Getting back to the new/old basics

By Patricia Kasten
Compass Associate Editor

During the New Year season, we all resolve to get back to the basics: health, eating right, mending relationships.

And nothing gets to the basics of life more than the Lord's Prayer.

The Lord's Prayer is so well-known that it is used as a linguistics comparison tool. One website http://www.christusrex.com/www1/pater/index.html offers 1,394 translations.

Two versions of the Lord's Prayer exist in the Gospels - Mt 6:9-13 and Lk 11:1-13. (Yet another appears in the second-century Didache, attributed to "the apostolic Fathers", as part of the Eucharistic celebration.) Mathew's version comes during the Sermon on the Mount and Luke's appears when the disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray. While Luke's Gospel was written after Matthew's, many Bible scholars believe Luke's version of the prayer - being shorter and simpler - is closest to what Jesus said. However, Matthew's version is the more familiar today.

The Lord's Prayer is simple, less than 60 words - so basic that the church, from early times, required its recitation by baptism candidates or their sponsors. Matthew's version contains seven petitions (Luke's five). Yet these petitions, as Augustine wrote in the fourth century, cover everything we would ever need to ask for in prayer. And Tertullian, a third century Christian apologist, called the prayer "the epitome of the whole gospel."

The prayer's goals are simple - worshiping God and survival. Its petitions can be broken into two groups: God and us.

First, God.

What could be more central? God is creator of all things and the goal of our existence. As the Psalmist said, "take away their breath and they perish" (Ps 104). Without God, none of the other basics matters.

So the Lord's Prayer first acknowledges God's centrality.

• Our Father, who art in Heaven. This introductory phrase addresses God both intimately and from a distance. Intimately, as in our (not just my) Father. And from an awe-filled distance, since God, but not us, is "in heaven" - a perfection, peace and glory we cannot yet know. But, by calling God "Our Father," we recall, as does the Catechism of the Catholic Church, that heaven is the "homeland toward which we are heading and to which, already, we belong" (n. 2802). We want to get there - and closer to God.

The first three petitions specifically address this desire:

• Hallowed be Thy Name. To honor (hallow) a name is to honor it. Additionally, in the ancient world, to know a person's name was to be intimate with him or her. So we are saying we want to draw closer to God, just as we know that God - through Jesus - has drawn close to us.

• Thy Kingdom Come is also a petition seeking God's nearness and expressing our longing to dwell in the presence of God that is called "the Kingdom." Jesus himself proclaimed that Kingdom - where freedom, love and health belong to all.

• Thy Will be Done on Earth as it is in Heaven. Yet again we express our longing for God and the ways of God's Kingdom. Scripture scholar Sr. Celine Mangan, OP, describes this petition as "asking that the justice and peace of God, spoken about and acted out by Jesus in his lifetime, may become a reality in our world."

So this petition shows us that longing and action are linked. Our prayers - like our New Year's resolutions - must become reality. We have our part to do in making this happen, in making the Kingdom come - and it's not just praying. As St. Thomas Aquinas said about this petition, "two things are necessary for eternal life: the grace of God and the will of man."

The Lord's Prayer is a two-way street that links God and us. Next, we'll explore how our own basic needs serve to draw us to God and help us do our part in revealing the Kingdom on earth.