to be glorified. The prayer, together with the other words of Jesus in the same context about prayer (Matt 6:2–6), turns its back on ceremony and on inner contemplation, in favor of concretely lived-out holiness.
Like his ancestors, like his listeners and like Matthew, Jesus assumed—as we do not since the cultural triumph of philosophical monotheism—that God’s control of history is contested. When addressed to the victorious Sovereign of the universe and of Christendom, the petition “May your name be sanctified, may your will be done,” seems to be asking for something to happen that can hardly help happening: thus prayer becomes submitting to and lining oneself up with the way things are. But in Jesus’s world, God’s sovereignty is not yet confirmed and God’s name is not yet widely hallowed. The other “gods” are still around, and are apparently winning. To pray, “Your name be hallowed; your will be done” is not an acceptance of evident reality, not the liturgical celebration of a settled cosmology, but a battle cry. It is a word of hope in defiance of the powers.
The first petition directed toward ourselves acknowledges our dependence upon God to meet our need for bread: a theme to which Jesus returns later in Matthew 6. The second petition is unique in the prayer in that it is conditional. The forgiveness we request corresponds to the forgiveness we have extended to others. This is the only portion of the prayer to be commented upon afterward by Jesus (vv. 14ff.). The same point is made as well in Luke 6:37 and in Matthew 18. The duty constantly to forgive is linked directly with our own constant need to be forgiven. Translators and commentators have not finished discussing whether the forgiveness in question is most fittingly understood as beginning with concrete financial obligations (“debts”) and then extending by analogy to other offenses and kinds of guilt or “trespass,” or whether it should be the other way around. In either case it is central that everyone who prays is committing herself or himself to live from and toward a quality of relationships in which one can be free from the bondage of past obligations and offenses. Not all debts have to be paid by me or to me; not all offenses need to be avenged or punished. We accept from God the grace of remission, and we commit ourselves to live out that grace as we relate to those who have incurred obligations toward us. It is not enough then to see in this prayer a petition for social justice; it is even more a petition for and commitment to social grace, to liberation from obligations actually incurred through our need, weakness, and guilt. Already in the Psalms the pious Hebrews had praised God for not remembering our trespasses. Jesus’s disciples commit themselves by thus praying to become instruments of that same quality of gracious forgetfulness. Does this have something to say about society’s treatment of offenders?
The other theme is protection from temptation. The petition is not that we may be made strong to face temptation successfully, but that we be saved from testing. There is no interest in braving the Tempter’s power, no sense that moral character would be formed or demonstrated by flirting with the edges of evil.
In the Greek one cannot distinguish between “evil thing” and “evil One.” Although most translations have favored the former, it might well be the latter that is meant. This would again make two sentences more nearly parallel: “Do not lead us into a time of trial; save us from the Tempter.” This petition acknowledges vulnerability and dependence in a world predisposed to foster our disobedience.
Our last observation is as profound as it is formal. The prayer is consistently in the plural. We pray together for our bread, our forgiveness, and our protection from temptation. The agent of Christian petition is the community, not the lonely soul or the moral hero. Likewise, then, the sanctifying of the Name and the doing of his will on earth as in heaven are collective activities, as we pray for and do them.
Seeking First the Kingdom (Matt 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–31)
How not to take no thought for the morrow
The concrete meaning of the warnings against preoccupation with material security has been rendered less accessible to us by some of the short-circuited ways it has often been read, sometimes in order to be applied sincerely and sometimes in order to set it aside as unrealistic. Since the birds and the flowers are fed without their thinking about it, and since the Old Testament reports that the prophet Elijah was once fed by ravens, there are those who think that Jesus was promising some kind of nature miracle, some new gift of manna, as an alternative to sober economic planning. Then obviously such “trust in God” would not be something we could reproduce in our culture. Thus by making the meaning radical we make it irrelevant.
But that was not Jesus’s point. The concrete and credible meanings of Jesus’s words were confirmed by the life of the circle of disciples who had literally left economic security behind and were already experiencing material support from the common fund. Already in this life, Jesus later taught (Mark 10:29ff.), those who forsake other communities and securities find in the Kingdom fellowship new possessions and new families. Thus the first impact of the promise that the morrow will take care of itself was not about ravens but about Jesus. It called people to join his itinerant commune. It summons us to make real among ourselves the new economic solidarity of those who consider nothing their own and who share according to need.9
The further analysis of what it means to trust God for survival is pointed up by the parallel, already accentuated by Leo Tolstoy and Reinhold Niebuhr, between the renunciation of selfish economic security in Mathew 6 and the renunciation of violence toward the enemy in Matthew 5. Both chapters exemplify renouncing the habits of thinking from the perspective of controlling the situation for good, and of beginning with one’s own rights. The most entrenched defenses of inequitable social systems in our time are not the unabashed selfishness of criminal types, but the consciously justified “legitimate self-concern” of good people, and the assignment to oneself of the responsibility to make sure that things do not come out still worse, whereby people claiming to do justice maintain things the way they are, because the alternative would be worse.
“Taking thought for the morrow” is the claim that it is my right or my duty to exercise control over others—control first of all over the social system, and therefore control over other persons—in the name of a relative justice that is better than something else that I fear, and in which, not so incidentally, my own rights will be taken care of first.
A pietist or a pre-scientific social thinker might say more simply that defending my rights means not trusting God. A more sophisticated analyst would add that it means not trusting other people, not trusting dialogue and forgiveness, not trusting conflict resolution and due process; claiming instead that one has no choice but to manipulate, to use non-dialogical power, and to accumulate and preserve one’s own economic advantage at the cost of wider sharing. “Taking thought for the morrow” is what some call “an ethic of responsibility.” We must control events because God won’t. Its basic moral mood is utilitarian. It puts security above solidarity. It privileges one’s own party in calculating the common good.
Thereby we have backed into a functional definition of what “trusting God” would mean in concrete social terms. It would mean that our calculations of the common good would not begin by privileging our own perspective, and would not be used to assign to ourselves or to our party the authority to impose our vision or our rights on others by authority or by applying greater power. To trust God is then to trust in dialogue and due process, repentance and the common search. Does this have something to say about economic justice and “national security”?
There is a deep commonality between the daring to share that is enjoined for the disciples’ economic life (Matthew 6) and the love for enemy that is commended in the realm of conflict. Both risk themselves at the hand of open process over which one is ready to relinquish control.
Proclamation and prayer derived from the coming of the Kingdom give reason to trust that such renunciation is not going to be generally suicidal, though it may situationally be costly. Heralding the Kingdom (Matt 3:2; 4:17; 10:7)
