After giving his disciples the Our Father, that prototype of all Christian prayer, Jesus asks a series of rather startling questions—startling, because of their razor-sharp commentary on human behavior.
“What father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion?” (Luke 11:11-12). It seems like a rhetorical question: no one, obviously. Of course, I do not know how often children ask for fish (mine would probably prefer the snake and the scorpion, if I’m being honest) — but if we can get beyond the particular objects, the questions become a little more revealing.
What father would give his son something evil? The answer is, well, all of us—all human fathers and mothers and brothers and sisters. This kind of thing happens all the time Sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally, but there are very few limits on our capacity for evil even toward those we love the most.
Of course, we all have some sense of what it means to give good things to our loved ones, but we consistently fall short of that vision. It is therefore hard for us to understand a Father who not only has perfect knowledge of the good—because he is good and the source of all goodness—but who has also forever determined to be good towards us. The Father, in other words, always gives us what we really need and what we really desire, even when we are ignorant of those needs and desires.
What we need, what we really desire, is God himself: and thus in Jesus God has given us, as Paul writes, “the fullness of deity” (Col. 2:9), and it is through him that we receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.
Having received this gift, and being in the process of receiving it more fully, we can pray as the Lord taught us: “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
The Lord’s prayer is the central prayer of the Christian life because it exactly captures the radical claims of the Christian gospel. In Jesus, we have already received the good gift of the Father: the kingdom of God has already come to earth, and, in Jesus, God has already shown the triumph of his will over the evil powers (the evil gifts) of the world. He has, in Paul’s words, “disarmed the principalities and powers and made a public example of them” (Col. 2:15). He has “obliterated” the claims against us, nailing them to the cross (2:14).
But we still wrestle with the obvious question: if the kingdom is already here and the evil powers are disarmed, why is there still death and hunger and evil and oppression? Or we could push the question back several thousand years to the time of Abraham: how, in a world where God has begun to reveal himself, can there exist towns like Sodom and Gomorrah?
The Church’s most basic answer is to persist — like Abraham, like the annoying neighbor in Luke — in praying the Lord’s Prayer and living the Lord’s Prayer: to proclaim that the reality of the world has been changed by the Incarnation, that the wall between heaven and earth has been torn down . . . but at the same time to acknowledge that the final union of all things in Christ is still to come. The medicine of the divine physician has to fully unfold in time.
To really pray the Lord’s Prayer, then, means avoiding two great temptations: one spiritual, and one material. The first temptation is to say, “Well, the world has not actually changed for the better, so the gospel is really just a spiritual message that has nothing to do with the body or the material problems of sin.”
The second temptation is to say, “Well, the Bible says an awful lot of things about this life, so the gospel must be just an ethical message about making this world a better place, not about how to worship God or speak the truth.”
Neither of these is the true gospel, because the gospel of the New Testament is that Jesus is Lord. And if he is Lord, he is not just Lord of the soul, or Lord of social ethics, but the Lord of all creation yesterday, today, and forever.
The hard part, for us, is to live in Christ’s lordship today. The hardest thing in the world is to be where we are.
A while back I remember reading an interview about the state of darkness in the world. Not spiritual darkness, mind you, but plain old darkness. In a world full of artificial light, it asked, where do we ever get real dark? Where can we see the true night sky?
Paradoxically, light can sometimes reduce our ability to see. The human eyes have an incredible ability to adjust to darkness. A single floodlight, though, destroys their ability to adjust; it illuminates, but it also creates deeper shadows, deeper gaps in our vision.
I wonder if our tendencies to spiritualism or to materialism are, in a way, shining bright lights on the world that make it harder for our eyes to adjust. Sure, they make part of the Christian life easier, but in the end they make it harder to see the whole.
Perhaps praying the Lord’s prayer, in light of Jesus’ resurrection, is like allowing our eyes to adjust to a new but dim light: the dawn is at hand, but the world remains in twilight. The key is not to pollute things with the glaring light of an artificial gospel, but to make the difficult decision to live in the world as it is: still dark, but on the cusp of the eternal day.
Praying “thy kingdom come,” looking up to our Father in heaven, we can then open our eyes to seeing where we are, and living the gospel where we are. We can look at the world, as Tom Wright says, “in binocular vision . . . seeing it with the love of the Creator for his spectacularly beautiful creation, and seeing it with the deep grief of the Creator for the battered and battle-scarred state in which the world now finds itself.” Bring these two images in focus and we find, at the center of things, Jesus Christ.
That is why, in the Mass, we say the Lord’s Prayer immediately before Holy Communion. And that is why receiving the Eucharist is always an act of yesterday, today and forever. It is memorial of the past, promise of the future, and the presence—here and now—of the Lord of all creation, in whom “the fullness of deity bodily dwells.”
And we keep doing this, day after day, week after week, because in calling us to this nagging persistence God allows us to grow more fully into the sort of fathers and mothers and children who can not only receive the good gifts of heaven — gifts that “exceed all that we can desire”[1]—but can in turn share those gifts in charity, in hope, and in faith that our Father will provide for all that we need.
[1] Collect for the Sixth Sunday after Trinity (Divine Worship) or for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (ordinary form).