Here is a little commentary on the Our Father.
TEXT:
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς,
Our Father, you who are in the Heavens,
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
May your name be sanctified;
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·
May your Kingdom come;
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
May what you will come to pass, as in the Heavens so upon the earth.
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
Give us today our daily bread;
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν,
And forgive us our debts,
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
As we also forgive our debtors;
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν,
And do not lead us into temptation,
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.
But deliver us from the Evil One.
COMMENTARY:
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς,
Our Father, you who are in the Heavens,
Unusually in the history of religion, the fundamental Christian prayer begins in the plural. One possible explanation is that the text that we have is actually a liturgical text. Such a liturgical text would necessarily be in the plural because it would be part of the practice of group worship. That this might be so is witnessed by the liturgical doxology which follows the prayer. And indeed the Our Father is prayed corporately in the Divine Liturgy.
However, there is no tradition in the Orthodox Church that the Our Father is merely a liturgical prayer; rather the Fathers consider the prayer the fundamental prayer of Christians, a prayer taught by God.
And, indeed, it seems to us that the Our Father contains the Gospel in a nutshell.
Hence, we must take the plural as conveying something deeper than merely an original liturgical setting of the Our Father.
The basic message we take from the plural is that we are not saved as isolated individuals but as members of the Church. The Church is so fundamental a concept in Christianity that it behoves us to pray for all members of the Church even when we are praying just for ourselves.
Next, is the appellation of God, ‘Father’. We are able to call God ‘Father’ because we are baptized. As we have learned, in baptism we have received the Holy Spirit and it has taken up its abode in our nous, our created spirit, restoring in us the image of God. This restored image of God is not a mere resemblance but so close and intimate that we are able to address God as our Father.
This is not metaphor: in Baptism we have been adopted as sons and daughters of God. But as we have learned, with baptism we have not acquired the fullness of adoption as sons and daughters of God, the fullness of the ‘in the likeness’. Rather, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit we struggle in our personal ascetical endeavour to realize our calling.
We can see, however, that it as members of the Church that we engage in this personal ascetical struggle.
Not only is this a matter of social solidarity—say, going to Church on Sundays—but a matter of participation in the mysterial or sacramental life of the Church: we engage in our personal ascetical effort to pass from the ‘in the image’ of the baptized Orthodox Christian to the ‘in the likeness’ of the sanctified Orthodox Christian by participating in the mysteries or sacraments of the Orthodox Church according to the rules and norms (typika) of the Church. We do not cut our own road, being smarter than the Fathers who wrote the rules under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. That is foolish. That is not consistent with our praying the Our Father.
Another way to put this is that through entry into the Orthodox Church in baptism having been adopted as sons and daughters of God, we must struggle to become sons and daughters of God in fullness: with the assistance of Grace we must struggle to become sons and daughters of God in the sense that Jesus taught: be ye therefore perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect. We must come to be sons and daughters of God who share in the love of God perfectly and who give that love of God perfectly to their neighbours and especially to their brothers and sisters.
‘Neighbour’ includes those who are not in the Church; ‘brother and sister’ refers to those in the Church.
Part of giving that love perfectly to our brothers and sisters is to pray ‘Our Father…’
The next part of this petition is ‘you who are in the Heavens’. It might be more exact to translate the beginning of the prayer ‘Our Father in the Heavens’.
Why would ‘you who are in the Heavens’ have been added by the Word of God made flesh to the Prayer he taught?
To which father are we praying? To our earthly father? To a political leader? To ‘Il Duce’? To a guru?
We are praying to ‘Our Father in the Heavens’, him who made Heaven, him who made the earth; him who made each of us, fashioning each of us in the womb when we were conceived. This it is to whom we are praying.
To invoke something in prayer is to render it present to us charismatically; it is to commune with it. Hence, when we pray ‘Our Father, you who are in the Heavens’ we are invoking the God of Gods, the Lord of Hosts, Him Who Is; we are rendering that God charismatically present in our hearts and minds; we are communing with him.
But if this is so, then immediately after we cannot turn to the Devil and the works of the Devil. That is to say, by invoking God in this way, we are purifying ourselves. We turn away from the profane to the holy, from sin and evil to justice and the good. We are sanctifying ourselves.
Our God is a holy God; our God is a jealous God. Before him there are no other gods. Hence, praying this way we develop an attitude of deep reverence for our Father, him who is in the Heavens.
When we are spiritually infants we might have a childish boldness before our Father in the Heavens, but when we mature, we must develop a profound reverence for the holiness of God, for Our Father, him who is in the Heavens.
This is the ‘idea of the holy’.
St Paul in the Epistle to the Hebrews makes the observation that we have not been to the Mountain of Sinai when God descended and even a wild animal that approached the Mountain was to be stoned—stoned because that was the one sure way to put the animal to death without touching it—, and what was seen was so frightful that Moses himself said: ‘I am frightened and trembling.’ Instead,
‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.’ The reverence we have for God must include the fear of him: not the slavish fear a demon or sinner might have that knows that it or he is going to suffer eternal punishment, but the fear that is engendered by holiness: we have tasted the holiness of the Lord and know that he is holy, the Fear of Isaac.
Here is what Psalm 118, 120 says:
Nail my flesh with your fear[1]; on account of your judgements I have feared.
ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου·
May your name be sanctified;
When we speak of something’s name, we are speaking of what conveys that thing’s true inner essence.
There is no sense in this epoch that a name is merely a convention pointing to an object in a language game the rules of which have been arbitrarily set. Such an analysis of ‘God-language’ has nothing to do with Christianity.
No, when we pronounce the name of someone, we mean his nature—who he really is. Recall that Moses asked the voice in the Burning Bush what his name was. ‘Who shall I say has sent me?’ Moses asked. And the answer came: ‘Say that “I am” has sent you.’ (This is the Septuagint rendering.)
That is why icons of Christ Pantocrator (‘The Ruler of All Things’) have Ὁ ὬΝ (‘He Who Is’) written above Christ’s head in the halo: As the Word of God made flesh, Christ is ‘He Who Is’, the ‘I am’ who sent Moses.
That is why Christ himself says in the Eighth Chapter of the Gospel of John that ‘…you will die in your sins if you do not believe that “I am”.’
That is why when the crowd came to arrest him in the
Hence, what is it that we are asking? We are not really asking anything. We are blessing God. We are saying ‘Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts’, but in a voice suited to a mortal upon the earth.
We are blessing God.
When we bless God in this way, there is a self-negation that we assert: when we pray that God’s name be sanctified, we are denying our own self-love; we are denying ourselves. We are negating ourselves so that God might be sanctified, so that his name might be made holy.
Moreover, when we bless God’s name in this way, we are denying the evil in us. For us to pray from the heart that God’s name be sanctified is to deny sin. It is to say that we have turned to God and away from the Devil, away from his pomps.
There is a sense in which we are in fact petitioning God that his name be hallowed: we are asking that in a world in which darkness is the norm, in an impure heart such as our own, that the name of God be hallowed: that the name of God be hallowed by the advent of justice both in the world and in our own being.
ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·
May your Kingdom come;
This is more clearly a petition. However, it also contains an element similar to the preceding: for us to wish and ask God that his Kingdom come is to deny ourselves and our own petty kingdoms; it is to turn ourselves over to the
This is not to deny that the
In praying ‘May your Kingdom come,’ we recognize that we ourselves can not bring about the passage from the ‘according to the image’ to the ‘according to the likeness’; this is something that ultimately and fundamentally must be wrought by God. Recall that the culmination of the ascetical ascent is the Divine Illumination by the Holy Spirit that confers a participation in the Divine Love, so much so that we are no longer subject to the eight passions. If the
Indeed, that is how the Fathers interpret the Transfiguration of Mt Tabor: The Transfiguration occurred a week after Christ said that ‘there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the
As St Peter said, ‘It is well for us to be here.’ As the icons of the transfiguration portray, the three apostles are struck by the revelation of the Trinity but
It might be remembered that St Gregory Palamas prayed continually to be enlightened by the Light of God and other saints have prayed similarly: in praying the Our Father we too are praying God to grant us this Divine Illumination that will transform us fully into sons or daughters of God by grace, when the Kingdom of God has come within us and we no longer are subject to the passions but participate in the Love of God that Jesus had and conveyed to his disciples when he washed their feet; when he came to them on the evening of the first day, the doors being barred, and said ‘Peace to you;’ when he asked them after a fruitless night fishing, ‘Children, do you have anything to eat;’ when he himself prepared a meal for them on the beach while they were hauling in the catch.
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς.
May what you will come to be, as in the Heavens so upon the earth.
We have translated more literally than is customary. This is so we can discuss the deeper meaning of the petition with greater clarity than might be possible with the customary translation.
The Greek word θέλημα conveys the thing that someone wills, not the faculty of the will that all men have. That is, if it is my will to go to
So what is it we are asking in this petition? Let us suppose that it is my will to go to
We look at the matter somewhat differently. Jesus said that he came not to do his own will but the will of his Heavenly Father. When we pray the Our Father we are asking that what Jesus wanted happen to us to: that we no longer seek to do our own will, but the will of our Heavenly Father.
Hence, what this petition requires is a continual struggle of ‘kenosis’ or emptying. This is a big Greek word. What it means is that we empty ourselves of ourselves so that God might fill up the empty space that we have left by getting rid of ourselves. Each time we pray that the will of God be done, we are emptying ourselves, negating ourselves, turning ourselves over to God in trust that what he wants is better than what we want; we are passing from being spiritual children to spiritual adults who no longer have temper tantrums is they do not get their way, but love their Father and revere his name.
τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
Give us today our daily bread;
We all have needs. One of the deepest messages of the Gospel is to trust in the Providence of God. This is a very deep lesson for the Christian. Early Christians sometimes took it to mean that they didn’t have to work;
Moreover, there is a false doctrine among Calvinists that wealth is a sign of God’s smile upon us, a sign of our election to salvation. There is no such doctrine in Orthodoxy. It is true that sometimes God showers material blessings on a Christian just as he did on Job both before and after his trial; it is also true that sometimes God allows the Christian to be tempted by poverty so that he might see whether he or she really loves God—and not just the material possessions that God has given or allowed the person to gather.
However, a much more fundamental doctrine in Orthodoxy is that personal wealth is no particular indicator of sanctity and value in the eyes of God: it is possible to be wealthy and a friend of God; it is possible to be poor and a friend of God; the opposite in each case is possible. What matters is our spiritual wealth, our virtue. We can’t take our material possessions with us, but we can and do take our virtue—or lack of it—with us when we die. And we all surely must die. In Orthodoxy the wealthy man is the man of love, the man who cares.
Recall that one of the Beatitudes is ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
Finally, it should be noted that the petition we have is not for fast cars and women and motorcycles and speed boats—it is for our daily bread. This petition entails humility: we have to humble ourselves and realize that just like anyone else we are in need of our daily bread from God. Not for anything fancy or special—let them eat cake!—but for our daily bread, the food of peasants and the poor of the earth.
So in praying this petition we are humbling ourselves before our Creator and asking him for our basic needs.
In common with the patristic understanding, we take praying for our daily bread as being to pray for our shoes, our heating bill, our rent, our kid’s clothes, and so on and so forth: for our genuine needs. It might be worth reflecting on among those of our readers who are unemployed and with no prospects of employment: Jesus Christ taught us to pray to our Heavenly Father for our daily needs; he taught us that God hears our prayers; he went so far as to speak the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge: the widow never gave up. Hence, we must continually pray to God to provide for our daily needs with the faith and hope that he will be faithful to his word—and he cannot be unfaithful to himself—and provide us our daily needs.
We had the occasion to speak to a priest recently about the burden of his
For those in despair over their economic situation, trust in the Providence of God is very important, as is prayer for their daily
καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν,
And forgive us our debts,
Now we come to the heart of the Gospel. This is a very, very deep petition. Who can say that he is without sin? Who has repented from the depths of his heart so that he no longer needs to repent? Who is so humble that he no longer needs to humble himself to ask forgiveness for his sins? And God will hear us.
Recall that St Silouan wrote that before he went to the monastery he met a convicted murderer who after he had served his time was gaily dancing at a party. Intrigued, St Silouan asked the fellow how, a murderer, he could dance so gaily at the party. The man replied: when I was in prison, I prayed and prayed and prayed for God to forgive me my sin, and he heard me and now I can sing and dance.
So we must be: while we are yet in prison, we must pray and pray and pray for the forgiveness of our sin so that God might hear us and grant us forgiveness. For as the ascetical Fathers teach, in whatever condition God finds us at the hour of our death, in that condition we will go to eternity. Hence, before we die we must pray for God to forgive us our debts. Moreover, the Fathers such as St John of Sinai are clear that without such a sure sense of the forgiveness of our sins and of the concomitant presence of the grace of the Holy Spirit, we are in trouble if we die unless we are distinguished by our humility. It is now that is the time of our prison, now the time that we must implore God to forgive us our sins. And here is that petition.
ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφίεμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
As we also forgive our debtors;
This is God’s ‘catch-22’ for us sinners. We want to obtain—if we are serious Christians—the forgiveness of our sins and bold assurance before God. But we can attain to this only if we forgive our own debtors. God is very clear on this. We forgive; he forgives; we don’t forgive; he doesn’t forgive. Nothing in the Gospel could be clearer. That’s the deal. Take it and forgive to receive forgiveness; or don’t take it and enter eternity without bold assurance before the Lord of Hosts, the Creator of your soul.
This is a very deep struggle. For while we are sinners, that does not mean that we can’t be sinned against, wounded, sometimes seriously, sometimes grievously. But there’s no other way: we have to purify our hearts and forgive. This can be a great struggle.
καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν,
And do not lead us into temptation,
A humble man who has ‘been around the block’—who has some experience—will pray this petition with feeling. In fact, an index of spiritual maturity is how seriously a man will pray this petition. The more serious he is, the more he will get down on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father not to lead him into temptation. He has learned. There is no longer any time for fooling around.
What are these temptations?
As we have learned, there are eight passions. These passions map into eight types of sin. Hence, there are eight basic types of temptation. We are praying in utter sincerity for God not to lead us into temptation.
Recall that we learned in the petition above to subordinate our own will to the will of God. Perhaps God does not want us to go to
ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.
But deliver us from the Evil One.
This is even more important. This is not only a matter of being delivered from the human condition of bondage to sin so as to attain to the fullness of the ‘in the likeness’ of a son or daughter or God who manifests a likeness to God in all the virtues, especially the virtue of love. It is a matter of being delivered from the Devil. Just as in the previous petition, the sensible Christian and monk will pray to be delivered from the Devil. The Devil, to use a metaphor, has many tentacles and gets mixed up in many things. Sometimes we don’t realize that we have been affected by evil, by the Devil, by our passions, by the demons, put it how you will. But here we pray seriously to our Heavenly Father for him to deliver us from the Evil One.
It is no longer a matter of me, but of the Lord: To pray the Our Father in utter seriousness, I have to convert; I have to be baptized; but above all I have to repent.
And here we can see what repentance is: it is an emptying of ourselves, of our pride and egotism so that God be all things in all.
[1] Thus the Septuagint. A translation based on the Hebrew would more likely read ‘My flesh bristled with the fear of you; on account of your judgements I have feared.’
