welfare. And, indeed, it is so precisely framed that hope of attempting anything better is rightly taken away from all men (Institutes, 3:20:49).
As we contemplate the meaning of this prayer, it is appropriate to stop and recognize that the prayer itself has great beauty and even a perfection that can never be surpassed.
Even as this prayer possesses great beauty and even perfection, as it offers an appropriate means of sharing one’s petitions with God, it also carries with it a sense of Jesus’ understanding of the kingdom of God. This prayer finds its center in serving as a kingdom petition. As John Koenig puts it:
The prayer that Jesus taught is among the shortest of the daily disciplines in the world’s great religions. But to the eyes of Christian faith it shimmers like the most precious of diamonds. When we pray it, allowing ourselves to be centered in the kingdom petition, a prism effect occurs. With light from the Spirit, other parts of the prayer fan out into a rainbowlike display of what it means for us to participate in the coming reign of God (Koenig, Rediscovering New Testament Prayer, p. 48).
Each of the five declarations and petitions that form the prayer serve as affirmations of God’s reign. They allow us to declare our allegiance to the God whose name is hallowed above all others, and then moves into petitions that direct and guide our daily lives, whether that be requests for daily provisions or relief from temptation.
Although there isn’t space to delve deeply into the issue of the sources and editing of these two versions of the prayer, an issue that also includes the question of the way in which Jesus addresses God as Father, I would like to briefly comment on both the sources of what appears in the current texts and the meaning of the word father in this prayer.
The Lord’s Prayer appears in two Gospels, Gospels that often make use of a collection of Jesus’ sayings normally referred to as “Q.” As is true with other sayings, each author uses the text in a way that fits their particular context and purpose. Matthew’s version is much more expansive than Luke’s, and provides the foundation for the forms that have been historically used in Christian worship. It is, however, impossible to determine which is closer to the original. What is perhaps most interesting is that Matthew chose to place it at the very center of the Sermon on the Mount.
With regard to the use of the word Father in this prayer, there has been considerable debate. In both passages the Greek word pater is used, but it is extremely likely that Jesus would have used the Aramaic abba. The debate concerns the way in which the Aramaic original influences the way in which the Greek word is used in this prayer, so that we might better understand what Jesus meant when he addressed God as Father. Although Jesus likely used the word abba, both authors chose to use the Greek word and no attempt was made to transliterate the Aramaic into Greek letters. We are, therefore, left with the decision made by the authors to use the Greek pater. The author/editors of these two Gospels could have used a transliteration, though the only example from the Gospels is Mark 14:36, an account of Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. The only other usages of the Aramaic term come in the Pauline epistles (Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6). The sparseness of this evidence would seem to suggest that it would be best not to speculate on the way in which the Aramaic word may have been used, and what its meaning would be.
The lack of evidence has not kept people from reflecting upon the word or making claims about the usage. Numerous books, both scholarly and popular, have suggested that not only did Jesus use the word abba, but that this word expressed an extraordinary sense of intimacy. Many interpreters have also suggested that such usage originated with Jesus — that is, while God may have been spoken of as Father in the Old Testament, God is not addressed directly in such terms. In their exploration of the meaning of the term, some writers suggested that the word abba is best translated as “daddy,” and thus would have been the word a child used to address his or her father. Some even go as far as to suggest that the word has the sense of a toddler babbling “dadda.” The acknowledged source for much of this speculation goes back to the writings of biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias, who indeed insisted that Jesus used the word abba, and at least originally held that it expressed the intimate expressions of a child to one’s father. He apparently backtracked somewhat from some of these assertions. Now it is possible that Jesus spoke in intimate terms and that he used abba in the way Jeremias suggested, but there is simply no way to know this for sure. What we do know is that at least in terms of this prayer, the Gospels use the Greek pater and not the Aramaic abba (Thompson, The Promise of the Father, pp. 21-34). For the purposes of our study, I’ve focused on the implications that the word pater provides us, for it carries with it the sense of patron and thus emphasizes the nature of allegiance that I believe is present in this prayer.
What follows is a set of six reflections that is brought to a conclusion with an afterword that raises the question of what allegiance to God looks like as we live in the present age. Thus, we begin with a chapter entitled “Worshiping the Holy God.” From this point, we move on to consider “Living in the Kingdom,”
“Trusting the Day to God,” “Living in Forgiveness,” “Deliverance from Evil,” and finally, “Sharing in God’s Glory.” This final chapter reflects upon the closing doxology of the prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory.” This final statement doesn’t appear in either of the two Gospel accounts, and thus is not original to the prayer, but it is so much a part of our prayer that it is appropriate that we not neglect it in this set of reflections. In many ways, without this statement, the prayer comes to an abrupt ending, leaving us wanting more. It would appear that early on this lack was noticed and a proper ending was provided.
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