© 2010 Pastor Louis Pernot
© 2010 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
The first question is what to do with it. Is it a prayer to recite, to repeat regularly like a fixed text? Nothing is less certain, and in any case it is not a question of saying the Our Father as a recitation. In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ rightly condemns the pagans and their vain repetitions. Mechanically repeating a text, even the most beautiful, is not praying. […]
The prayer can be seen as made up of 7 requests: 3 concerning God, 4 concerning men. The doxology (for it is to you that belong…), for its part, is considered by all exegetes as apocryphal, that is to say as added late to the original text. The Our Father thus has a symbolically perfect form, 7 being the number of the perfection of creation (the 7 days of creation), 3 being the divine number par excellence (think of the trinity), and 4 the number of the terrestrial, (with the four cardinal points, the four elements etc.). We find here something that is common in the Bible: the accomplishment of creation is found in the union of the spiritual and the material, by the union of the two natures celestial and terrestrial which are our two sources of life.
OUR
From the first word of our text, a surprising particularity of this prayer appears: it is entirely in the first person plural. It does not say “Oh! my Father, give me this or that”, but “Our Father, give US”.
We can draw several conclusions from this. The first is that all Christians are united in this prayer, or even simply in prayer, there is a communion of all those who recognize God as their Father, and they then form only one body, making that no one is isolated to the point of being able to pray in isolation for himself alone. The love for God which is expressed in prayer cannot be dissociated from the love of neighbor. It may also be, precisely, that one of the roles of prayer is to put oneself in communion with all the others.
Taking this idea to its conclusion would make us say that in fact, there can really be no prayer in the first person singular. Prayer cannot be about asking God for a privilege that we do not wish to see granted to others. Asking for something for ourselves, and not wishing it at the same time for others would be proof of selfishness, or even a lack of love that is completely anti-evangelical. Love of our neighbor gives us a duty of solidarity making it impossible to make a particular request without being able to desire that it also be granted to others, if only out of compassion. […]
Father
It has been said a lot that calling God “Father” is one of the characteristics of Christianity. This is partly true, the notion of God-Father is already found in the Old Testament, as in Psalm 103 for example (like the love of a father for his children the love of God for those who fear him). But it is certain that Christ generalized this usage and gave it particular importance. Calling God “Father” is in itself revealing of an entire theology, it is affirming a certain number of essential things about God himself in his relationship with us. This even says a lot of things, because it turns out that the notion of “Father”, for us humans, is complex enough that attributing it to God covers several affirmations in one.
We generally distinguish, ideally, three essential roles in the function of father, and it is from this ideal function of the father that we must reflect, trying to put aside our own experience which risks distorting things.
These roles are indeed filled more or less by our earthly fathers, and calling God “Father” carries the danger that we project onto him our more or less happy experiences of an earthly father. We must therefore consider who the ideal Father is, and attribute these different roles in fullness to God.
The first of these roles of the father is to be the progenitor. He is the one who gave life. In this sense, calling God “Father” is simply saying that he is our creator. He is the one who is at the origin of our life. This again can be understood in two senses, since the New Testament teaches that there are two creations, an old one and a new one. The old creation is the material creation, in this domain, God is indeed our creator, he is at the origin of all visible things, of the Universe in general, and therefore of us in particular. He is also the one who is at work in the “new creation”, the one who gives us life once again through his life-giving Spirit, he is the source of the new life that can arise in us.
The second essential role of the father is to give the law. He is in a way the educator, the one who structures his child by imposing limits on him, by telling him what is allowed and what is forbidden. This role, a little forgotten sometimes, is nevertheless essential. It is true that it is above all the figure of the God of the Old Testament who responds to this function, with the law of Moses, but it would be a mistake to forget it completely. Christ himself said that his role was not to abolish the law, but to bring it to its fulfillment. […]
And finally, the last essential role of the father is perhaps the one we think of most easily today: the father is the one who loves. This is particularly what is said about adopted children: the one who welcomes and loves a child can by right be called “father”. The love of a father for his child is in fact normally a very strong thing giving a good image of the love of God, a love that is prior, total and unconditional. The father loves his child because that is how it is, and not because the child would demonstrate qualities or merits that make him lovable. In this area, the notion of adoption gives additional strength to love, the adoptive father, in fact, has no reason to love his child, other than his own choice, first and prior to any relationship with the child, since he is not even the father. If we look closely at what happens with our human paternities, we notice that paternity always presupposes an adoption, or at least a recognition. The Father is never certain that the child is his, he can only say it through an act of trust, acceptance, and gratuitous love. On the contrary, the mother is sure that the child is hers, and there is a fusional relationship between the mother and the child which is not the same as between the father and the child. Some have thus wanted to say that the God of the Old Testament is in this respect more of a mother-God, fusional, in an extremely close relationship with his people, while the God of the New Testament is more of a father, he is a God who leaves a little more freedom, and whose relationship with man requires a mutual adoption, and which is essential in the spiritual relationship.
who art in heaven
Here too we find a fundamental theological affirmation that is of the order of the confession of faith: the God in whom we believe and to whom we pray is in Heaven… For a Hebrew, at the time of the Bible, Heaven was opposed to Earth, in that, precisely, Heaven is the place to which man cannot go. In biblical topology, there are two essential domains, the Earth which is the material world, the domain of things, objects and the visible, and Heaven which is the domain of the invisible, the unattainable, the spiritual. At that time, the materiality of air was not known, and the sky was therefore this immaterial environment that surrounds us, overlooks us, that gives us life through the air that we breathe, and that sometimes even shows its power through important meteorological phenomena such as storms, wind or tempests, which could be seen as theophanic signs, that is to say manifestations of God. Thus, to affirm that God is in Heaven is above all to say that he is not on Earth, that is to say that he is not a material reality, that he is purely spiritual. This can be seen as an anti-idolatrous affirmation, idolatrous populations worshiped material gods, statues, objects, and Hebrew thought has always strongly opposed this practice, with in particular the ten commandments: “You shall not make for yourself a graven image, or any representation… to bow down to them.” This affirmation retains all its force today, to say that God is precisely what is not on Earth, he is by definition the immaterial, the invisible. God is what escapes physics, he is what surpasses matter.
The divine is in man this dimension which makes us more than mammals and in each of us this part of our being which makes us more than our body… Today, where Heaven has lost its immateriality, and its inattainability, we should rather say: “Our Father who is beyond everything, and even heaven”.
Hallowed be thy name
It is well known that in the Bible, the name represents the person himself. The name is that by which a person is in relation to others, who give him the name, or who recognize his name. The name is what we know about someone and what we call him by to enter into relation with him.
It is also well known that the Hebrews had the brilliant idea of saying that the name par excellence of God remained a mystery, it is this famous tetragrammaton, YHWH whose pronunciation had to remain mysterious, to show that no one can claim to know God perfectly, and possess him. Now it is not so much the name of God that remains mysterious, as God himself, this one being such that no one can know him.
Here, we are asked to “sanctify” this name of God, an expression that requires some explanation. Indeed, “sanctify” means “make holy”, and we do not necessarily see very well how we could make holy what is holy par excellence, nor how the holiness of God could depend on us. But the word “holy” has a very precise meaning in the Bible which is not really the one that Christianity subsequently gave it. “Holy”, in fact, today evokes for us the idea of perfection, divinity etc… but “Holy” in the Bible simply means: “to be apart”, and “sanctify”: to set apart. This is how in the New Testament, those who are called “saints” are not the perfect ones, but all Christians, to the extent that, precisely, being a Christian is to differentiate oneself from the world. Thus we can find in Romans 12 (v2) a particularly explicit expression of what sanctification is: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind”… “Sanctify the name of God” thus means: set it apart, differentiate it from the other realities that make up the daily life of ours.
Likewise, when it is said in the Ten Commandments: Remember the Lord’s day to keep it holy, what we are commanded is to set aside one day in the week to dedicate it to God, to ensure that all days are not alike but that there is one different from the others, so that our being is not diluted in material action but keeps a part of this other dimension of the spiritual.
Likewise, it is true that in our life, we have many concerns of all kinds, more or less trivial, more or less elevated, and it is appropriate that spiritual concerns have a separate place.
What the Our Father does not even consider is that among all these concerns, that of God is not there. We can indeed think that there is not even humanity, in the proper sense of the term, if the individual finds himself entirely in concerns only of a material nature: his health, what he will eat, his body, what he possesses, his territory, etc. To be human is precisely to be concerned with something else, with something invisible, with quality, with values, with ideals, etc.
But here again, this is not enough, and the Our Father invites us to go further. What is needed is that the reality of God in our lives is not only present, but has a place of choice. If we put spiritual concern on the same level as others, we fail in our vocation, and we make the spiritual inactive. What we wish in prayer is that God’s concern be of another order, not one among others, but that it have a special status. God must be our “ultimate concern” to use the expression of the great theologian Paul Tillich, the concern of concerns, the one that is above all others, that in our hearts, God’s concern be apart from the others, in a privileged, central place. This request also allows us to specify how Christ conceives the value of concrete life, the material dimension of our existence. If the name of God is apart, it cannot compete with other concerns, it is not on the same level. It is therefore not a question of renouncing all material concerns in our lives, of sacrificing the physical dimension of our existence, but simply of putting above all the concern of fidelity to God. Asceticism is therefore not a necessity, the ideal is not that there is God alone in our life, but that God is apart, above all the rest.
This is probably even how we should interpret the famous no one can serve two masters, God and Mammon… (Matt 6.24). Not to say that one must necessarily be poor, and have no money to be faithful to God, but the question is to know who is the master, what is the concern that directs all the others. And in this area, there can only be one place, the ultimate concern can only be unique, and there is necessarily one, so we might as well choose it. Taking something other than God as the ultimate concern is the essence of idolatry, and in this sense, we are far from having passed the stage of the danger of idolatry constantly denounced in Scripture. The ultimate concern for the Name of God is not there to annihilate all other concerns, or to make us renounce the world as a whole, but to organize them and give them their own meaning.
Thy kingdom come
This request can be interpreted as a request that God himself come and impose his reign in the world. This is the meaning given to it by certain millenarian communities, impatiently awaiting the return of Christ to finally reestablish all justice. This type of theology is quite dangerous in the sense that it risks demobilizing man. If in fact, Christ must return soon to artificially impose his reign, then the role of man is null and void and he can only lament the evil that exists in the world while waiting for God to sort it out himself.
We can even be more severe and consider that this expectation of Christ’s return can well pass for a lack of faith in Christ as Messiah. Indeed, the message of the Gospel is not that the Kingdom of God will come later, but that it has come near (Matt 4:17, Luke 10:9 etc.) in Jesus Christ, it is not only when Jesus returns that we will finally be in the messianic times, but the Messiah has come in Jesus Christ, so we are indeed in the messianic times, and there is no longer any need to wait for another messianic era.
The question is, in fact, what is meant by “reign of God” (or “Kingdom of God,” since there is only one term for “reign” and “kingdom” in both Hebrew and Greek.)
Wanting God’s reign to come on Earth is simply wanting God to be increasingly recognized as king, to be respected, listened to, obeyed, and to be the one who actually governs the greatest possible part of the world. Now, since God has always wanted not to alienate human freedom, it goes without saying that all this depends on man. It is up to us to recognize God as our king, and it is therefore certainly not a question of passively waiting for God to establish his Kingdom against the will of men. As in all prayers, the request made to God is not intended to want God to do what is ours for us, so as to avoid us having to do it, but on the contrary to help us accomplish his own will. Prayer is a request that commits us, a request that we express in faith and trust in God because we know that we need his help and his strength so that he can help us to truly want and to accomplish as best as possible what is at stake.
If we are interested in the literal meaning of the term “kingdom”, we can consider that it is the group of those who recognize someone as king, who submit to him and who are governed, protected by him. Now, as it is not possible to establish a division between men to designate those who would be totally faithful and those who would be totally unfaithful, we must remember that the limits of the Kingdom of God pass through our midst, there is a part of ourselves that recognizes God as king, and another part that disobeys him and submits to other priorities. We can therefore hope that not only the world as a whole will be more and more subject to God, but that in ourselves, the part that submits to God will grow so that ideally our whole being is in the Kingdom of God.
Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven
Here again, the risk of a passive interpretation is present. We can indeed see in this request a sort of fatalism approaching the Muslim Inshallah. It is true that we find, for example in the Epistle of James (4:13-14) a type of theology which has always had a certain success, warning those who say: Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, we will spend a year there, we will trade, and we will gain! You who do not know what will happen tomorrow! for what is your life? You are a vapor which appears for a little while, and then disappears. You should say, on the contrary: If God wills, we will live, and we will do this or that.
(to be continued)
Pastor Louis Pernot