Gleeson’s remarkably attentive and insightful reading of the Lord’s Prayer. I understand better the meaning of Our Lord’s words, and my own daily recitation of them, having read Andrew’s brilliant commentary on them.

- Sean Haylock

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Our Father, which art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy Name;

Thy kingdom come;

Thy will be done

in earth, as it is in heaven:

Give us this day our daily bread;

And forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive them that trespass against us;

And lead us not into temptation,

But deliver us from evil;

For thine is the kingdom,

the power, and the glory,

For ever and ever.

Amen.

- - Book of Common Prayer (traditional version)

Matthew chapter 6, in which Jesus dictates the Lord’s prayer, begins with him warning against the vanity of the “hypocrites” who “love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men”. Instead, we are to pray in private and even in secrecy: “go into your room and shut the door and pray to your father who is in secret; and your father who sees in secret will reward you”. Now while Christians of course do pray in private and often alone, it is virtually unknown, perhaps apart from circumstances of persecution, for them to pray in secret. So the fact that Jesus speaks of God as “in secret” and as one who “sees in secret” is a clue that the word ‘secret’ is not being used in its regular sense here. God is a spirit (John 4:24) and not a visible object and so not something that can be exposed in public or hidden away under the bed. The “Hiddenness of God” is not that sort of hiddenness. God cannot be seen, but not because he is secreted away. No, the secrecy here is something more like the solitude of each human heart. This in itself does not preclude hypocrisy. The human heart is a deceiver and I can lie to myself. But God is not a deceiver and He is not deceived. A lying prayer is not even heard by God. The liar, by their deception, removes himself from admission to the secret chamber of dialogue with the divine. The condition of admission is truthfulness, and that truthfulness (which is much more than veracity) is “secret” in that a truthful speaker – even if reciting a prayer in public and with others – must speak alone in the sense of being uninfluenced by the passions of the mob, the threats and inducements of the world, and so on, but only by the dictates of a lucid conscience. We must make an effort, in prayer, to speak as if there were no audience but God. Even my own selection of words is liable to betray me, and that is surely one of the reasons Our Lord instructs us in a standard format. Not just any extempore words will do. Not even those charged with genuine emotion, for these words must be robust enough to survive the inevitable gusts and eddies of feeling and opinion. The words of the Lord’s Prayer make a language of divine civility, which, like the courtesies of everyday life, maintain our spirit when the flesh is weak.

None of this is to say that the Lord’s Prayer is the only legitimate prayer. Far from it. And it is also true that repetition of a set format can become routine. But it is a template to which our own prayers are accountable. It shows us in its structure, content and tone the essential elements of every prayer: to praise God, to confess our sins, to petition him in gratitude and obedience, and to seek salvation from evil. And it is the one prayer all Christians share in common. It is mine alone when I pray (even in a group) and yet it is yours too because it is God’s.

Our Father Who Art in Heaven

God is in heaven. We – the implication might seem to be – are not, or not yet, or not securely. The price of admission, I have already suggested, is the truthfulness we speak in our own conscience. Heaven is thus a paradox: a secret club that anyone can join. That inclusivity means we cannot be too choosy about the “We” who pray together. We must bend our knees with those of the prostitutes and the tax collectors. Once we start setting any standard for entrance save truthfulness, once we become snobs about who can join, we will end up having to exclude even ourselves, a principle which we might call Groucho’s law: “I do not care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members”.

When we pray, perhaps especially when we pray these very words the Lord taught us, we stand on the threshold of heaven. At that point we are solitary in the sense I have tried to express even if we are not alone. Each of us is there on his own business and even a secret business, the secrets of our heart which God already knows. We are only on the threshold because while we have one foot in Heaven’s precincts we still have another on Earth. On Earth the clock keeps ticking. In Heaven we are in eternity. For just a while, as we pray, our lives are no longer ruled by that calculus of profit and loss, that brinksmanship of ambition and cravenness, that in greater or less degree rules life on Earth. Here we may speak truth without shame or fear, and with hope, amounting to confidence, of forgiveness and acceptance. Here the world is viewed not with an eye on the practicalities of advantage and disadvantage, but sub specie aeternitatis – ‘from the point of view of eternity’, a perspective from which all the events of the world are done and dusted and the totality is illuminated by a calm light of divine compassion. Many, like Iris Murdoch, have made a comparison here to the highest art. But, pace Murdoch, the eternity we touch in prayer is not the eternity of the artist. The artist’s role is off-stage. The one who prays is in a sense centre stage – with God the audience – and he or she is called to account, not by retaliation or vengeance or punishment – that was taken care of on the Cross – but by the truthfulness of confession. This was my role, for good or ill, in the drama and I set it down for an accurate, a truthful, record that I acknowledge.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Name? But the prayer does not use a personal name for God (like Yahweh or Jehovah) only the title Father. That we have personal names is a fact of the greatest significance. Names are not just a device for keeping track of one another, like supermarket bar codes. They are expressions of tenderness and love, constituents of our human solidarity. Think of the rituals, festive and solemn, that attend naming ceremonies or the inscription of names on tombstones and memorials. So why do we not have a name for God, the most intimate of companions? In one way this is not so odd. A child calls his human father ‘Daddy’. His calling his father by his name is even frowned upon. This use of a title is in part the recognition of a special relationship of affection and authority. Daddy of course has his regular name, for he has equals. A prince is equal to a pauper qua man. But God has no equal and so no personal name. Part of the genius of the familial imagery lies in its simultaneously transmitting a sense of God as a loving intimate while dispensing with the ordinary personal name that would imply an underlying equality inconsistent with His transcendent authority, as if His Lordship were only an office that may be occupied by different people at different times, or a position conferred by nature, but always contingent and limited in its range and sovereignty, like being a father.

The refusal to speak God’s name – to speak, instead, of God, Lord or Father – is the ancient practice of both Jews and Christians. We are not to presume such familiarity, even when of long acquaintance. He is, so to speak, so hallowed that we cannot ever speak His name. Witness in general that we approach those in authority – monarchs, magistrates – addressing them with the formality of a title. Such practices can be abused of course, and they are seen as anomalous by a purportedly egalitarian age. Yet in truth they are a necessary bulwark to that deeper equality of a common humanity. Intimacy is a double-edged blade. It can realise the deepest sense of another human being’s value, but it also provides opportunities for manipulation and exploitation. If a meeting of equals is not to become a conflict of egos, it must be conducted in a spirit of respect for the other’s distinctness. Thus our claim upon their attention cannot simply be taken for granted. We address even the complete stranger with titles like ‘Sir’ and ‘Ma’am’, Mr and Ms, Ladies and Gentlemen, and by non-verbal protocols like handshakes, bows, and the coupling of the palms. The liberties we take in relations of intimacy must be earned, even the use another’s name. Using another’s name – to summon or address, to make tribute or memorialize, to insult (“Judas!”), profane or blaspheme – is a way of treating them. All intimacy requires some reservation if it is not to become domination. In God’s case that extends to the sanctification of his name as something too holy to be spoken.

Now this might seem a forbidding, even chilling, scenario, too high-minded for our good as mortal beings. But we can be reassured when we remember that the very heart of Christianity is incarnation: the Word – we might be tempted to think the Name – made Flesh. Christianity says the very man from whose lips came the instruction to pray “like this” was this incarnate God, as palpable and mortal as you and I. The Lord who shares no equality with us condescends to do so. He has a name like the rest of us and the Gospel authors use it throughout. And though the disciples are only ever recorded as calling him Lord, I like to think that at least sometimes they called him Jesus too. After all, we do.

Thy Kingdom Come

Thy Will Be Done in Earth as it is in Heaven

When Pilate asks Jesus what he has done to be arrested by the Jewish authorities, he answers:

My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would fight, that I might not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not from the world. (John 18:36)

This is not a refusal to recognize the jurisdiction over him, in temporal matters, of either the Jewish or the Roman authorities. Like Socrates under Athenian rule, he submits to the judgment and punishment imposed. Rather – and also like Socrates – he denies the particular charge against him, in his case on the ground that what he had done to cause his arrest was not a temporal matter, not a matter of this world. Pilate had begun the interrogation by asking him if he were the King of the Jews, presumably a claim to the Messiahship, a claim, as traditionally understood, fraught with explosive political implications. Jesus’s answer above does not deny the charge straight out, but rather seeks to radically reconfigure the understanding of kingship. When in response a puzzled Pilate asks “So you are a king?”, Jesus answers:

You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice. (John 18:37)

We must remember that Jesus speaking of truth here is in the context of Judas’s betrayal, the envious malice of the Jewish leadership, and the realpolitick of Pilate (who, to be fair, does try to save him, but who is ultimately unwilling to provoke Jewish unrest). Such things are the way of the world and Jesus is not a king of this kind of world. He is King of the world of Truth. Pilate, bemused and cynical, asks – one imagines with a dismissive shrug of the shoulders – “What is truth?”

Well Jesus also said, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life”. This is much more than just the claim that he exemplifies the ideal way of living or something like that. He is the Truth. I said above that in the solitude of prayer we enter into a truthful dialogue. Now it seems that it is a dialogue with truth itself. This Kingdom of Truth itself is the kingdom we implore to come in the Lord’s Prayer. And it comes to us first and foremost in the act of saying the prayer itself. The spirit of truth itself cleanses and inspires me, and is incarnated in the words as I, or we in unison, speak them. I will not write here of the bearing these words may have, either on eschatology or on the Whiggish idea of a gradual improvement or even conversion of this world. I do say that however those things may be, the victory of truthfulness – the fruit of the victory on the Cross – begins in each human heart as crystallised in the moment of prayer. Here, in the very act of saying the prayer, Thy Will begins to be Done in Earth as it is in Heaven by being done in me.

Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread

And perhaps the first thing done in me is to realize that ‘Thy Will’ – in Thy Will Be Done – really does mean THY will and not mine, and the first matter in which I must resign my will to His is in the very petitions my prayer itself utters, even though they have been mandated by the Lord himself. As the saying goes, God does answer every prayer, it is just that sometimes the answer is ‘No’. Submission means submitting to that answer. Even the very act of asking must already be a kind of thanking, regardless of the answer.

This is true of petition in general. A child may ask his parents for ice-cream, a friend ask another for a loan, but the petitioner must accept refusal in good grace. The case of God takes this to the limit. When Oliver Twist pleaded “Please, sir, I want some more” only a cruel heart – and no true father – could deny a petition for what, after all, was a duty. Oliver had every right to complain and even rebel. But that is not so with asking God for more. The words Thy Will Be Done really do admit of no exceptions. And this holds even though we cannot run from the fact that, ask for our daily bread as often and as devoutly as we might, sometimes some people do not get that bread. Appearances notwithstanding, Thy Will Be Done should not, in the light of this ugly truth about the world, be read as meaning that God wills starvation and other evils, much less that we should be indifferent about them. We are talking now, of course, about the problem of evil, the problem of how there can be such suffering (and wickedness) is a world created by an all-powerful and loving God. I cannot discuss this here beyond noting that we cannot hide from this problem behind the dubious rationalizations of theodicy. Nor can I for one say that the atheist who denounces such a deity in anger has no serious point. He has a very serious point. Even a compelling point. But the Lord’s Prayer nevertheless bids us to hold faithful to God’s love. That has a serious point too, but we must admit it is a harder point to see.

But if this fidelity does not mean a hapless and inhuman resignation to the world’s evils, what does it mean? Something like this, maybe: that even as we rail against the world’s evils – that even as a part of us (let’s be honest) rails against God – we still are grateful for the world, for a life that we still see as a gift of love, and that we can persist in a path of goodness with hope and faith in our hearts. The atheist cannot do this, at least not in prayer; that is his testimony. But there are those who can, and who have done so with most conviction when in the very midst of darkness; that is their testimony. If it is to be yours or mine I think we need to take seriously the atheist’s compelling point and see just where it compels us to. But I cannot go further with this here.

And Forgive Us Our Trespasses

As We Forgive Them That Trespass Against Us

Perhaps nothing demanded of us is harder than to forgive. Really to erase from our hearts every trace of resentment is a blessing granted in this world only to the most holy. Overt behaviour may be decent. Pardon may be granted. Revenge forsaken. But resentment, though it may wax and wane, lives on like a dormant cancer, and just when we think we are free of it, it is actually lurking in our bowels ready to metastasize again at some provocation.  

Recall the hypocrites who, Jesus says, “love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men”. He tellingly adds: “Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward”. Then when he tells us that we are to pray in secret, he adds that “your father who sees in secret will reward you” (Matthew 6:5-6). The reward is spoken of as in some way entailed by the act of prayer itself. It is hard to see this in the case of petitions for worldly things like bread or healing, for these come – if they come at all – sometime after the act of asking for them. The reward we “already” have even as we speak our prayer is, I think, one I have already mentioned; the blessings that are inherent in the very act of seeking to submit our will to God’s. The blessings of humility and gratitude. The ‘reward’ – really the curse – of the hypocrites is the hardness of their hearts.

Jesus warns us that if we have a quarrel with a brother, then we must try to make peace with him before we go to the temple (Matthew: 5:23-24). If we do not forgive others, he will not forgive us, as the lines of the Lord’s Prayer perhaps imply. I take it Jesus does not mean that there must be actual peace before one can approach God, for one cannot be assured of the other party’s reaction. And of course some people will be dead or otherwise unavailable. I take him to intend, again, primarily an act in “secret”: that we must cauterize the wound in our heart, forsake the resentment. And the road to that is paved with our acts of confession and petitions to be forgiven for our sins, including our failure to forgive others. Thus it is that our forgiving others is internal to what it is to seek God’s forgiveness: forgive me my trespasses as before you now I forgive others. And in so far as I do genuinely forgive, or seek to forgive, others, God’s forgiveness of me can enter my heart, for now the necessary condition – the moral truthfulness that divine love demands – has been put in place. In its turn my experience of his forgiving grace inspires my capacity further to forgive others. The two cases of forgiveness are inseparable. But both begin with the acknowledgment that one stands in need of forgiveness. Pride is the refusal to acknowledge that. And if you don’t need forgiveness, why should anyone else? In which case, why should you owe it to them?

All this is invisible from a purely worldly perspective. When he says that “your father who sees in secret will reward you” Jesus means not just that you get rewarded in secret, but that your reward, like your prayer itself, belongs to a realm the world does not see. The world sees the rewards that go to the hypocrites – they are no secret, they are advertised everywhere – but not those that go to the one who prays in truth. For the rewards of humility, gratitude and truthfulness are inherently self-effacing, and they occasion celebrity only rarely and by accident. They are by their nature secretive in the sense of reclusive (sin, by contrast, is not intrinsically secretive, for it will be brazen whenever it thinks it is safe to be so). Even to see them as rewards – or to see the rewards of the hypocrites as curses – requires already seeing things from their point of view to some extent. Thus it can be hard to see steadily that both the humble and the proud will get their rewards, indeed they already have, for on the face of things, the humble often enough suffer while the proud flourish. But that face is the face of the world, and Jesus is suggesting it is a deceptive face. It smiles and invites, but to our destruction. The rewards – the recognition, applause and preferment of the powers that be – are the rewards of the Kingdom of this World, on Earth, but not the rewards of the Kingdom of Heaven.

And Lead Us Not Into Temptation

But Deliver Us From Evil

The philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, in a profound reading of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, says that Oedipus treats the Delphic Oracle not as a divine mystery but as a source of a “hot tip from a good source”. On this attitude, the gods are not to be worshipped or obeyed, but rather the devotions and sacrifices made to them are bribes designed to obtain information and other goods for one’s own ends. The oracle is simply another service at man’s convenience. Prayer is simply a means to an end. This is a superstition, one common in all religions. Petitionary prayer has an obvious vulnerability to it. But asking for the forgiveness of our sins and to be saved from temptation and evil (which in the context I take to include moral evil), are petitions that cannot be so readily twisted to these dark ends. Confessing our sins advances no worldly cause, but instead checks pride. The spirit of ‘Thou Will Be Done...’ is built into it. Thus it is that the very act of saying the prayer itself leads us away from temptation and evil, so that once again the one who prays already has his reward, at least in part. To recite the Lord’s Prayer is to take the first steps on the long march to holiness, a journey that needs renewal each day.

For Thine is the Kingdom

The Power and the Glory

Thine is the Kingdom. It is a kingdom of power and of glory. So Thine is the power and the glory. Not my power and glory, but Thine. Yet what power does God exercise over me? We might say he has the whole world in his hands, that all the works of nature that control or at least severely limit (but also enable and empower) me, are his. Yes, but what power does he wield over me at that moment when I submit in prayer? No force of nature compels me to that. If I am compelled it is by my conscience as that conscience is formed and now confronted by the ideal Goodness that is God the Father. The power of that goodness is quite unlike the power of worldly princes. A tyrant may break my body on a wheel. A conqueror may enslave me. A cult leader may brainwash me and even gaslight my conscience to control me. But only goodness can move another’s conscience in a way that leaves them free from exploitation. We often express our conscience in the language of necessity: “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me God”, said Luther. But in an important sense this compulsion is under my consent, the consent of my highest faculty of approval and disapproval: conscience. This compulsion then is an expression of who I most deeply am, and in that sense it is an expression of freedom. This is not true of other internal compulsions like addiction. Nor is any of this to say conscience is infallible, but in so far as it is informed by orientation to Goodness itself – the sort of orientation effected by the Lord’s Prayer – it will lead the right way.

The power of goodness does not demand withdrawal from the affairs of this world. It does not deny the necessity of the use of force in human communities, though it does place limits on that and on the spirit in which it is conducted. But its own distinctive form of operation forgoes all uses of power save that I have described for conscience. And in doing so it turns this world topsy turvy.  Where the worldly seek power and money, our Lord refused the whole world offered him by Satan. Where the worldly are quick to anger at any provocation, the Christian turns the other cheek. Where the world’s ideal of goodness is impressed by ostentatious displays of philanthropy – “effective altruism” – Christ’s ideal is the widow who “out of her poverty put...all the living that she had” (Luke 21:4) – just two mites – into the temple treasury. Where in the world of Alexander and Caesar, of Napoleon and Hitler, a king strode in triumph across the globe crushing the bodies of his enemies, in the Kingdom of God the king is naked, bloody and powerless, staked to a cross. He rises yes, but his death is no mere necessary condition of that rising. It is on the Cross that the powers of this world are defeated. The resurrection is the Victory procession.

To the world this is a scandal, as the great Australian theologian Michael Leunig explains:

The humiliation of God on the Cross is really his glorification, celebrated in the resurrection. That is the glory the Lord’s Prayer speaks of. We begin to learn it, and perhaps a little bit to share in it, when we utter “Forgive Us Our Trespasses”. The world tends to know morality as shame and the impulse of shame is to conceal one’s misdeeds and hide one’s face from society. By contrast, guilt-based morality exposes its sins. It does so first and foundationally by confession to God in the secrecy of individual conscience. But then also to the human world, not to court notoriety, but in apology, reparation and where appropriate, submission to punishment. If, from fear of shame, we hold back the truth of our sins, then God cannot love us – not because he is hard-hearted, but because of the nature of love. If he – or anyone for that matter – is really to love us, and not some carefully curated simulacrum put up for public consumption, then he must love us as we really are, warts and all. The world sees all this as degenerate and feeble. But truly, in our weakness is our strength; in our submission, our liberation; in the cross, the resurrection.

For Ever and Ever

Sometimes people have experiences of which they say it is like “time stood still”. Normally our days are ruled by the relentless march of the clock, our days regimented into hours and minutes, held up by appointments and deadlines, and policed by expectations of punctuality and reliability. Even in days of yore our lives obeyed the gentler rhythms of nature, the rise and fall of the sun, the coming and going of the seasons, and always the trajectory from childhood to old age and death. From this inevitable river of time we sometimes seek respite – itself inevitably marked by its transience – in beauty, joy, love, which seem to yield us something beyond time. Some – C S Lewis most popularly (for instance in his essay ‘The Weight of Glory’) – have suggested that at these moments we glimpse something not just desirable, but something suited to our deepest nature, something, in theological language, that we were made for, and even a birthright, one rashly squandered, but not beyond recovery. It has then something of the quality of recollection, an echo of some distant past to which we are being recalled: “happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory...we are all kings in exile” (G K Chesterton). In Christianity, this universal experience is given more specific substance. A father whom one has not known since the earliest childhood, being estranged by a long-forgotten family quarrel, is yet remembered through confusing mists. But this father has never ceased in his love for his lost ones and comes in search of them, bearing on himself all the burden that must be carried for reconciliation. He enters the country of the children in partial disguise, having prepared the way through many he sent before him. 

We can certainly make sense of this “something” as poetry and myth that speaks to something deep inside us. It is much harder to know what to make of it as some kind of (for want of a better word) ‘literal’ truth. Though we can rule some things out: it is not “somewhere” where the clocks still tick, it is not an extension of the familiar time-line into novel events, though that imagery is inescapable. ‘For Ever and Ever’ is not to be read as requiring completion by a series of ‘and Ever and Ever...’ going on to infinity. ‘For Ever and Ever’ is more like a dedication to someone. The Power and the Glory are For Him, Him who doesn’t just hang about for ever but is Ever, Him who is greater even than time and the death it deals. Amen.

Andrew Gleeson is a retired Australian philosopher.