The Divine Conspiracy, page 32
Maybe he looks out an hour later and sees you just standing there wringing your hands. What else can he do? And as Jesus points out, “It is not because he is your friend that he will do it, but because you just keep standing there waiting for the loaves” (v. 8). Of course, if you go away he won’t do it, and if he does do it you won’t be there to receive it. That is common sense, and Jesus integrates it right into the life of prayer.
Another graphic illustration of the importance of staying with a request is found in Luke 18. This, like the previous one, is explicitly designed to teach us not to quit praying for what we need:
He told them a parable in order to show how they should pray relentlessly and not give up. One of the most powerful men in the city, a judge, did not fear God and had no regard for men. And one of the weakest people in the city, a widow, came to him repeatedly, insisting that he apply the law to right a wrong done to her. This judge did nothing for a while, but then he thought, “Even though neither God nor man scares me, this widow is driving me nuts. I’ll give her justice to keep her from wearing me out by constantly petitioning me.” (18:1–6)
Now, Jesus says, “Listen to what this crooked judge says. And will not God do what is right by his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? And will he be slow in responding? Not at all. He will be quick to their aid” (vv. 7–8). But the assumption is that the request does not go away. It is there to stay. That is our part.
The main teaching here is that we should expect prayer to proceed in the manner of a relationship between persons. Of course it will be in the manner of such relationships at their best, but the general character of requesting will remain. In fact, the contrary assumption possibly causes more people to “drop out” of praying than anything else. Praying is mistakenly thought to be like plunking your money into a soft drink machine or like dropping a bomb. You do a simple act one time, and then mechanism takes over to produce the inevitable result. I have even heard people seriously teach that if you ask God for the same thing a second time, that only proves to him you didn’t believe the first time—as if he didn’t know already.
This view also leads to misguided efforts to word everything just right: for example, being sure to say, “In Jesus’ name,” or, “If it be thy will.” The idea that if we get it “just right” it will work treats prayer like the drink machine. Prayer is never a mechanism. It is always a personal negotiation, as the earlier quotation from C. S. Lewis so wisely suggests. Jesus’ constant effort in his teaching about prayer is to drive this point home.
Does This Offend God’s Dignity?
But just as religious faith has its traditional dogmas, so does unbelief. I am acquainted with highly placed intellectuals who hold that we know nothing of the nature of God. And yet they do not hesitate to affirm that it would be beneath God’s dignity to receive anything from human beings or to “answer” a request. God is too “great” to be bothered, like “great” human beings, no doubt. But if we know nothing of the genuine nature of God, one might reply, we certainly do not know that.
This is a very old prejudice, at least as old as Plato, who regarded the belief that the gods are “turned aside from their purpose by sacrifices and prayer” as one form of insolence toward God.16 That prejudice is passed on through people such as Cicero and Hume.17 We have seen in a previous chapter that it comes to expression in many contemporary theologians on the left.
We should admit, I think, that some views of prayer are degrading of God, and perhaps of human beings as well. We think, for example, of those that make his response inevitable if we can just get our words right. Or of those that have us buying him off with sacrifices of various kinds. But that is not so of the view of prayer that Jesus gives. To suppose that God and the individual communicate within the framework of God’s purposes for us, as explained earlier, and that because of the interchange God does what he had not previously intended, or refrains from something he previously had intended to do, is nothing against God’s dignity if it is an arrangement he himself has chosen.
It is not inherently “greater” to be inflexible. That is an unfortunate human idea of greatness, derived from behavior patterns all too common in a fallen world. It turns God into a cosmic stuffed shirt. This unfortunate idea is reinforced from “the highest intellectual sources” by classical ideas of “perfection,” which stressed the necessity of absolute inalterability in God. But in a domain of persons, such as The Kingdom Among Us, it is far greater to be flexible and yet able to achieve the good goals one has set. And that is an essential part of the Divine Personality shown in the Bible and incarnated in the person of Jesus and presented in his message. So far from fitting the classical pattern of God as “the Unmoved Mover,” the God shown in the historical record is “the Most Moved Mover.” This is the One who lives with us and whom we approach from within the community of prayerful love.
The Grandest Prayer of All
The Lord’s Prayer
All this becomes very clear if we only pay attention to Jesus’ explicit teaching and practice of prayer, as his apprentices naturally would. Although he spent much time alone in prayer, he also spent much time praying in the presence of his students. They were tremendously impressed. On one occasion he took Peter, James, and John along with him to a mountaintop. There, “while he was praying his face was transformed and his clothing flashed like lightning” (Luke 9:29).
This may seem quite unrealistic. His three friends certainly hardly knew what they were looking at, and they came to understand it only much later (2 Pet. 1:16–19). But recall, as we have said, that we live in a Trinitarian universe, one where infinite energy of a personal nature is the ultimate reality. When we pray we enter the real world, the substance of the kingdom, and our bodies and souls begin to function for the first time as they were created to function. Indeed, the “transfiguration” of Jesus must be regarded as the highest revelation of the nature of matter recorded in human history.
Matter, ordinary physical “stuff,” is the place for the development and manifestation of finite personalities who, in their bodies, have significant resources either to oppose God or to serve him. Jesus the Quintessential Man, that is, the Son of man, is the only one who has brought the role of matter to its fullness in his own personality. That is what we are looking at in the Gospels. As for each of us, this is something that lies in our future, in the worlds to come (Phil. 3:20–21; 1 John 3:2). Yet even now when we put our body and soul into prayer, the effects are remarkable.
William Penn said of George Fox, around whom the early Friends (Quaker) movement arose,
But above all, he excelled in prayer. The inwardness and weight of his spirit, the reverence and solemnity of his dress and behavior, and the fewness and fullness of his words, have often struck even strangers, with admiration, and they used to reach others with consolation. The most awful, living, reverent frame I ever felt or beheld, I must say, was his in prayer.18
Clearly the presence of Jesus in prayer was more impressive than even that of George Fox. Some while after the event of Jesus’ transfiguration before his friends, the Gospel of Luke records, “He was praying in a certain place” with his students. “After he had finished one of his students said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just like John [the Baptizer] also taught his disciples’” (11:1). This is, of course, an exact expression of the master-student relationship. The apprentices have watched the master do some important thing, and they have heard him explain it. Now they say, show us how, induct us into the practice.
Jesus’ response here must be taken very seriously. Many people make little progress in learning to pray simply because they have not seriously entered into Jesus’ answer to the explicit request, “Teach us to pray.” Praying is a form of speaking, and it is best learned by entering into the words that Jesus gave us to say to God when we pray. He is the Master of this subject too.
Of course, we have already seen in chapter 6 that mere repetition is not kingdom praying. And this is still true of repetition of the words that Jesus gave. Instead, we learn to use the words given by him to speak intelligently and lovingly to our heavenly Father, with whom we are engaged in a common life. But we do use those words. And with them as foundation, and only so, we move out—partly on our own initiative, which God elicits and expects—into prayer over the details of our life and times “under the sun.”
God Must Be Addressed
The variations in phrasing between the words given as the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6 and in Luke 11 are of little significance, and we will treat the two passages as one and the same prayer or prayer outline. First, there is simply the address. “Father,” the Luke version simply says, and Matthew characteristically further identifies the one addressed as “Our Father, the one in the heavens.” The “address” part of prayer is of vital significance. We dare not slight or overlook it. It is one of the things that distinguishes prayer from worrying out loud or silently, which many, unfortunately, have confused with prayer.
When we speak to someone, we use a name to call to that person in distinction from everyone else. We thereby indicate that we wish to speak to that particular person. The name also calls attention to our standing in relation to the one addressed. This is nearly always true in intimate associations. I call my son “My dear boy,” my daughter “Little Princess,” and my wife “Sweetheart.” No one else does that. No one else can do that. Similarly when they speak to me: when they say “Dad” or “Sweetheart,” there is a configuration drawn around us within which we then relate. It is stronger than steel. Whatever else happens or is said will be conditioned upon this configuration.
A remarkable change in the spirit of our society is marked by recent changes in the formalities of address. These changes are not incidental, not small things. They mirror manifold profound ambiguities and uncertainties as to who we are as we go through daily life. It now is thought to be cloyingly bad taste, for example, to refer to anyone in a note or memo as “Dear Joe” you just write “Joe.” If the trend continues, it will next be “Hey, you.”
The idea is, I think, that we don’t want to be hypocritical and express fondness where it is not felt. How very noble the sentiment! No one seems to understand that it was not fondness but respect that was expressed by the “Dear Joe” form. The change of form marked the loss of respectful approach, not the loss of hypocrisy—which, from all appearances, remains in a very healthy condition.
Our Father, the One in the Heavens
When we speak to God, Jesus tells us, we are to address him as “Our Father, the one in the heavens.” This is the configuration of reality from within which we pray. The overwhelming difficulties many people have with prayer, both understanding it and doing it, derive from nothing more than their failure or their inability to place themselves within this configuration and receive it by grace. This may be because they actually do not live within the kingdom configuration, perhaps are even in rebellion against it. But until they learn to do this routinely yet deeply, they will experience no stability and development in their practice of prayer.
If we are already “turned” toward the Father and are recipients of the kingdom, a common way of bringing ourselves into the “address” position is to enter a deep, meditative reading of some choice passage of scripture. Martin Luther said that those well trained in “warming up the heart” for prayer will “be able to use a chapter of Scripture as a lighter”—a Feuerzeug, the same term modern Germans use for a pocket lighter.19
For this purpose we will benefit most from the great passages of scripture that clearly show us our Father in relation to his creation and his earthly family. These are passages such as Genesis 1 or 15; Exodus 19; 1 Kings 8; 2 Chronicles 16 and 19; Nehemiah 9; many of the psalms (34, 37, 91, and 103, for example); Isaiah 30, 44, and 56–66; Luke 11; Romans 8; Philippians 4.
Reading or singing the great hymns, or using written prayers the Lord has given his people through the ages, are also extremely useful. This activity must not be hurried. Quiet, deeply meditative absorption of the words, receptive of images that fill out the realities they refer to, is sure to bring us to proper orientation before God.
Certain bodily postures may also be useful in this regard. Luther, once again, recommends that we “kneel down or stand up with folded hands and eyes toward the sky.”20
The followers of Saint Dominic described nine different ways in which he prayed, including bowing humbly before the altar in a church, lying flat on his face before the crucifix, standing with hands and arms spread out like a cross, stretching himself to the limit and standing as upright as possible.21
Such matters of posture are, of course, not laws. No one has to do them. And the necessary address to God in prayer is, in fact, an entirely inward reality, between us and God. Reading, posture, singing, special setting, and the like are all to be used only insofar as they serve to establish a gripping presence and address. They are simply matters of what is helpful and what is not. The important thing for each individual is that he or she should find some way that is effective and not assume that it does not matter how one approaches prayer.
Jesus commonly stood and “looked into heaven” as a part of his address to the Father. He did this because the person he was speaking to was, of course, there. We should remember this, and though it may occasionally be useful to bow the head and close the eyes, that is not to be regarded as the “canonical position,” the only one in which we are really praying. The particular values it serves are not the only matters to be observed in prayer, and, perhaps strangely, many people have found it very enlivening to pray with open eyes, and possibly walking to and fro.
In any case, when we pray we must take time to fix our minds upon God and orient our world around him. Whatever we need to do to that end should be done. When it is done, we will see ourselves situated in the family of God across time and space, as we pray “our Father,” and we will see God as our Father, and we will see our Father directly available to us for face-to-face communication. That is what it means for him to be Our Father, the one in the heavens.
Unfortunately, the old standard formulation, “Our Father who art in heaven,” has come to mean “Our Father who is far away and much later.” As explained in an earlier chapter, the meaning of the plural heavens, which is erroneously omitted in most translations, sees God present as far “out” as imaginable but also right down to the atmosphere around our heads, which is the first of “the heavens.” The omission of the plural robs the wording in the model prayer of the sense Jesus intended. That sense is, “Our Father always near us.”
Having taught us to address God in the manner indicated, the remainder of the model prayer as given in Luke 11 consists of requests or categories of requests.
There are five of them:
That the name “God” would be regarded with the utmost possible respect and endearment.
That his kingdom would fully come on earth.
That our needs for today be met today.
That our sins be forgiven, not held against us.
That we not be permitted to come under trial or to have bad things happen to us.
These are basically the same as in Matthew 6, where a little wording is added to some of them. We shall consider the two passages together.
“Hallowed” Be Thy Name
The first and second requests directly concern God’s position in the human realm. The first one asks that the name of God should be held in high regard. “Hallowed be thy name,” the old version has it.
In the biblical world, names are never just names. They partake of the reality that they refer to. The Jewish reverence for the name of God was so great that especially devout Jews might even avoid pronouncing it. Thus we do not really know how Yahweh, as we say it, really is to be pronounced. The pronunciation is lost in history.
Today very few people any longer understand what it means to “hallow” something and are apt to associate hallow only with ghosts and Halloween. So we would do better to translate the language here as “let your name be sanctified.” Let it be uniquely respected. Really, the idea is that his name should be treasured and loved more than any other, held in an absolutely unique position among humanity.
The word translated “hallow” or “sanctify” is hagiastheto. It is basically the same word used, for example, in John 17:17, where Jesus asks the Father to sanctify his students, especially the apostles, through his truth. And it appears again in 1 Thess. 5:23, where Paul expresses his hope that God will sanctify the Thessalonians entirely, keeping them blameless in spirit, soul, and body until Jesus returns. In such passages, too, the term means to locate the persons referred to in a separate and very special kind of reality.
This request is based upon the deepest need of the human world. Human life is not about human life. Nothing will go right in it until the greatness and goodness of its source and governor is adequately grasped. His very name is then held in the highest possible regard. Until that is so, the human compass will always be pointing in the wrong direction, and individual lives as well as history as a whole will suffer from constant and fluctuating disorientation. Candidly, that is exactly the condition we find ourselves in.
But the cosmic significance of this first request must not hide the fact that it is also the natural request of a child who loves its “Abba,” its Daddy. How a child’s heart is wounded to hear its parents, mother or father, dishonored or to see them attacked. Such an attack shakes the very foundations of the child’s existence, for the parents are its world. The touching confidence in the parent that famously makes a child think its parents are “the best” in every regard is really essential to the child’s well-being in the early stages of life.
So when we hear this first request, and indeed the second as well, we want to remember that it is the prayer of an adoring child, somewhat jealous for its parent. And we want to let ourselves sense its longing that “Abba,” who in this case really is “the greatest,” should be recognized as such. We want to dwell on this meditatively and perhaps weep for sadness that God is not so understood. We want to enter into the alarm of the little child who stumbles across those who do not think its father or mother is the greatest and best. And we must transfer that alarm to the lack of admiration and confidence that the human world has for our Father in the heavens.
