The Words We Return To
Some words become harder to hear because we know them so well.
A familiar prayer can reach that point. The first few words summon the rest, and the mouth moves almost ahead of the mind. This is not necessarily carelessness. Familiarity is one of the ways words become part of us. Songs, prayers, names, and old stories can settle so deeply into memory that we no longer need to think about what comes next.
The Lord’s Prayer may be the clearest example in Christianity. Its words have been spoken for nearly two thousand years, in churches and monasteries, beside hospital beds and graves, around dinner tables and alone in quiet rooms. For many Christians, “Our Father” is enough to set the entire prayer in motion.
Going back to its earliest surviving form slows it down again.
The prayer appears twice in the New Testament, in Matthew and Luke. Matthew gives the longer form that became the basis of the prayer familiar to most Christians. The earliest surviving manuscripts containing Matthew’s complete version date to the fourth century, most notably Codex Sinaiticus and Codex Vaticanus. Their Greek is remarkably close to the text still used by scholars today.
Read without the accumulated familiarity of English liturgical language, however, the prayer sounds slightly different.
Jesus begins, “Therefore, pray in this way.”
Then:
“Our Father, who is in the heavens.”
The Greek says our, just as the English does. Familiarity can make it easy to overlook how consequential that small word is. Jesus has just told his listeners to enter a private room, close the door, and pray to the Father in secret. Yet when the door closes, the prayer he gives them does not begin “My Father.”
It begins “Our Father.”
There is no “I,” “me,” or “my” anywhere in the prayer.
The person praying may be alone, but the grammar will not permit a private world. Give us our bread. Release our debts. Do not bring us into trial. Rescue us from evil.
The closed room remains crowded.
After addressing the Father, the prayer turns entirely toward God:
“Let your name be made holy. Let your kingdom come. Let your will come to be, as in heaven, also upon earth.”
The familiar English “thy will be done” is a sound translation, but the Greek verb carries the sense of something happening or coming into being. God’s kingdom is asked to come, and God’s will is asked to come to be. The movement is toward earth becoming more like heaven.
Then, suddenly, there is bread.
“Give us today our epiousios bread.”
That strange Greek word, epiousios, has puzzled readers since antiquity. It occurs only here and in Luke’s version of the same prayer. Origen, writing in the third century, could find no ordinary Greek usage that settled its meaning. It has been understood as daily bread, necessary bread, bread sufficient for existence, or bread for the coming day. Jerome wrestled with it too. In Matthew he rendered it supersubstantialem, while in Luke he chose the more ordinary Latin word for daily.
Whatever shade of meaning Jesus intended, the object itself could hardly be more ordinary.
Bread.
The prayer has moved from the heavens, to God’s name and kingdom, to God’s will being realized upon the earth, and at the center of Matthew’s seven petitions sits something people need to eat.
There is no embarrassment about this. The prayer does not treat ordinary physical need as a distraction from spiritual life. Bread belongs in the same conversation as the kingdom of God.
Christians would eventually hear more than physical nourishment in these words. Jerome’s unusual choice of supersubstantialem contributed to a long tradition of reading the petition in connection with the Eucharist and Jesus’ description of himself as the “bread of life.” That interpretation did not require ordinary bread to disappear. The prayer could hold together the food needed for the day and a deeper hunger that food alone cannot satisfy.
The Jewish world in which Jesus prayed makes the first meaning immediately recognizable. Israel had long prayed to the God who provided manna in the wilderness, who was addressed as Father in the prophets, whose name was holy, and whose people asked for provision, forgiveness and deliverance. Proverbs contains the wonderfully modest request, “Feed me with the food that is needful for me.” The Lord’s Prayer grows from this soil.
After bread comes another ordinary reality of living among people:
“And release our debts, as we also have released our debtors.”
Matthew really does use the language of debt. The Greek word translated “forgive” also carries the sense of releasing, sending away, or letting go. Luke’s version makes the metaphor explicit by asking forgiveness for “sins” while speaking of forgiving those indebted to us.
Something has become due between two people. The prayer asks that it be released.
Then comes human vulnerability:
“Do not bring us into trial, but rescue us from evil.”
The Greek word traditionally translated “temptation” can also mean testing or trial. The final phrase can mean either evil or the evil one. The Greek leaves an ambiguity that English has difficulty preserving.
Then the earliest recoverable text of Matthew simply stops.
The familiar ending, “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,” does not appear in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew. Yet the doxology itself is very ancient. A Christian text called the Didache, probably composed around the end of the first century or beginning of the second, preserves a version of the Lord’s Prayer remarkably close to Matthew and adds, “for yours is the power and the glory forever.”
The Didache then adds an instruction that changes how the prayer can be understood:
“Pray this way three times a day.”
Within the earliest generations of Christianity, the Lord’s Prayer had already become something Christians returned to throughout the day.
This matters because repetition is sometimes mistaken for redundancy. If the purpose of the prayer were simply to communicate information to God, saying the same words again would seem unnecessary. God heard them the first time.
But repetition does something to the person speaking.
Three times a day, the prayer returns the speaker to our when life has narrowed toward my. It turns attention toward God’s purposes before personal wants. It asks for enough bread for today. It brings old accounts back into view and asks that they be released. It acknowledges that human beings can be tested beyond their confidence and may need to be rescued.
Then life resumes.
Centuries later, Benedict built this same understanding of return into the rhythm of his communities. In Chapter 13 of the Rule, he requires the Lord’s Prayer to be spoken aloud at Lauds and Vespers so everyone can hear it. His reason is characteristically practical. People living together develop grievances. Benedict calls them the “thorns of scandal,” the frictions that inevitably appear when lives continually rub against one another.
His attention settles particularly on the promise contained in the words, “Forgive us as we forgive.”
Benedict does not answer the problem with a lecture on forgiveness. He puts the words back into their mouths.
Morning and evening, the monk encounters the same sentence. Perhaps yesterday he meant it. Perhaps by afternoon someone had given him reason to reconsider. Evening prayer brings him back to it.
The prayer has not changed.
The person praying has lived another day.
That may be part of the wisdom hidden inside repetition. A prayer learned by heart can become so familiar that its words nearly disappear, but familiarity also makes return possible. The words remain when attention wanders. They are waiting after resentment has returned, after tomorrow has begun to occupy the mind, after desire has expanded beyond what is needed today.
The Lord’s Prayer does not explain very much. It offers no theory of prayer and remarkably little theological exposition. It simply gives a person somewhere to return.
Our Father.
Your name. Your kingdom. Your will.
Our bread. Our debts. Our weakness.
And then tomorrow, the same words again.
Not because yesterday’s prayer failed.
Because another day has happened.