Jesus Would Have Us Pray

My latest take on The Lord's Prayer (Matthew version):

Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name.

Virtually any number of biblical descriptions of God will be taken by the denominations as "names of God."  However, it is indeed noteworthy that the phrase "Our Father which art in heaven" (or perhaps "heavenly Father") is not considered more seriously as the "name" referred to in the above verse.  Ultimately, the most pointed "hallowing" (or "considering hallowed") of "heavenly Father" would be as of a father beyond compare--of a father whose stature as such obliterates all other uses of the term.  This Heavenly Father, properly considered, would be our father not only in earth and in heaven, but our father in such transcendent terms as to render void all considerations of existence other than in terms of his will, and indeed this is where the rest of the prayer is leading. 

Thy kingdom come.  Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven.

This "kingdom" for which we are to hope is a kingdom of the father's will, not a kingdom of any independent stature--or, more pointedly, not a kingdom to which we will assign any independent stature.  This proper view of the kingdom must be such as to vitiate any sophomoric notions that the existence of God can be extrapolated from any perceived majesty, breadth, cohesion, or complexity of Creation.  This God Who is the Cause of that Which Exists is not God at all--this God is just a fancied creature of majesty sufficient to hover above all majesties we can imagine, to stride across all breadths we can imagine, and so on.  The kingdom to which we are to aspire is in its mountains and its mustard seeds--and it potentially innumerable "heavens"--present at every moment purely in the will of God, and a prayer of ours consistent with the will of God might alter the twinkling starlight of a moment or alter the course of galaxies.

Give us this day our daily bread.

Nonetheless, we will fail to adhere to the will of God, and as such failures we cannot pray into existence--according to the Father's will--the food we will eat (or the clothes we will wear, and so on--all the things to which Jesus says we--if properly oriented--might give no thought.)  The basest--and, to us, the most understandable--needs we might have are those which arise from the physical demands of our existence.  We can pray at least to have our temporal needs met, but we must see such needs as against a larger backdrop of the physical existence of the universe--of the physical expanse and terrain and components of the "in earth" phenomenon.  We must seek to see the universe as an expression of the will of God--not as an arena in which he can exert his will--or we have made of him, if not an idol, then an effectual pagan actor-god who might well be represented by a idol.

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.

And we will fail to adhere to the will of God in more acute ways, so that it might be said that we have committed sin.  It would be more exact to say we are sinful, but opining on the depth and depravity of our sin is as insipid as opining on the subtlety and enormity of This God Who is the Cause of that Which Exists--we can fall short of the more properly described God Who Exceeds All in such manner as would warrant our saying that our sin exceeds all.  For this reason, as Jesus tells us, we must reckon that the extent to which we can be expected to forgive our fellows is limitless--just as the debt for which we must ask forgiveness is most properly considered limitless.

And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

And so what are we to do?  If the words of this prayer are taken seriously, the upshot is that we are to ask God to alter the nature of the universe, that is, to make the earth like heaven.  "Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven" is an utterly vapid phrase if it is reckoned to be a suitable heading under which we will list those things we would like fixed, replaced, or alleviated "in earth."  This is the intellectual pathology that is revealed when we count God as above all, below all, before all, and after all--yet we reckon that the remedies (or candidate remedies) for our sinfulness are to be found in the sequelae of our discrete, sinful acts.  So also is it insipid for us to ask God to cure us of our sinfulness, as though he was bound by an unfolding preacher's-narrative about the decline and fall of the lost soul.

If God is merely an actor in a realm that he created--a huge, thundering actor, no less--then it would make sense to ask him merely to forgive our discrete, sinful acts, or to ask him to root out our sinful natures.  In such requests reside all of the theologians' notions about "genuine repentance" or "effectual sacraments" (or whatever), as well as all of the theologians' notions about "saving faith" or "saving grace."  While such conceptions are not devoid of logic, they are nonetheless opposed to the prayer's request to "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."  If God is the great, controlling actor against a backdrop of Creation, then--while it would be understandable to ask to be spared certain levels and modes of temptations--God (if he is indeed God) would be perfectly capable of adjusting his level of expectations of the person to fit the altered temptation-environment.  Nothing would have operated to the sinner's eventual profit.

No, the only value of the request, "lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil", is as a request that God alter the entirety of the existence that bears upon persons.  Asking God to do this or that--when Jesus tells us that we can do the this's or that's of moving mountains at a word--is to ask God to be as minor an actor--insultingly, of course--as even our most grandiose conceptions of his majesty would cast him.  Jesus, rather, is telling us to ask God (as the prayer foreshadows from the start) to make earth like heaven--and we cannot conceive of what it would be like for earth to be like heaven.  Our conceptions of improving our eternal lot (including the theologians'  vapid notions of faith and works and faith-versus-works) are--like all our conceptions--merely adjustments of our estimations of the existence we can experience or at least opine about.

Jesus asks Nicodemus to understand the "birth from above" (or "again"--it matters not) in analogy to the action of the wind.  And then Jesus tells Nicodemus that Nicodemus does not understand the wind.  This is our great predicament: We will never understand in totality the conditions of our perceived existences, and moreover will will never understand the totality of the nature of God ("Father," "King," "Creator," and so many other titles) whose nature is worshipped yet never encapsulated by our use of names and concepts.  We are therefore doubly removed from understanding God.

What Jesus would have us do is ask God to remove our predicament.  Attempting to "understand" that predicament--as opposed to considering concepts (as sobering exercises) about our alienation from God--is a waste of time and effort.  Jesus tells us merely to ask, and to trust God to do the rest.  I used the more familiar Matthew version of the Lord's Prayer, but it is worth noting that the prayer's iteration in Luke leads directly into Jesus speaking about "ask, seek, knock."