Father Stephen De Young: So now, chapter 11:

“Now it came to pass,” that’s another one of those covers for transition. “It came to pass”, meaning, “it happened”.

Now it came to pass, as He was praying in a certain place, when He ceased, that one of His disciples said to Him, ìLord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.î

So Jesus is praying. That’s the set up here because it’s important. The Lord’s Prayer is roughly the same, not totally identical, but roughly the same in both St. Matthew’s Gospel and St. Luke’s Gospel. But it’s framed a little differently in terms of when Jesus says it. Now again, as we’ve talked about before, that’s not a contradiction, we can imagine, Jesus is traveling around preaching in all these villages. He probably says things more than once, because he’s preaching to different audiences, some of the parables and some of these things he said many times in different contexts to different people. There are times when he said things to the disciples and then sent them to the crowd, sometimes the same way, sometimes a little differently because he was talking to different people. And so again, that’s not a problem. That’s what we would expect to find when we’re reading multiple accounts of that, is that Jesus said things at different times, right?

And St. Matthew looks at it and says, “I think it was really important when Jesus taught this to the multitudes that came out to see him”, and St. Luke is saying, “Well, I think it’s really important the way he taught it to his disciples.”

He did both, but each one of them has their own points to make and so they mentioned different instances. So, in this instance that St. Luke is describing, Jesus, as we’ve already seen in St. Luke’s Gospel several times, goes off by himself to pray. So this is another one of those times where Jesus has gone off by himself to pray. And we know from the question the disciples asked that John had taught his disciples, his followers, how they should pray. This may seem a little odd to us because you pray while you go and you pray, close your eyes, fold your hands, talk to God, right? That’s how we tend to think of praying.

But you have to remember, praying, or as we saw it often called in the Old Testament, “calling on the name of the Lord” was not sort of the casual thing that we sometimes make it today in the ancient world. In the pagan world, most of what we call prayer now didn’t exist. Most of what would be called prayer in the pagan world was closer to magic, it was sort of incantations. You’d say this certain set of words to get this god or that god or this spirit or that spirit to do what you wanted, right?

“I need a good harvest, so I’m going to go and I’m going to say these prayers to the fertility goddess every night and do this ritual and then that’ll make sure I have good crops.” But you weren’t like, forming a personal relationship with Ishtar, right? You weren’t getting to know Ishtar. It was, “this is the ritual, this is what I do to get Ishtar to do what I wanted to do.” And prayers had also become very formalized in the Jewish world at this time because of course, you have the worship at the temple where you have formal prayers centering around the Psalms, praying the Psalms. So you had formalized prayers there. They’re not in the same sense or they shouldn’t have been, they may have become in some cases, but as they’re set out in the Old Testament, they weren’t magic. It wasn’t, “Here’s how to get God to do what you want.” We know that’s sometimes how they were used because remember when you’re reading through the prophets, God sort of took Israel to task for doing that, where he’d say, “You know what? You should just stop with the sacrifices because I’m not hearing you because you’re wicked. You can’t just go out and live your life however you want to and then come to me and do a ritual and get me to do what you want, get me to bless you. That’s not how it works.”

It’s not magic. Some took it that way, but that was not the intent.

So, the question “teach us to pray” is, “as your disciples, how is it that we should pray? How would you have us pray?” And we find this from other Jewish groups. It’s not just St John the forerunner here and Jesus, but at Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, there’s a community there at Qumran. They have texts on how to pray and when to pray and what you pray when.

And we’re going to see this continues into Christianity. Remember Acts? The book of Acts is volume two of the Gospel according to St. Luke. And one of the important verses right at the beginning of that is that it says that the followers of Christ in that very early group of the church in Jerusalem were going to the temple to say the prayers. There’s a definite article in front of it. It doesn’t say they went there to pray. It says, they went there for the prayers. So there were set prayers that they were doing at certain times and certain hours. And this, of course, has been carried over into the Orthodox Church. We have the first hour, third hour, sixth hour, ninth hour. We have Vespers in the evening, we have Matins in the morning. There’s the midnight office that you’ll see mostly at monasteries because it’s done at midnight and I’m not going to be here at midnight most nights, once in a while, Pascha, maybe Christmas, once in a while, but the rest of the time I’m not here at midnight. But we have these hours of prayer and these prayers that are said at those times.

And so, this is what they’re asking for from Jesus when they ask him to teach them how to pray, they’re asking for this structure. When should we pray? What prayer should we pray? Because prayer, remember, if we say that prayer isn’t magic, right? Magic is trying to get God or the gods to do what you want them to do. If it’s not that, what is it? It’s the opposite of that. Prayer isn’t about changing God and getting God to do what we want. Prayer is about changing us. We draw close to God in prayer and the prayer is to change us. When we pray prayers of repentance, what are we trying to do? It’s not God’s mad at us and we want Him to be happy with us.

It’s, we’ve sinned, we’ve done injury and damage to ourselves. We’ve corrupted ourselves. We’ve hurt other people. And we come and we repent and we pray prayers of repentance. To be healed and to try to make things right. We are what needs to be changed. We need to be cleansed. We need to be healed. So, we pray prayers of repentance. We pray prayers of thanksgiving. We’re praying prayers of thanksgiving in order to give thanks to God for what he’s given to us, to give us a grateful heart to fight our own tendency toward greed and selfishness and our tendency toward pride, to think that we accomplished everything we have and we earned the things that we have, and they aren’t gifts from God. “This is mine and belongs to me.” We’re fighting that with prayers of thanksgiving, right? It’s not that God is going to get mad at us if we don’t thank Him. It’s that we need to thank Him, right? For ourselves, for our sakes. We’ll be the ones who suffer if we don’t. God doesn’t need our thanks. He doesn’t need our worship. He’s fine without it. We need to worship him. We need to thank him.

So, that’s important to keep in mind because we fall into the other trap all the time. Even in the way we talk about prayer, someone’s sick, and so we go and pray for them and they don’t get better, and we say, “Well, prayer doesn’t work.” But what does that assume? That assumes that the purpose of prayer was to get God to heal that person, and if he doesn’t do what we want, then it didn’t work, right? Which means for us, prayer is magic, trying to get God to do what we want.

There have been some really egregious examples of this, I think. I bet you this before. Several years ago, there was this prayer of Jabez thing, where in Second Chronicles there’s this prayer that Jabez prayed, and it says that God blessed him for this prayer. And some folks, rather than trying to take the lesson like, “Oh, okay, this is a prayer of thanksgiving and this is a prayer… and so we should pray similar prayers or this is how we should be prayerful.” They said, “What you need to do is say this exact prayer, the prayer of Jabez five times a day and then God will give you money. God will bless you if you go and say this prayer five times a day.”

Well, what is that? That’s magic. That’s paganism. That’s not Christianity. That’s not how prayer works. So prayer is a drawing close to God and it’s something that is for us to change us, to mold us, for us to grow. And so, this is why it’s important that we would come to Christ and say, “Hey, how do we do this? How do we do this so that I will be healed, so that I will grow closer to you, so I will become more like you?” That’s the question that they’re asking.

Interlocutor: Is the John, John the Baptist?

Fr. Stephen: Yes. The John there is St. John the Forerunner. St. John the Baptist. Remember, because some of Jesus’s disciples had been St. John’s disciples. And so what this is saying is that St. John gave what we would today call a prayer rule. He gave to his disciples here’s when to pray and how to pray, pray this psalm the third hour at 09:00 AM and pray this psalm… He gave them guidance in that regard. So they’re asking Jesus for the same guidance. Can you do this for us the way John did for his disciples and the way other Jewish teachers did for their disciples.

“So, he said to them, ‘when you pray, say Our Father’”.

Now, I’ll just read it here as it is in our Orthodox Study Bible even though it’s not quite how we read it:

Our Father in heaven,

Hallowed be Your name.

Your kingdom come.

Your will be done

On earth as it is in heaven.

Give us day by day our daily bread.

And forgive us our sins,

For we also forgive everyone who is indebted to us.

And do not lead us into temptation,

But deliver us from the evil one.î

Yeah, it’s a little bit of an awkward translation. I wish they had used sort of the standard translation for the Orthodox Study Bible. So we, of course say, “Our Father who art in heaven.” We add a verb, which there technically isn’t one in this translation. “Our Father in heaven” is a clause. There’s no verb in that sentence. So we add “who is” right, because the verb to be. And if you want to be really woodenly literal, the word “in heaven” there means “in the sky”. Now, that’s obviously not what we mean. That’s not what we mean. We’ve talked before about the idea of that there’s a visible creation and an invisible creation. What they’re saying is that God is part of the invisible creation. We don’t see God the Father. He exists, but we don’t see Him in the visible creation.

Interlocutor: I think we talked about this, but did Christ actually physically ascend on his ascension?

Fr. Stephen: Yes, but that doesn’t mean that the place where God is is related to us vertically, amongst other things, we now know that the Earth is a sphere. So, “up” becomes problematic based on that.

Interlocutor: Up from the center of the Earth towards the stars.

Fr. Stephen: Well, that depends. Once you get outside of Earth’s gravity and come into something else’s gravity, is that still “up”? I mean, you have “up” from any given point, but it’s related to that point, say way left and right is left and right depends on which direction you’re facing. It’s not an absolute direction.

But the point here is not to locate God, to say God is in this particular place as opposed to other places. Because I know we’ve also talked about before, God is not confined by space. It’s equally true to say that God is everywhere because there’s not some place where you can go where God isn’t. But at the same time, you could say God is nowhere, because God is not in some particular place. I’m going to go find Him. There was another interesting program on Christian television several years ago. There was a group of people called “The God Chasers”, where they drove around in a van. Somebody would report that there was a miracle there’s, somebody speaking in tongues or a revival somewhere, and they’d all jump in a van and drive over there because that’s where God was. To go find him. Well, that’s equally not true as the idea that there’s some place where God isn’t.

We’re created things, right? I’m here and I’m not over there. God is not a created thing, so there’s not… categories of space and place don’t apply to them. But the point of “Our Father, who art in heaven,” is distinguishing that we’re talking about God the Father, our heavenly Father, not our earthly Father. I’m not talking to my dad. So, the point that Jesus is making here is identifying God as our Father. This is why in the liturgy we introduce the Lord’s Prayer the way we do, that we might with boldness call upon our heavenly God as Father. Call upon God as our father. That’s the idea here.

So, right from the get-go in that first verse, that posits a very different relationship between human beings and God than you’d find in, say, paganism. As I’ve said before, nobody went around singing “What a Friend We Have in Zeus.” You generally wanted Zeus to stay away as much as possible. Because Zeus was a problem, If you read any of the mythology, you didn’t have a relationship with them. You certainly weren’t part of their family.

Now, it is true that the Caesars, starting with Augustus, used the title Divi Fili, where it’s Son of God, right? But the god they were referring to was Julius Caesar, who they believed had become a god, that he didn’t really die. He went up into the heavens to become a god, right? And so because they were, genetically, or by adoption, the son of Julius Caesar who was a god, they called themselves the son of a god. That’s not, obviously, what Jesus is talking about. But notice also Jesus has used the title of himself Son of God. But you notice here he doesn’t say “My Father in heaven.”

Now, he probably said that when he prayed, right? But God the Father is not only the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which he is, but he is also our Father. And again, what we see a lot, and we’ve seen this a lot already in the Gospel according to St. Luke. We’re going to see it in Acts as well, is that St. Luke will say some of the same things that St. Paul says, the same things that St. Paul was teaching in these churches, but rather than just the way St. Paul does, because it’s a letter just laying out, here’s what’s true, right? So, for example, St. Paul is going to talk about and we’re going to read this St. Paul is going to talk a lot about adoption, that we have been adopted by God as his sons. He’s going to go into a lot of detail about that.

Well, St. Luke has shown us that what St. Paul is talking about there, when he goes on and on about adoption, comes from Jesus, right? And Jesus says it here very quickly in one line, that God, Yahweh, God of Israel, is our Father. And what St. Paul is doing when he has that discussion is not making up theology, but he’s pulling out what that means. God is our father. How is God our father? Was he always our father? Did he come to be our father? How did that happen? And so that’s what the whole idea of adoption in Christ comes from, that we’ll read about when we get into St. Paul.

So that first line, the key point of it is God is our Father. And when we address him, we address him as our Father. So when we’re praying this is part of that element of when we’re praying, we’re developing a relationship with Him. It’s not just about asking Him to do things. It’s not just about asking Him not to smite us, right? “Please have mercy on me because… don’t hit me with a lightning bolt.” But that our relationship with God is akin to the relationship of children with their Father.

Secondly, “Hallowed be Your name”; the two things stand in parity, right? God’s name is holy. So the purpose of the statement that God is our Father is not to mean that now we could be informal with God because he’s our dad, right? And we could just crawl up in his lap and give Him a big hug. He is both our Father who cares for us and wants a relationship with us, wants us to participate in his life, and he is the God who created the universe before whom angels tremble. This is still the same God whose name is holy. Both of these are true.

Then, “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” “Your kingdom come” and “your will be done” are not two different things. One is explaining the other. When we say to God, “your kingdom come” is what we mean… what most of the people at this time in history meant when they said they wanted the kingdom of God to come to earth, what did they mean? They wanted the Messiah to be born so he could go and overthrow the Romans and restore the kingdom to Israel. That’s the language Luke is going to use towards the end of his Gospel, right. Set up the kingdom of Israel again over there on the Mediterranean coast. That’s what they were looking for. So when Jesus has them pray “thy kingdom come”, he clarifies further what that means. He clarifies further what that means. That that does not mean “Man, whup those Romans soon”, right? God’s kingdom coming, first of all, where is it coming from?

When they said “Thy kingdom come”, they meant come into existence, right? God doesn’t have a kingdom right now because it collapsed and we went into exile in 586. The Romans are ruling everything. God needs to come and take out the Romans and take over and set up his kingdom. But what does Christ say? By saying on earth as it is in heaven, that means God’s kingdom already exists, right? God’s kingdom already exists. God is already ruling over his creation. He didn’t lose control of things. His kingdom already exists in heaven, in the unseen place, in the place where God is. And we’re praying that that kingdom that already exists in heaven will come to also exist on Earth in the same way.

And the way that’s going to happen is how? By God’s will being done. God’s will being done is what is going to bring about the kingdom of heaven on Earth. So that’s what that is aiming at.

And so, there’s a vision here that goes all the way back to Genesis, to the creation, Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning,” what? “God created the heavens and the earth,” two separate things. You notice, all through Genesis 1, God creates things in pairs. There’s the heavens and the earth, and he separates light and darkness. And then there’s the water above and the water below, and then there’s the water and the dry land, culminating in what? God creates human beings and he creates them male and female.

And then the first piece of what we call eschatology, of what we call the last things, comes in Genesis 2, when God says the two will become one flesh, when he institutes marriage, between a man and a woman. He created human beings, man and woman, in this pair. The pair comes together and becomes one and becomes one.

And so, as we saw in the prophets, when God talks about the day of the Lord, when God talks about Him returning to his people, what’s the image he uses again and again? Marriage. And as we’ve been reading the Gospels, what’s the image Jesus uses all the time of himself? He’s the bridegroom, preparing for his wedding. Preparing for this marriage. Because in the end, what happens in the end, what happens after judgment, what happens in the new heavens and the new earth, is these things that were two become one. Heaven and earth that are separate now become one. This is what St. John is getting at when we eventually, in several years, get to the Book of Revelation, that the new Jerusalem comes down out of heaven, right? These two become one. They come together. And so the image of that that we get from the very beginning is man and woman created in a pair become one. And that’s the image of the Incarnation, God and man becoming one. That’s the image of the new heavens, of the new earth, heaven and earth becoming one.

And so, that’s what we’re praying for. We’re praying for Christ to return. When you pray “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” We’re praying for that to come about, that ultimate fulfillment of God’s creation to come about.

And then is it has here, “Give us day by day our daily bread,” or “give us this day our daily bread”. The idea being that we’re asking God to care for our daily needs. This is going to be explored more coming up here in the Gospel according to St. Luke. He’s going to talk a lot about worrying about what we have and what we need and that kind of thing. So this is going to get expanded on coming soon, right? But the point here being that God cares for our daily needs. Now, what we just said about prayer, this is not to say that you better ask God to make sure you have food or you’ll starve to death. You need to pray this prayer three times a day, and then God will make sure you always have food. As Jesus is going to also say, coming up here pretty shortly, God knows what you need. He knows what you need before you ask. He knows what your sins are before you confess them. It’s not like he wasn’t around and wasn’t watching, and you’re giving Him new information, “Hey, you know, God, I need to eat down here”, right?

And that sounds ridiculous, but in the pagan world, that kind of stuff happened. There are sort of pagan stories where… one of the versions of the flood story from a pagan religion, God has them build sort of a boat and he forgets to put windows. So they have to kind of remind the God, “Oh, hey, we need to breathe. We’re human beings, we need to breathe, we need windows.” So it wasn’t this was in paganism, but our God, who is our Father, the only true God, knows we need to eat. He knows what we need before we ask Him. So why are we asking Him, if he already knows, if we’re not giving Him new information? What we said about prayer, it’s for us.

Because if I’m praying and asking God and trusting God to give me food to eat, clothes to wear, a place to live, to take care of my other needs, what am I not doing? I’m not worrying about them myself. And if God blesses me with a lot of possessions, like he has, I’m not taking credit for it and saying, “These things are mine and this is my achievement and my accomplishment.” Every time I pray this, I’m reminding myself that the things I have come from God and that the things I need tomorrow are going to come from God. So, I can’t take credit for them and I don’t need to worry about them. I’m reminding myself that it’s God who cares for me. But so, that is why that is there. And it’s not just talking about bread, obviously, right? But bread is about all of our daily meals.

Now, this is one of the little differences between St. Luke’s version and St. Matthew’s version, and you’ll see this in different versions of the Lord’s Prayer that people will say. Whereas in St. Matthew’s Gospel it says, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Forgive us our sins. St. Luke uses the language of debt literally, “forgive us our debts as we forgive those who are indebted to us.” This is in keeping with a couple of things we’ve talked before about how St. Luke tends to take especially things having to do with wealth more literally, whereas St Matthew tends to take them more spiritually. Of course, both are true. Both are true, in the sense that “blessed are the poor in spirit”, is true. Blessed are the poor. The people just don’t have also, God cares for both types of poverty.

So, the debt metaphor kind of resonates, but also this falls into that sort of parable idea. We’ve already seen some parables Jesus has told, and we’re going to see some more where he uses debt in the story to represent sin. One of the most famous ones you could probably think of would be the unmerciful servant, remember, the king forgives this one person a huge debt, the equivalent of millions of dollars in debt. He just forgives it to him. And then he walks out and runs into a guy who owes him $5, so he jumps on him and starts beating him and says, “Where’s my money?” So the king calls him back in and says, “Hey, what is this?” It’s the same imagery that’s being used here. We’re going to ask God to forgive us of our sins or trespasses against Him, ask Him for forgiveness and healing.

And if we’re going to do that, we only have the right to ask God for as much forgiveness as we’re willing to show to other people. And so every time we say this part of the Lord’s Prayer, we should at least, if we’re paying attention, have a little bit of trepidation. Because if the only forgiveness I’m going to receive from God is the amount that I give other people, I’m probably in trouble. Not probably, I’m in trouble, right? And so by us asking it in this way, again, it’s not trying to get God to do something. It’s reminding us. It’s reminding me, I’m out here asking God to forgive my sins, and I’m still mad at the guy who cut me off in traffic, and this person I work with and that person who criticized me today and this and that. And so, it calls us to step back. I need to begin by forgiving others. Then once I’ve done that, I can come and ask God for forgiveness. And it also points out that there are always those two dimensions to sin. That sin is, I’ll go ahead and say, never just about you. Any sin you commit doesn’t affect just you. It affects the people around you, affects people you sin against, affects people who know that you’ve done it, the example it sets and the disappointment and the loss of trust, it affects more than just you.

And so, it’s not enough for someone to cheat on their spouse and then go to confession, say, “Oh, hey, I went to confession. You got to forgive me because God forgive me.” You notice here in the Lord’s Prayer, it’s the exact opposite way. It’s, if there’s a problem between me and my wife, I can’t go and ask God to forgive me for it until I’ve taken care of it with my wife, right? That relationship needs to be mended first before I’m going to get forgiveness from God.

So, we need to sort of reorient that order and remember that there’s those two dimensions, there always and again, forgiveness is not getting off the hook, right? God was going to smite me, but now I confessed, and so now he’s not going to smite me. But what we’ve done by sinning is do actual damage to ourselves and to other people. We have hurt, we have harmed, we have corrupted ourselves and other people. And that has to be healed both in us and in those other people.

And that’s why, just to give one last example, the story of Zacchaeus, that we heard several weeks ago in church, but it’s familiar, when Jesus goes to Zacchaeus’s house, he goes to eat with this tax collector. And you would think, “Oh, Jesus is coming into his house. Salvation has come to this house.” But when does Jesus say salvation and come to his house? Right after Zacchaeus said, “Anyone I’ve stolen money from, I’m going to give back five times what I took.” That’s when Jesus says salvation has come to his house. He’s gone and tried to make things right for what he’s done wrong, and he’s tried to heal the wounds he’s inflicted, that’s when Zacchaeus can receive forgiveness and healing for the wounds he’s inflicted on himself. So those are always tied together.

And finally, “Do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.” Now that lead us into temptation is often misinterpreted. St. James is going to be very clear to his Epistle, God tempts no one. God doesn’t go around trying to get you to sin. God doesn’t go around trying to trip you up. That’s not what this is talking about. Remember, the word that is translated “temptation” here can also mean trial, also means struggle. So when we ask God not to lead us into temptation, we know that God is the one who is in control of the future. I don’t even know what it is going to be, let alone control it. God is the one who controls the future. God is the one who knows what’s going to happen to me tomorrow.

And if tomorrow I’m tried, if tomorrow I’m tested, if tomorrow I’m tempted and I’m honest about my own weakness and my own sinfulness. If I’m tried and I’m tempted tomorrow, odds are I’m not going to perform that well. Odds are if I face a lot of temptations tomorrow, I’m probably going to give into most of them. If I know myself at all. I do a little bit, not much, not enough, but a little bit. Enough to know that I’m weak and I’m sinful. And if I’m tried, I’m not going to be like Job in the Old Testament where he faced all these trials and still maintained faith. I know my faith isn’t up to it. And so this is what we’re asking God when we pray this prayer, again, We’re not asking God to do something different. We’re confessing our own weakness. We’re reminding ourselves of our own weakness and our own sinfulness. And the fact that if I do manage to not sin tomorrow, not only do I need God’s forgiveness, but if I manage to be tempted and not sin tomorrow, it’s going to be because of God, not because of me. It’s not going to be because I’m such a strong person and I bravely and courageously resisted temptation and sinning. It’s going to be because God protected me. And that’s the only way that’s going to happen. Because I’m weak. And more than weak, I’m evil, I’m corrupt. And so, I need God to protect me from myself.

And finally, “But deliver us from the evil one.” Again, these are in parallel, right? Satan’s out to get me. Satan and his demons are out to get me. They’re out to destroy me. And notice it’s not “give me the strength and courage to defeat the evil one”, right? Because if it comes down to a grudge match between me and Satan, I’m going to lose every time, just like Adam did. Just like Eve did. So we ask God to deliver us from the evil one, because Christ is the one who has won the victory over Satan, not me.

And now is probably a good point to stop. The passage continues. But if I go through the rest of this passage, we’ll be here for another hour. And though, again, I like hearing myself talk, that might be pushing it for the rest of you. So thank you, everybody.