What does “Lead us not into temptation” really mean? Join Joe Heschmeyer as he delves into the deeper meaning behind this line from the Lord’s Prayer. Discover the nuances of the original Greek text and explore how the Catechism sheds light on this essential petition. Understand why we pray this and how it aligns with God’s character.
Transcript:
Jamie wanted to know why Jesus taught us to pray, “lead us not into temptation.”
Yes. And so fortunately, this is an area that Catechism talks about directly. It’s my job very easy. So the catechism in its section on prayer goes through the our father bit by bit. And it’s extremely worth your while. It you do a deep dive on a prayer given to us by Jesus Christ. And in paragraph 28 46, it explains that our sins come from our consenting to temptation. So if we want to not sin, we want to not just not sin, we want to avoid temptation that might lead us to sin, but that the Greek verb being translated as lead us doesn’t neatly translate into English because the Greek means both. Do not allow us to enter into temptation and do not let us yield the temptation. But this is one of those words where it cannot be easily kind of translated in a way you could just pray.
If you’re giving the footnote every time you try to do our father, that’d be a cumbersome and unwieldy. So you just have to settle on good enough kind of language. Similarly with give us this day our daily bread, the word daily there could also be translated super substantial. And St. Jerome translates it both ways because the daily bread is the manna from heaven and it’s pointing us to the super substantial food of the Eucharist. And so the word Jesus uses in Greek to describe this, food isn’t just an ordinary word for daily. There’s something a little more going on that’s sometimes hard to get in translation. So we’re reminded in the catechism that God cannot be tempted and tempts no one. That’s James one, verse 13. So he doesn’t literally lead us into temptation, but on the contrary wants to deliver us from, he wants to set us free from evil. And so we ask him not to allow us to take the way that leads to sin that lead us not into temptation is not because we’re worried that God is going to lead us into temptation, but that we might go into temptation on our own and we’re asking him to lead us in a different direction.