Prayer and worship
The Lord's Prayer, petition by petition
The prayer Christ gave, taken one clause at a time - the shortest complete summary of the Christian life.
You are reading the brief version. Switch the depth control to Complete for the full treatment.
The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. He gave them this.
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy kingdom come; thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
Tertullian called it a summary of the whole gospel. Augustine said that whatever else you pray, if you pray rightly you are praying something contained here.
Its structure is deliberate. Address - Our Father, who art in heaven. Then three petitions about God: His name, His kingdom, His will. Then four petitions about us: bread, forgiveness, temptation, deliverance.
The order is the lesson. We begin with Him, not with our needs, and the needs we then bring are ordered too - today's food before yesterday's sins before tomorrow's dangers.
Every word is difficult once you attend to it. Our - not my; you cannot pray this alone. Daily - a word that appears nowhere else in Greek literature. As we forgive - the only petition with a condition attached, and Christ adds a comment about it immediately afterwards. Lead us not into temptation - which sounds as though God might.
All four traditions pray it, at every Eucharist and daily. It is the one prayer every Christian in the world knows.
Which version, and the doxology
Two versions survive. Matthew 6:9-13 gives the longer form used liturgically; Luke 11:2-4 gives a shorter one. The differences are minor and the traditions use Matthew's.
The ending - for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever - is not in the oldest manuscripts of Matthew. It appears in the Didache around 100 in slightly different form, which suggests it was in liturgical use very early as a congregational response rather than as part of the prayer Christ gave.
Practice differs. Orthodox and Protestant usage includes it. Catholic usage separates it: at Mass, the priest inserts a short prayer between the Lord's Prayer and the doxology, and the people sing the doxology after. So everyone says it; the disagreement is about what it is.
Our Father, who art in heaven
Our. The first word rules out private religion. You cannot pray this prayer as an individual. Even a hermit alone in a cave says our, and is thereby praying with everyone else.
Father. The astonishing word. Jesus's own address to God was Abba - the intimate Aramaic form, which Paul says the Spirit teaches us to cry too (Romans 8:15; Galatians 4:6). Israel knew God as Father of the nation; addressing Him directly and personally in this way is characteristic of Christ, and He gives His own form of address away.
Note what it implies. We are not petitioners approaching a magistrate. We are children approaching a father, and children ask for things that are none of their business because the relationship, not the merit of the request, is the ground.
Who art in heaven. The counterweight, and it is needed. Fatherhood without transcendence produces sentimentality - a God who is indulgent, comfortable, and essentially ourselves enlarged. In heaven says He is other, holy, and not to be presumed upon. Both halves are necessary: intimacy without awe becomes chatter, and awe without intimacy becomes fear.
Pause and thinkPause: for someone whose own father was absent, cruel or frightening, the word Father is not comforting. What would you say to them?
Do not rush to reassure, and do not explain the problem away. The wound is real, and the word does land differently for them.
Two things can be said, in this order.
First, Christ is not saying God is like your father. He is saying your father was meant to be like God, and in that case failed. Human fatherhood is the derivative thing - Paul says the Father is the one of whom the whole family in heaven and earth is named. The original is not the man who hurt you; the original is the one every good father is an imperfect copy of and every bad father is a betrayal of.
Second, notice what Jesus does with the word in the same discourse. He says that if you, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father in heaven. He assumes human fathers are a flawed comparison and argues from the gap.
And it is worth saying plainly that for some people this takes years, and that praying a word you cannot yet feel is not hypocrisy. It is the form carrying you until the meaning catches up, which is what forms are for.
Hallowed be thy name
Hallowed means made holy, treated as holy, set apart. God's name is already holy; the petition is that it be recognised as such - in the world, and first of all in us.
In Hebrew thought a name is not a label but the person as known. To hallow God's name is to treat God Himself as holy: not to use Him casually, not to enlist Him for our purposes, not to speak of Him as though He were a subject like other subjects.
Luther's explanation in the Small Catechism is the sharpest: God's name is indeed holy in itself, but we pray in this petition that it may be holy among us also. And he adds how it is profaned - when anyone teaches or lives otherwise than God's word teaches. So the petition implicates the person praying it. The commonest way God's name is dishonoured is not blasphemy from outside but Christians living badly.
Thy kingdom come
The kingdom is not a place but a reign - God's rule, acknowledged and obeyed.
It comes in three senses, and the prayer includes all three. It has come in Christ: the kingdom of God is at hand. It comes now, wherever God's will is done and His grace received. And it will come in fullness when Christ returns.
The petition is therefore both a request and a submission. To pray thy kingdom come is to ask for God's rule - which means asking for the end of your own, in the areas where you have been governing. Anyone who prays this attentively will notice immediately which parts of his life he would prefer the kingdom not to reach.
Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
Two observations.
In heaven, God's will is done perfectly. That is what makes it heaven. The petition asks that the same be true here - which tells you the Christian hope is not escape to heaven but heaven's pattern arriving on earth. The prayer ends where the Bible does, with a new heaven and a new earth.
It is a costly petition. Christ prayed it Himself, in Gethsemane, with sweat like drops of blood: not my will, but thine, be done. Nobody should pray this line lightly. It is a signed blank page.
And it is the answer to a common confusion. The point of prayer is not to align God's will with ours. It is to align ours with His.
Give us this day our daily bread
Daily translates epiousios, and the word is a genuine puzzle - it appears nowhere else in surviving Greek literature outside this prayer. Origen thought the evangelists coined it. Its possible meanings include necessary for existence, for today, and for the coming day. Jerome rendered it supersubstantial in Matthew, which opened a long tradition of reading it eucharistically.
The traditions have taken it at several levels, and none excludes the others:
- Literal bread. Food, and everything needed for bodily life. Luther's catechism lists what daily bread includes - food, drink, clothing, shoes, house, home, fields, cattle, money, goods, a devout spouse, devout children, good government, good weather, peace, health, discipline, honour, good friends, faithful neighbours. It is one of the most down-to-earth passages in Christian literature.
- The Eucharist. The bread of life, received in the assembly.
- Christ Himself. I am the bread of life.
This day. Not give us a supply. The manna in the wilderness could not be hoarded; it rotted overnight, and the Israelites had to come back every morning. The petition asks for dependence rather than security, and most of us would rather have the security.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
The only petition with a condition attached, and the only one Christ comments on afterwards: for if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: but if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses (Matthew 6:14-15).
This is uncomfortable and is meant to be. Read carefully, it does not teach that we earn forgiveness by forgiving. It teaches that a refusal to forgive is a refusal of the very thing being asked for. A clenched hand cannot receive. The unmerciful servant in Matthew 18 is not punished for failing to earn mercy; he is punished for having received an unpayable debt's cancellation and then seizing a colleague by the throat over pennies.
Note also what forgiveness is not. It is not saying the wrong did not matter, or feeling warmly towards someone who wronged you, or necessarily restoring the relationship or trust. It is the decision to release the debt - to stop requiring payment. It is usually a process rather than an event, and it usually has to be renewed.
The traditions differ on the word - trespasses, debts, sins - because Matthew's Greek says debts and Luke's says sins. The metaphor of debt is the sharper of the two.
And lead us not into temptation
The clause that troubles people, because James says plainly that God tempts no one.
Three things resolve it.
The Greek peirasmos means both temptation and trial or testing. The petition may well be asking not to be brought into the time of trial - the test that would break us.
The Semitic idiom behind it is permissive. In Hebrew usage God is often said to do what He permits. Lead us not carries the sense of do not let us be led.
The translation question is live. Several modern liturgies have moved: the French Catholic Church adopted ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation in 2017, and Pope Francis approved the Italian non abbandonarci alla tentazione in 2018. Others have kept the traditional wording on the grounds that it is what the text says and the difficulty is instructive.
What the petition asks, on any reading, is for God not to allow us into a situation where we would fall - an admission of weakness, not a theory about God's intentions. It is the prayer of someone who knows he would not survive being tested at his weakest point.
But deliver us from evil
The Greek can be from evil or from the evil one, and the traditions have taken it both ways. Most modern scholarship favours the personal reading: deliver us from the devil.
Either way, the prayer ends where the Christian life is actually lived - in the middle of a fight, asking for rescue. It does not end in serene contemplation. It ends with a cry for help.
Where the four traditions stand
Catholic
The Catechism devotes its concluding section - over a hundred paragraphs - to the Our Father, treating it as the summary of the whole gospel and the fundamental Christian prayer. It is prayed at every Mass, immediately before the sign of peace and communion, introduced with the words we dare to say, which captures the audacity of calling God Father. The Catechism reads daily bread on all three levels and draws out the eucharistic sense, noting Jerome's supersubstantial. At Mass the doxology is separated from the prayer by the embolism, deliver us, Lord, from every evil. The prayer forms the opening of the Rosary and is embedded in the Liturgy of the Hours. Recent papal attention to the translation of the sixth petition reflects a long pastoral concern that the English and Italian wording can suggest God tempts.
Orthodox
The Lord's Prayer is sung by the whole congregation at every Divine Liturgy, immediately before communion, and it is part of the daily prayer rule of every Orthodox Christian - morning and evening prayers open with it. The Orthodox form includes the doxology, which is chanted by the priest. Eastern commentary, especially Maximus the Confessor's exposition, reads the prayer as containing the whole economy of salvation: adoption, equality of honour with the angels, participation in eternal life, the restoration of nature to itself, the abolition of the law of sin, and the overthrow of the tyranny of evil. Orthodox tradition places heavy weight on the forgiveness clause - Forgiveness Sunday, at the start of Great Lent, involves the whole congregation asking forgiveness of one another individually, face to face, so that Lent begins with the petition actually performed rather than merely recited.
Lutheran
Luther's Small Catechism expounds the Lord's Prayer petition by petition as the third of its chief parts, and it is the most widely memorised commentary on the prayer in any tradition. Its marks are concreteness and pastoral realism. On daily bread, the famous catalogue of everything the phrase includes, down to good weather and faithful neighbours, with the observation that God gives daily bread even to the wicked, and that we pray only that we may receive it with thanksgiving. On the first petition, the note that God's name is profaned chiefly by those who teach or live contrary to His word - putting the burden on the Church. On lead us not into temptation, the explanation that God tempts no one, but that we pray He would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world and our flesh may not deceive us. The Large Catechism treats the prayer as a command and a promise together, arguing that God orders us to pray precisely so that we cannot claim our prayer is presumptuous.
Anglican
The Lord's Prayer opens Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer, the Litany and Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer, so that a practising Anglican says it several times a day. The Prayer Book uses trespasses, following Tyndale, which is why that form predominates in English-speaking usage generally. At Holy Communion it comes after the consecration; at the offices it comes at the beginning. The Catechism requires every child to learn it alongside the Creed and the Commandments before confirmation, and then asks what desirest thou of God in this prayer? - answering in a single sentence of great compression: that God would send His grace unto us and to all people, that we may worship Him, serve Him and obey Him as we ought to do; and praying that He will send us all things needful both for our souls and bodies, be merciful to us and forgive our sins, and save and defend us in all dangers ghostly and bodily. Anglican usage includes the doxology at the offices and, in 1662, omits it at the start of Communion and includes it after.
Work with it
Check yourself
Why is the first word of the Lord's Prayer significant?
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Correct. The prayer is corporate in its first syllable, before any petition is made.
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The possessive runs the other way; the point is that the one praying is joined to others.
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Luke and Matthew both preserve it, and the tradition has commented on it from the beginning.
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The prayer is given by Christ, and "our" is His word.
Check yourself
Which petition has a condition attached, and what does the condition mean?
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Right. Matthew 18's unmerciful servant is the commentary: his debt was cancelled unearned, and he lost it by refusing to let mercy change him.
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No condition is attached to this petition.
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The petition is a submission, not a negotiation.
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No condition appears in this petition.
Check yourself
What is unusual about the Greek word epiousios, translated "daily"?
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Yes. Possible senses include necessary for existence, for today, and for the coming day. Jerome rendered it supersubstantial, opening a eucharistic reading.
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That would be epiousios only by conjecture; no such usage survives.
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The word does not specify a substance.
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The prayer's underlying Aramaic is debated, but the word itself is Greek and unattested elsewhere.
Objection drill
"Lead us not into temptation" is either nonsense or blasphemy. James says God tempts no one. So either the prayer is asking God not to do something he would never do, which is pointless, or the Bible contradicts itself. Even the Pope has admitted the translation is wrong.
A model answer
The tension is real, the question is old, and there are three things to say - the third being the most interesting.
First, the word. The Greek peirasmos covers both temptation in the sense of enticement to sin and trial or testing in the sense of an ordeal. English has split what Greek held together. On the second sense the petition reads: do not bring us into the time of trial - the test that would break us. That is not a request for God to refrain from wickedness; it is a request for mercy from someone who knows his own limits. Christ uses the same word in Gethsemane when He tells the disciples to watch and pray lest they enter into peirasmos, and within the hour every one of them fails the test.
Second, the idiom. Hebrew and Aramaic regularly speak of God doing what He permits. Scripture says God hardened Pharaoh's heart, and also that Pharaoh hardened his own. It says God sent an evil spirit to Saul. This is not sloppiness; it is a way of speaking that refuses to let anything fall outside God's governance, even what He does not will. Read in that idiom, lead us not into temptation means do not let us be led there, which is how the Fathers generally understood it. Augustine says as much, and Luther's catechism says flatly that God tempts no one, and explains the petition as asking that God would guard and keep us so that the devil, the world and our flesh may not deceive us.
Third, the translations. This part of the objection is accurate and worth stating correctly. In 2017 the French bishops adopted ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation - do not let us enter into temptation. In 2018 Pope Francis approved the Italian non abbandonarci alla tentazione, do not abandon us to temptation. His stated reason was pastoral: people were hearing the traditional wording as implying that God pushes us towards sin.
But notice what that does and does not concede. It concedes that the traditional English and Italian renderings can mislead. It does not concede that the Greek is wrong or that Scripture contradicts itself - the change is a translation of a disputed idiom into clearer modern language, and other conferences have declined to make it, on the grounds that the difficulty in the text is itself instructive and ought not to be smoothed away. Reasonable people differ about which is the better policy.
And here is what the difficulty actually teaches, which is why some would rather keep it. The petition takes for granted something modern religion tends to avoid: that we are weak, that testing can destroy us, and that our best defence is not strength of character but God's protection. A prayer that said give us strength to resist temptation would be more comfortable and much less true. What Christ gave His disciples was a prayer asking not to be put in the position in the first place - which is the prayer of a realist, and which, a few hours before His arrest, He prayed Himself.
Memory work
Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.