The Lord's Prayer

Our father,

Who art in heaven,

Hallowed be thy name!

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

On earth as it is in heaven!

Give us this day our daily bread, 

And forgive us our trespasses 

as we forgive those who trespass against us,

And lead us not into temptation

But deliver us from evil, Amen!

Everyone knows the Lord’s Prayer. The version quoted in the Gospel of Matthew (6: 9-13) is probably the best-known verse in all of Judeo-Christian scripture. It is a cyber-wonk’s dream. The density of the information content is out of this world, quite literally! 

The Lord’s Prayer is a fractal: It consists of 3 stanzas, each in turn consisting of 3 verses (9 verses in all). Each verse is self-similar to the other verses in its stanza, each stanza is self-similar to the other stanzas and to the prayer as a whole.

The Lord’s Prayer is a hologram: each verse encodes its stanza and each stanza encodes the entire prayer. 

The first stanza concerns the identity of God and the nature of our relationship with him (Christmas Past); the second has an eschatological focus (Christmas Future), while the third stanza is concerned with everyday social relations (Christmas Present). We are all so familiar with this prayer that we may not always notice these sharp thematic breaks.

In the first stanza, we learn that God is “our father” – not merely ‘the maker of heaven and earth’ and not just the father of Israel or of Jesus, but the father of everyone, our father!

Sidebar: When Roman Catholic children first learn this prayer, they don’t call it the “Lord’s Prayer”; they call it the “Our Father” in recognition of the prayer’s personal tone and pastoral focus. Attention is drawn to the compassion of a father rather than to the majesty of a Lord.

The role of father is very different from the role of creator. As creator, God establishes the conditions necessary for existence per se, including our own; he is the ground of our being. But as father, God enters into a personal relationship with each of us. 

Next, we learn that our father is transcendent (“in heaven”) …and therefore eternal: he is not subject to the corruption and death characteristic of immanent, spatiotemporal reality.

Finally, we acknowledge that God’s name is holy. In the ancient world, a person’s name was not just ‘her handle.' A name also defined the person’s role in society; in God’s case, it defines his role in the universe (which is his ‘society’). He is unique, a class of one, and so his name is holy.

This is why Moses (Exodus 3) was so concerned to learn God’s name. He knew the Israelites would ask and would not follow him until they knew. In the language of philosophy, a name was ‘essential’ in the ancient world, just as it is ‘accidental' today.

Universal Father (Past), Kingdom of Heaven (Future), Holy Name (Present) – 3 different phrases, each denoting the same subject. The first stanza recapitulates the entire prayer. 

The ‘magic’ of Christianity is its ability to turn Being inside out, revealing alternately, Gestalt-like, its immanent aspect and its transcendent aspect. The opening stanza of our prayer combines the intimate immanence of a father with the absolute transcendence of heaven.

The second stanza of the prayer is eschatological. While the first stanza reveals the ‘primordial’ state of things (Past), this stanza presents the state of things to come (Future): his kingdom comes, his will is done, and any discord between heaven and earth disappears. 

“I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” (Rev. 22:13) The Lord’s Prayer identifies God as the Alpha Dog and confirms that he will be ‘the last man (sic) standing’ as in Job 19: 25 - 27.

But these stanzas provide no hint of how we are to get from Alpha to Omega. Rightly so! The first two stanzas are visions, not a political platform. We still need GPS to get from here to there, and fortunately, the third stanza provides just that! It is concerned with daily life in the spatiotemporal realm (Present). We have already been introduced to the Alpha and the Omega; here is where we learn the rest of the alphabet, i.e., everything in-between.

In this final stanza, we learn that our primordial relationship with God and God’s eschatological vision for the universe are relevant, not only in the transcendent realm, but immanently as well. 

Not surprisingly, this third stanza is enormously more complicated than its two predecessors. Now we are in the realm of extension and duration, energy and matter. Plus, we are confronted with the human element – the appetites and aspirations of individuals and the homeostatic and catastrophic forces operative in society. 

We begin therefore with basics: survival, our daily bread. But ‘man (sic) does not live by bread alone’. I survive only in the context of community and community comes to be only when you and I grant each other ‘reck’ (recognition).

We grant reck when we sublimate our own interests to those of another. I ‘make space’ for you and, hopefully you make space for me; if so, voila, community! But there’s a catch. The mutual granting of reck may not be transactional or reciprocal; it cannot be tit-for-tat. Each granting of reck must be spontaneous, voluntary, an expression of love with no expectation of gain. 

The opposite of ‘reck’ is ‘trespass’. Instead of making room for you to emerge and grow, I impinge upon you, stunt your growth, and perhaps even abort your arrival. We ask God to overlook, to overcome, to forgive all our trespasses, i.e. all the ways and times I suppress others. 

“As we forgive those who trespass against us.” Are we bargaining with God, bribing him, giving him an ultimatum? Of course not. We forgive others’ trespasses as we grant them reck, spontaneously. In fact, forgiving and granting are two sides of the same coin. To forgive is to love. When I forgive, I love and when I love, I express and project the love that comes from God, that is God.   

This interpretation is confirmed elsewhere in Scripture in a somewhat different context: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you lose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matt. 18: 18) 

God operates in the world through the world. God desires to forgive all sins; when we forgive , we operate in loco Deo.  We realize God’s eschatological objective in a concrete context.

“But lead us not into temptation.” We are motivated by Good, we are tempted by the semblance of good. Seeking nothing but Good, we settle for what is not-so-good and when we treat the not-so-good as Good, we commit the sin of idolatry.

Note: All sin is idolatry, the substitution of the relatively good for the absolutely Good. Idolatry is as much a cognitive disorder as it is a disorder of the will. We do not set out to regard an inert hunk of metal as the Summum Bonum; we are beguiled by its heavily polished bronze and flaming ruby eyes. 

Using a more secular vocabulary, Alfred North Whitehead called this phenomenon the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. We mistake something for what it is not. We assign eschatological significance to the purely transitory: ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings; look upon my works…nothing beside remains.” (Shelley)

“But deliver us from evil.” While neither Jesus nor the Evangelists knew the Second Law of Thermodynamics, they were all keen observers of the natural world. They knew that ‘all things must pass,' and they were familiar with texts like Ecclesiastes: “Vanity of vanities! All things are vanity.” They understood mortality.

Today we understand ‘change’ as ‘entropy’ and we know that every ‘change’ works to increase the overall entropy of the universe. (Entropy is the measure of disorder.) According to our astrophysicists, the universe that sprang into being at Big Bang (‘Let there be light’) will fade out in some version of Heat Death (‘Apocalypse’). 

If Being = Love = Order, then entropy, morally neutral in its own right, becomes the ‘agent of evil’, the opposite of creation. If Good is to triumph, God must rescue us from spatiotemporal entropy. If we are granting reck and forgiving trespasses, we are already doing the work of God on Earth. We do not grant reck; God grants reck through us. But when we work God’s will, we accept the gift of eternal life.

As entropy increases, order decreases. At some time in the far distant future, the universe will reach or approach a state of maximal entropy; all order will be lost and, effectively at least, the universe will cease to exist.

Organic Order then is denotatively synonymous with Being and therefore also with Good. Entropy is ‘evil’ because it erases being, which is intrinsically good. But that is the reality of our temporal world. We relish the marvelous things we experience as entropy unravels creation; but we dread the inevitable consequence: eternal nothingness. 

At the level of organisms (like us), the ultimate expression of entropy is mortality, death. According to Stephen Hawking, no friend of theology, entropy is just another word for time (and vice-a-versa). Time is the true “destroyer of worlds” (Bhagavad Gita). From the perspective of a purely temporal world, death not only terminates our existence…it erases it!

The only intellectually honest emotion then is despair. Unless…reality also has a transcendent (eternal) aspect (or dimension)! The opposite of faith is not doubt, which is unavoidable, but despair. When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we, like the Psalmist (e.g. Psalm 23), are asking God not to let our existence be erased. We are simply asking for eternal life, that’s all!

Everything that happens in the spatiotemporal realm is real; and to the extent that anything temporal harmonizes with God’s values, it is eternal. It ‘borrows’ eternity from God (grace). But if my eternal life was dependent on my guessing, and then doing God's will, we’d all be in pretty rough shape.

Fortunately, it doesn’t work like that. I act, motivated by a desire for Good, in whatever way I choose (free will). God, who desires to save all things, searches for ways to work my action into his Will. God is like GPS: every time I make a ‘wrong’ turn, God patiently recalculates the route (to himself) in the hope of redeeming my suboptimal deed. By the grace of God, I may even hope to get home in one piece.  

In this light, the terrible pall of certain and impending mortality evaporates. In the words of the Psalmist:

“The Lord is my shepherd (father); there is nothing I lack (daily bread) …He guides me along right paths (lead us not into temptation) for the sake of his (holy) name. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death (the temporal world), I will fear no evil (destruction), for you are with me (deliver us from evil) …I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever (thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven).” 

Amen.

***

Image: The Lord's Prayer (Le "Pater Noster") by James Tissot (1886-1894)

Gathered around Jesus, the disciples ask him to teach them to pray. With arms opened wide and hands upraised in a gesture of humility, Jesus begins his prayer with an acknowledgment of God’s power in heaven and on earth. (Tissot places Jesus between the color-streaked sky and the ground on which his disciples sit, further signifying Jesus’ place between the human and the divine.) This invocation became the foundational prayer for his followers.