The Prayer Christ Taught

On Prayer

The Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the Reason of God — the Word of the Reason, the Reason of the Word, and the Spirit of both — that is, Jesus Christ our Lord, who is both the one and the other: he has laid down for us, the disciples of the new covenant, a new form of prayer. Here too it was necessary that new wine be stored in new skins, and a new patch sewn onto a new garment. Besides, everything belonging to earlier days has either been changed outright, like circumcision; or filled out, like the rest of the Law; or fulfilled, like prophecy; or brought to completion, like faith itself. God’s new grace has made all things over from the physical to the spiritual, bringing in on top of them the good news, which wipes out the whole ancient order that came before. In that good news our Lord Jesus Christ has been shown to be the Spirit of God, the Word of God, and the Reason of God — the Spirit, by which he was powerful; the Word, by which he taught; the Reason, by which he came. [b]

So the prayer Christ put together is itself made of three parts. In speech, by which prayer is spoken, and in spirit, by which alone it has any power, John too had taught his disciples to pray. But everything John did was laid down as groundwork for Christ, until — when “he had increased,” as John himself kept announcing beforehand, that “he must increase and I must decrease” — the whole work of the forerunner passed over to the Lord, and his spirit with it. That is why the form of words John taught for prayer has not survived: earthly things have given way to heavenly ones. “The one who is from the earth,” John says, “speaks earthly things; and the one who is here from the heavens speaks the things he has seen.” And is there anything belonging to the Lord Christ — this way of praying included — that is not heavenly?

So, my blessed brothers, let us look at his heavenly wisdom. First, the command to pray in secret. By it he demanded faith of a person — the confidence that Almighty God sees and hears under a roof, and reaches even into a hidden room — and he required modesty in that faith, so that it would offer its worship to him alone, whom it believed to see and hear everywhere. Next, since wisdom carried straight on into the command that follows, let that command belong in the same way to faith and to faith’s modesty: that we should not think the Lord has to be approached with a parade of words, when we are certain that he looks after his own without being asked.

And that very brevity — let this count as the third level of his wisdom — rests on the substance of a great and blessed meaning, and is as wide open in sense as it is packed tight in words. For it takes in not only prayer’s own business, whether reverence toward God or petition for people, but nearly every discourse the Lord gave, every record of his Discipline. In fact, the Prayer holds a summary of the whole good news.

The prayer opens with a testimony to God and with faith’s reward, when we say, “Our Father in the heavens.” In saying it we are at once praying to God and commending faith, since this title is faith’s reward. It is written, “To those who believed in him he gave power to be called sons of God.” And our Lord very often announced God to us as a Father; he even gave a command that we call no one on earth father, but only the Father we have in the heavens. So in praying this way we are obeying that command as well. [g]

Happy are those who recognize their Father! This is the charge brought against Israel, the charge for which the Spirit calls heaven and earth as witnesses: “I have fathered sons, and they have not recognized me.” And in saying “Father” we are also calling him “God”; that title carries both family devotion and authority. Again, in the Father the Son is called on: “I and the Father,” he says, “are one.” Nor is our mother the church left out, since in the Father and the Son the mother is recognized — the one from whom the name both of Father and of Son arises. So in one general term, one single word, we honor God together with his own, we keep the command in mind, and we mark out those who have forgotten their Father.

The name “God the Father” had been made public to no one. Even Moses, who had questioned him on that very point, heard a different name. To us it has been revealed in the Son, for the Son is now the Father’s new name. “I have come,” he says, “in the Father’s name”; and again, “Father, glorify your name”; and more openly still, “I have made your name known to people.” So we pray that this name may be made holy. Not that it is fitting for people to wish God well, as if there were some other god by whom he could be wished well, or as if he would suffer unless we wished it. Plainly it is fitting everywhere for God to be blessed, in every place and at every time, because every person always owes him the memory of his kindnesses. But this petition does the work of a blessing too. [i]

Otherwise — when is God’s name not holy, and not made holy through himself, when it is out of himself that he makes all others holy? He is the one to whom that surrounding ring of angels never stops saying, “Holy, holy, holy.” In the same way we too, candidates for angelhood, if we manage to deserve it, begin here on earth to learn by heart that song which will be raised to God later, and the duty of the glory to come. So much for the glory of God. Now for our own petition. When we say, “May your name be made holy,” we are praying that it be made holy in us who are in him, and in all the others for whom God’s grace is still waiting — so that we may obey this command too and pray for everyone, even for our personal enemies. And so we leave the words hanging: not saying “may it be made holy in us,” we say “in all.”

On this same pattern we add, “Your will be done in the heavens and on the earth.” Not that there is some power standing in the way to keep God’s will from being done, so that we would be praying for him to bring his will off successfully; we are praying for his will to be done in everyone. For, taking flesh and spirit as figures, we ourselves are “heaven” and “earth.” And even if the words are to be understood plainly, the sense of the petition is the same: that God’s will be done in us on earth, so that it can be done in the heavens too. And what does God will, except that we walk according to his Discipline? So we ask him to supply us with the substance of his will and the capacity to do it, that we may be saved both in the heavens and on earth — because the sum of his will is the salvation of those he has adopted. [l]

There is also the will of God that the Lord carried out in preaching, in working, in enduring. If he announced himself that he was doing not his own will but the Father’s, then beyond doubt the things he used to do were the Father’s will; and toward those things, as toward models, we are now spurred on — to preach, to work, to endure even to death. And we need the will of God if we are to be able to fulfill those duties. Again, in saying “Your will be done” we are even wishing ourselves well, in that there is nothing evil in the will of God — even if, in proportion to what each of us deserves, something we would not have chosen is laid on us. So by this phrase we are warning ourselves in advance toward patience. The Lord too, when he wanted to show us in his own flesh the weakness of flesh, by real suffering, said, “Father, take away this cup of yours”; and then, catching himself, he added, “only, not my will but yours be done.” He himself was the Will and the Power of the Father, and even so, to show the patience that was owed, he handed himself over to the Father’s will.

“Your kingdom come” points at the same thing “Your will be done” points at — that is, at us. For when does God not reign, when the heart of every king is in his hand? But whatever we wish for ourselves, we look for in him, and what we expect from him, we credit to him. And so, if the appearing of the Lord’s kingdom belongs to the will of God and to our own anxious expectation, how is it that some pray for the age to be stretched out longer, when the kingdom of God, the very thing we pray will arrive, is heading toward the end of the age? What we want is our reign hurried on, not our slavery drawn out. [n]

Even if the Prayer had not laid it down that we ask for the kingdom’s coming, we would have let out that cry unbidden, in our hurry toward what we hope for. The souls of the martyrs under the altar cry out to the Lord in jealousy: “How long, Lord, will you not avenge our blood on those who live on the earth?” For of course their avenging is set by the end of the age. Yes, Lord — let your kingdom come, and with all speed! It is the prayer of Christians, the confounding of the nations, the delight of angels; it is what we suffer for — or rather, what we pray for.

How gracefully the divine Wisdom has arranged the order of the prayer, so that after the heavenly things — after the Name of God, the Will of God, and the Kingdom of God — it gives earthly needs room for a petition too! For the Lord had also issued his order: “Seek the kingdom first, and then these things will be added as well.” Though we may rather understand “Give us today our daily bread” in a spiritual sense. For Christ is our Bread, because Christ is Life and bread is life. “I am,” he says, “the Bread of Life”; and a little earlier, “The Bread is the Word of the living God, who came down from the heavens.” And we find too that his body is counted in bread: “This is my body.” So in asking for daily bread we are asking to remain in Christ forever and never to be divided from his body. [p]

But because that word can also be taken in a bodily sense, it cannot be used that way without remembering the spiritual Discipline along with it. The Lord commands that bread be prayed for, the one food believers need, since “all the other things the nations chase after.” He drives the same lesson home by examples and handles it again and again in parables, when he says, “Does a father take bread away from his children and hand it to dogs?” and again, “Does a father give his son a stone when he asks for bread?” In this way he shows what sons expect from their father. Even that man knocking in the middle of the night knocked for bread. And he rightly added “Give us today,” since he had already said, “Take no anxious thought about tomorrow, about what you are to eat.” He fitted the same subject with the parable of the man who was pondering an enlargement of his barns for the crop that was coming, and long stretches of security ahead — and that very night he dies.

It was fitting that after taking in God’s generosity we should turn to his readiness to pardon as well. For what good will food do us, if we are really being handed over to it the way a bull is fattened for sacrifice? The Lord knew himself to be the only guiltless one, and so he teaches us to beg that our debts be forgiven us. A request for pardon is a full confession, because the person who begs for pardon fully admits his guilt. This is how repentance is shown to be acceptable to God, who wants it rather than the death of the sinner. [s]

In the Scriptures, debt is a figure for guilt, because it is owed in the same way to the sentence of a judge and is collected by it; and it does not escape the justice of that collection unless the collection is let go — just as in the parable the master let his slave’s debt go, since that is where the whole parable is heading. And the fact that the same slave, once released by his master, does not spare his own debtor in the same way, and is accused before his master for it and handed over to the torturer until he pays the last quadrans — that is, every guilt, however small — answers to what we profess when we say “we too forgive our debtors.” Elsewhere, in agreement with this Form of Prayer, he says the same: “Forgive, and it will be forgiven you.” And when Peter put the question whether forgiveness should be granted to a brother seven times, “No,” he says, “seventy-seven times” — recasting the Law for the better, because in Genesis vengeance was set at seven times in Cain’s case, and at seventy-seven times in Lamech’s.

To complete so brief a prayer he added — so that we would ask not merely about the forgiving of acts of guilt but about turning them away altogether — “Do not lead us into temptation,” that is, do not let us be led into it, by the one who does the tempting, of course. But far be the thought that the Lord could seem to tempt, as if he either did not know a person’s faith or were eager to overthrow it. Weakness and malice are the devil’s traits. [w]

For God had commanded even Abraham to make a sacrifice of his son — not to tempt his faith but to prove it — so as to make of him an example for that command of his which he would shortly lay down, that no one hold the pledges of his affection dearer than God. He himself, when the devil tempted him, showed who it is that presides over temptation and starts it. He confirms this passage by later ones, saying, “Pray that you are not tempted.” And they were tempted — as they showed by deserting their Lord — because they had given in to sleep rather than to prayer. So the final clause agrees with this and interprets the sense of “Do not lead us into temptation.” The sense is: “But carry us away from the Evil One.”

In summaries of so few words, how many sayings of the prophets, the Gospels, and the apostles are touched on — how many discourses, examples, parables of the Lord! How many duties are discharged all at once! The honor of God in “Father”; the testimony of faith in “Name”; the offering of obedience in “Will”; the recalling of hope in “Kingdom”; the request for life in “Bread”; the full admission of debts in the plea that they be forgiven; the anxious dread of temptation in the request for protection. What wonder? God alone could teach how he wanted himself prayed to. So the observance of prayer, set in order by him and given life by his own Spirit at the very moment it was coming out of the divine mouth, rises into heaven by a right of its own, commending to the Father what the Son has taught. [z]

But the Lord, who sees human needs in advance, said separately, after handing over his Rule of Prayer, “Ask, and you will receive.” And there are petitions that are made according to each person’s own circumstances. So our further needs have the right — once we have laid the lawful and customary prayers as a foundation — to raise an outer structure of petitions on top, as long as we remember the Teacher’s commands. [aa]

So that we may not be as far from God’s ears as we are from his commands, the memory of those commands paves a road to heaven for our prayers. The chief of them is that we not go up to God’s altar before we have settled whatever quarrel or offense we have taken on with our brothers. For what kind of act is it to approach the peace of God without peace, or the forgiveness of debts while you hold on to them? How will a man satisfy his Father when he is angry with his brother, since from the beginning all anger has been forbidden us? [ab]

Even Joseph, when he was sending his brothers off to fetch their father, said, “And do not be angry on the way.” He was warning us at that moment, to be sure — for elsewhere our Discipline is called “the Way” — that when we are set on the way of prayer we should not go to the Father angry. After that the Lord, filling out the Law, openly adds the ban on anger against a brother to the ban on murder; he does not allow it to be let out even in a bad word. Even if we must be angry, our anger must not be kept up past sunset, as the apostle warns. But how reckless it is either to let a day pass without prayer while you refuse to make it right with your brother, or else to lose your prayer by keeping up your anger!

Prayer ought to be free not only from anger but altogether from every disturbance of mind, spoken out of a spirit like the Spirit it is sent to. A defiled spirit cannot be recognized by a holy Spirit, nor a sad one by a joyful one, nor a spirit in chains by a free one. No one takes his opponent in; no one lets anyone in but his own like. [ae]

And what sense is there in going to prayer with hands washed but the spirit filthy — when it is spiritual cleanness that our hands themselves need, so that they may be “lifted up clean” from lying, from murder, from cruelty, from poisonings, from idolatry, and from all the other stains that are conceived in the spirit and carried out by the working of the hands? These are the true kinds of cleanness, not the ones most people are superstitiously careful about, taking water at every prayer even when they are coming from a bath of the whole body. [af]

When I was making a scrupulous, thorough investigation of this practice and searching into the reason for it, I found that it is a memorial act, bearing on the handing over of our Lord. But we pray to the Lord; we do not hand him over. In fact we ought to set ourselves against the example of the man who handed him over, and for that very reason not wash our hands. Unless some defilement picked up in dealings with people gives the conscience a reason to wash them, our hands are otherwise clean enough — we washed them once, together with our whole body, in Christ.

Israel may wash all his limbs over daily, and he is never clean. His hands, at any rate, are always unclean, dyed forever with the blood of the prophets and of the Lord himself. And on that account, as hereditary offenders through their sharing in their fathers’ crimes, they do not dare even to lift those hands to the Lord, for fear some Isaiah should cry out, for fear Christ should shudder outright. We, however, not only lift our hands but spread them wide; and taking our model from the Lord’s suffering, we confess to Christ even in our prayer. [ai]