May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all our hearts be acceptable in Your sight, our Strength and our Redeemer. Amen.
Today, we meet Jesus as he is returning from the place where He went to go and pray. We are shown how important that sacred time with God was to Him.
From that encounter, His disciples might have seen this beautiful intimacy that He had with His Father, and they too might have yearned and longed for that intimacy, hence the request: Lord, teach us how to pray?
We receive this morning Luke’s account of Jesus’ response.
Father, hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins,
for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.
A prayer that is all too familiar to us. A prayer that we use during the liturgy of the Divine Offices, during Mass and so many other times. A prayer that sometimes gets said out of habit (that sometimes loses its sacredness).
Yet, we need to remember that this is not a prayer that a guru or someone we admire has taught, but the Son of God (Jesus Himself), and I invite you into the sacredness of this prayer.
God is power, yes. God is sovereign, yes. God is creator, yes. All that is true, but Jesus says that when you invoke God, you don’t begin with those titles. You begin with this very intimate title: Father. The intimacy and tenderness that is implied. And when you pray the Our Father again, pause and let that sink in for a while. Jesus as the Son of God is inviting us to share in this relationship with the Father.
And the first thing that we ask of our Father is: May we hold Your (His) name holy, as set apart. That, without competition, we keep God as the highest good.
At the heart of the prayer: May your kingdom come. God’s way of ordering things, the way of Love.
Give us each day our daily bread: The Greek speaks of super-substantial bread, and not just the bread that will feed us daily, but Christ Himself in the Eucharist. Not just the bread that will keep us alive physically, but also spiritually.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
Jesus came for all kinds of reasons — to teach and inspire us — but we can argue that the main reason He came was to affect how we look at sin. Jesus, forgiving our sins on the cross, draws us through that forgiveness to forgive others.
And do not bring us to the time of trial: There is this understanding, especially in the Old Testament, that just before the coming of the Messiah there will be a time of trial, a time of testing. Jesus is tapping into this idea that, as we are preparing for the coming of the Messiah, we are aware of the spiritual struggle. As we all know, the spiritual life is a daily struggle, a war, as St. Paul writes, against principalities and powers that we can’t see. And, trust me, they are not happy when we grow deeper in communion with Christ. So, what we pray for at the end is for strength and courage.
My dear brothers and sisters, may this week be a week of deep reflection as we meditate on this sacred prayer that Jesus has taught us.