Prayer is a dialogue or conversation. It is not one sided, and it is a loving conversation between people who care for, respect and trust each other. If we find it hard to pray it is often because we do not know whom we are talking to. We usually think we know something about God, we are happy to hear of Him, but how many of us have a deep and friendly relationship with Him, that recognises our dependence on Him as His sons and daughters? God is a person to meet, know and love. We know him through his Word, which is a kind of love letter for me in which He reveals Himself. The Sacraments are ways of meeting Him, for they are effective signs of His loving goodness that He has for me. His love is totally freely given in them, and they remind us of the beauty with which He clothes us each day, where we find our origin and to whom we belong. Jesus was begged by his disciples, and so he taught them THE PRAYER, that the first book of instruction (about 100 A.D,) for the early Christian community encourages us to use at least three times each day. The Lord’s Prayer gives us a synthesis of our Christian faith.
We believe in a God who has the features of a loving Father. When God reveals His name to us, He is showing us what He is really like inside, and we get an idea of how He behaves towards each person. Jesus, the Son of God, tells us that the Creator God loves to be called father, by his creatures because this is what He is really like, and shows us what He feels about us. God is a Dad to all of us. Because we are children of this Father, we know all are our brothers and sisters. That is how we should relate to everyone.
In the Old Testament, the idea of God’s holiness is always linked to the liberation of His people. When God revealed his name to Moses, the revealing of his name JHWH was followed by the desire to liberate the oppressed Israelite people. Through liberating them, God shows the holiness of His name. When we pray hallowed be thy name, it means we do not want anyone in our time to be oppressed by any yoke of slavery. When we pray the Our Father, we are saying in effect that we will do all we can to liberate, support and remove everything that does not allow others to be free.
When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of heaven, it is not something that comes from heaven. Jesus tells us the Kingdom of God is here, among us. This kingdom grows and spreads according to how much people of faith put it into practice, living the choices and the attitudes of Jesus. He, with his life, teaches us to give up all ambitious dreams of power and greatness that have the flavour of wanting to control others. Rather we are called to be the “little ones” of the Gospel. We are those people who choose the Beatitudes as the rules he gave us to live by, and as the road to take each day of our lives. (Mt. 5: 3-11)
To give us bread means to give us nourishment, give us food. For people in the East, bread is used to mean “Life” because food is the basis of nutrition. So it is a fundamental necessity, without which human beings will not survive. This bread is a special gift that only the Father-God can give: “Behold, the days are coming”, says JHWH, “when I will send a famine on the land; not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the word of JHWH” (Amos 8: 11). The necessary bread is His Word that is the food of life for us. It guides our steps; it forms our hearts and minds into the heart of God-Love. Fed by this bread we are called in our turn to action, to produce this bread-food, this bread-life and to share it with those who have none. The Lord reminds us that there is bread enough for all. It becomes scarce and there is not enough to go round when it is enclosed in our own hands. The hands of a few that are weary with all they have, squander it and throw it away, leaving men, women and children victims of their selfishness.
Through these words Jesus invites us to recognise that we have evil within us, and that God is merciful. We ask God to forgive us; we know He is a good Father, and we know He offers forgiveness to us quite freely and regularly. At the same time not one of us has sufficient worth to merit God’s forgiveness. “You received without paying, give without paying” (Mt. 10: 8). To receive divine forgiveness means to live out forgiveness of others. It is a necessary condition without which, when we ask God for forgiveness, we cannot receive it fully, not because He refuses the gift to us, but we shut ourselves off from the gift of His mercy, because we are closed in by our own self-centredness towards others.
St. James writes in his letter: “Let no one say when he is tempted, ‘I am tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted with evil and he himself tempts no one; but each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire”. (James 1: 13-14) So this phrase from the Our Father might be translated like this: “Do not allow us to be tempted” or “do not allow us to tempt ourselves”. St. Jerome wrote: “Jesus did not say: ‘Watch and Pray’ not to be tempted, but ‘not to enter into temptation’, i.e. may temptation not dominate over you, may it not triumph over you, may it not entangle you in its web.” As God is and behaves towards us, so we are to be and behave in regards others. That is the sense of the prayer that Jesus entrusts to his Apostles and to us today. May the Lord support us in this journey in which we are brothers and sisters to each other, to fulfil in us and through us the Kingdom, which without our efforts, will be invisible to the eyes of many people.
