Teach Us to Pray

He had been praying in a certain place — to that Father up above, of course, looking up with insolent and reckless eyes into the Creator’s own heaven, where a rough and cruel being might well have crushed him with hail and lightning; just as it was arranged by that same being that he should afterwards be fastened to a cross at Jerusalem. And one of his disciples came to him and said, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.” He asked it, we are to believe, because he thought different gods called for different prayers. Well then: anyone who puts forward a guess like that should first show that Christ had proclaimed another god. [a]

For nobody would have wanted to know how to pray before he had learned whom he was to pray to. If he had already learned it, prove it. And if you can find no proof anywhere, then let me tell you: it was the Creator he was asking to be taught to pray to, the God John’s disciples used to pray to as well. But since John had brought in some new order of prayer, the disciple was not out of line in supposing he ought to ask Christ whether they too should pray — not to a different god, but in a different way. So Christ would not have taught his disciple to pray before he had given him the knowledge of God himself. What he actually taught, then, was prayer to the God the disciple already knew.

In fact you can find out from the sense of the prayer which God is being addressed in it. To whom can I say “Father”? To one who had nothing to do with making me, from whom I do not get my origin? Or to the one who by making and shaping me became my parent? Of whom can I ask for his Holy Spirit? Of one who does not give even the breath that belongs to this world — or of him “who makes his angels spirits,” whose Spirit it was that hovered over the waters in the beginning? Whose kingdom am I to wish would come: the kingdom of someone I never heard called the king of glory, or of him in whose hand are even the hearts of kings? Who is to give me my daily bread? The one who does not produce a single grain of millet for me, or the one who day after day gave his people the bread of angels out of heaven? Who is to forgive me my offenses? The one who, by refusing to judge them, does not hold them against me; or the one who, unless he forgives them, will hold them against me right up to his judgment? Who is to let us not be led into temptation? The one before whom the tempter will never so much as tremble, or the one who from the beginning condemned the tempting angel in advance? If anyone uses a form of words like this and calls on some other god and not the Creator, he is not praying. He is defaming God.

In the same way — whom must I ask, if I am to receive? Whom seek, if I am to find? At whose door knock, if it is to be opened to me? Who is there to give to the man who asks, except the one to whom everything belongs, and to whom I too belong, I who am doing the asking? And what have I lost in that other god’s keeping, that I should look for it with him and find it? If it is wisdom and good sense, it was the Creator who hid them; am I to go to Marcion’s god in search of them? If it is health and life, those are at the Creator’s disposal. Nothing is to be sought and found anywhere except where it is being kept out of sight so that it may come to light. And so I will knock at no door but the one my own standing came to me out of.

In short, if receiving, and finding, and being let in are the fruit of labor and earnestness in the man who has asked and sought and knocked, then understand that it is the Creator who laid down those duties and promised those results. That most excellent god of yours, who comes (so he says) to help a man who is none of his making, and to do it free of charge, could not have laid any labor on him or given him anything to be in earnest about. He would stop being the most excellent god the moment he failed to give unprompted to everyone who does not ask, and to let everyone who does not seek find, and to open to everyone who does not knock. The Creator, on the other hand, could proclaim these duties and these rewards through Christ, so that a man who by sinning had offended his God might have to work at it, and by keeping on asking might receive, and by seeking might find, and by knocking might get in.

That is why the comparison just before it puts the man who went at night and begged for loaves in the position of a friend and not a stranger, and has him knock at a friend’s house and not a stranger’s. Even supposing he has given offense, a man is more of a friend to the Creator than to the god of Marcion. So he knocks at the door of the one he had a right to approach; whose gate he had found; whom he knew to have bread; who is in bed by now with his children — the children he willed to be born. And even if the knocking comes late in the day, it is still the Creator’s time of day. The latest hour belongs to the one who owns a whole age and the end of it. Nobody could have knocked late at the new god’s door, since he has hardly seen the morning light yet. It is the Creator who once shut the door on the Gentiles while the Jews were knocking at it, and it is he who both gets up and gives — if not to a man as a friend now, still not as to a stranger, but, as he says, “because of his persistence.” The recent god cannot have allowed anyone to be persistent in the little time he has been here.

So recognize the one you call the Creator as “Father” as well. He is the one who knows what his children need. When they asked for bread he gave them manna from heaven, and when they wanted meat he sent them quails in abundance — not a snake instead of a fish, or a scorpion instead of an egg. And it will belong to him not to give the bad thing in place of the good, since he has both in his power. Marcion’s god, having no scorpion, could not refuse to give what he did not have; only the one who has a scorpion and still does not give it can refuse it. In the same way, the one who will give the Holy Spirit is the one who has the unholy spirit at his command too.

When he cast out “the demon that was mute” — and by a cure of that kind proved Isaiah right — and was charged with casting out demons by Beelzebub, he said, “If I cast out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your sons cast them out?” What can he mean by a question like that, except that he throws the spirits out by the same power their sons do, that is, by the power of the Creator? For if you take the sense to be, “If I by Beelzebub, then by whom your sons?” — as though he were taunting them with having Beelzebub’s power themselves — you run straight into the sentence just before it, that Satan cannot be divided against himself. So it was not by Beelzebub that even they were casting out demons, but, as we have said, by the power of the Creator. And to get that understood he adds, “But if I cast out demons by the finger of God, has not the kingdom of God come near to you?” For the magicians who stood before Pharaoh and resisted Moses called the Creator’s power “the finger of God.” It was the finger of God because it was a sign that even a weak thing was overflowing with strength. Christ showed the same when he brought those old wonders back to notice — his own wonders, and he was not wiping them out — and said that the power of God must be understood as the finger of no other God than the one with whom it had got that name. So his kingdom had come near to them, whose power was called his “finger.”

Fittingly, then, he attached to it the parable of the strong man armed whom a stronger man overcame: the ruler of the demons, whom he had already called Beelzebub and Satan. He meant that this was the one overcome by the finger of God, not that the Creator had been beaten by another god. Besides, how could the Creator’s kingdom still be standing, with its borders and its laws and its workings — a kingdom Marcion’s god could seem to have overcome as “the stronger” even if the whole world had been left to him intact — when it is by the Creator’s law that even Marcionites keep dying, draining away in dissolution back into the ground, and are reminded often enough by nothing more than a scorpion that the Creator has by no means been overcome?

A mother in the crowd calls out, “Blessed is the womb that carried you, and the breasts you nursed at”; but the Lord said, “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.” Now he had turned aside his mother and his brothers in exactly the same terms before, preferring the people who heard God and obeyed him. Here, though, his mother was not present with him. So on that earlier occasion he had not denied that he was her son by birth. Hearing this greeting the second time, he did the second time what he had done before: he moved the blessing away from his mother’s womb and breasts and onto his disciples — and he could not have moved it away from her if he had not really had her.

I would rather clear the Creator somewhere else of the faults the Marcionites find in him. Here it is enough that the same faults are found in their Christ. Look how uneven, inconsistent and unpredictable he is! Teaching one thing and doing another, he orders that everyone who seeks be given to, and then he himself refuses to give to people who seek a sign. For an immense age he keeps his own light hidden from human beings, and yet says a lamp must not be hidden but set on a lampstand so that it gives light to everybody. He forbids cursing back — and cursing first, of course, much more — and yet he heaps his woes on the Pharisees and the lawyers. Who is more like my God than his own Christ is? [w]

We have often settled it already that he could not have been branded as the destroyer of the law if he had been announcing another god. That is why even the Pharisee who invited him to dinner in the passage before us showed some surprise in his presence that he had not washed before reclining at the table, as the law requires — since it was the God of the law he was proclaiming.

Jesus interpreted the law to him too, when he told him that they “clean the outside of the cup and the dish, while their inside is full of greed and wickedness.” He said it to show that before God the cleaning of vessels stands for the cleansing of people, since it was a man and not an unwashed dish that this Pharisee had been going on about in his presence. So he said, “You wash the outside of the cup” — that is, the flesh — “but you do not clean your inside” — that is, the soul; and then, “Did not the one who made the outside” — the flesh — “also make the inside?” — that is, the soul. By saying it he declared outright that the cleansing of a man’s outside and his inside alike belongs to the same God, since both alike are in the power of the one who prefers mercy not only to a man’s washing but even to sacrifice. For he goes on to command, “Give what you have as alms, and everything will be clean for you.” Even if some other god could have commanded mercy, he could not have commanded it before he was known. And it is plain in this passage that they were not being taken to task about their God, but about a point in the instruction he had given them, when he prescribed to them the cleaning of their vessels in a figure while really meaning works of mercy.

In the same way he scolds them for tithing worthless garden herbs while “passing over hospitality and the love of God.” The calling and the love of which God, if not the God whose law of tithes had them offering their rue and their mint? The whole force of the rebuke lay here: that they were careful about small matters in the service of the very God to whom they would not show their weightier duties, when he commanded them, “You shall love the Lord your God, who called you out of Egypt, with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength.” Besides, not enough time had gone by for Christ to be demanding a love so premature — and, as things stood, so unpalatable — toward a god who was new and recent, not to say not even out in the open yet.

When he goes on to scold the men who grabbed at the front seats and at being greeted with honor in public, he is only carrying on the Creator’s line. It is the Creator who calls ambitious men of that sort “rulers of Sodom,” who forbids us to put confidence even in princes, and who pronounces the man who puts his confidence in a human being altogether wretched. And anyone who aims at high position because he wants the glory of other people’s attentions is caught by it: since God forbade those attentions as a matter of placing hope and confidence in man, he censured at the same stroke everyone who is ambitious for high place.

He goes at the lawyers themselves as well, because they were “loading men with burdens hard to carry, which they would not touch with one finger of their own” — but not as though he were jeering at the burdens of the law out of any hatred for it. How could he have felt any aversion to the law, when he used to take them to task so earnestly for passing over its weightier matters: almsgiving, hospitality, and the love of God? And not only those great things. Even the tithes of rue and the cleaning of cups. In fact he would rather have counted them excusable for being unable to carry burdens that could not be carried.

What burdens, then, is it that he condemns? Only the ones they were piling up on their own account, when they taught human rules as commandments; when for their own advantage they joined house to house so as to cut a neighbor out of what was his; haranguing the people, loving presents, chasing after rewards, robbing the poor of a fair hearing, so as to have the widow for plunder and the orphan for spoil. Isaiah speaks of these men too: “Woe to those who are strong in Jerusalem!” and again, “Those who exact from you shall rule over you.” And who did that more than the lawyers? Now if these men offended Christ, they offended him as his own. He would have aimed no blow at the teachers of a law that was foreign to him.

But why is a “woe” pronounced on them for “building the tombs of the prophets their fathers had killed”? They deserved praise rather, since by an act of respect like that they seemed to be showing that they did not approve of what their fathers had done. Was it not because Christ was jealous with exactly the disposition the Marcionites denounce — visiting the sins of the fathers on the children down to the fourth generation?

And what “key” did these lawyers have, except the interpretation of the law? They did not go in to the understanding of it themselves, and precisely because they did not believe — for “unless you believe, you will not understand” — and they did not let anyone else in either, because they preferred to teach them human rules as commandments. So when he reproached men who did not go in themselves and shut the door on others as well, is he to be reckoned a disparager of the law or a supporter of it? If a disparager, the men who were obstructing the law ought to have pleased him. If a supporter, then he is no enemy of the law after all.

But he uttered all those curses, the Marcionites say, to blacken the Creator as a cruel being, since anyone who offended him was in for a “woe.” And who would not rather have been afraid of provoking a cruel being by deserting him? So the more he represented the Creator as someone to be afraid of, the more earnestly he would be teaching that he ought to be served. And that is exactly how the Creator’s Christ would be bound to act.