© 2010 Pastor Louis Pernot
© 2010 French-speaking Association of Readers of the Urantia Book
[…]
What is at issue is whether we think that it is really always the will of God that is accomplished on this Earth or not. For those who think so, like Muslims, or even like Calvin thought, this request can mean that we know how to accept the will of God, that we are given to submit to it, since in any case this divine will must be accomplished. But we can think that everything that happens is not precisely the will of God, and that this is indeed the explanation for the existence of evil: it is what deviates from the divine plan. We can think that God can only want good, and that he is at work so that progressively it is his will, his creative plan that is accomplished. There then can be found an essential role for man, his vocation, to accept taking part in the creation of God by accomplishing his will, in the world in general, and in himself in particular. There is no stoic resignation in the Gospel, quite the contrary, a cooperation of man with God’s plan. It can therefore well be a request which extends the previous one: “that I be able to accomplish Your will on this earth… and not mine”.
So this request, like any prayer, is not a way of expecting everything from God so that we no longer have to do anything ourselves, but rather a request which also commits us, and more particularly in the accomplishment of his will.
This is what is at stake: Heaven, symbolically, is the place where God dwells, and in its domain, God is the only actor in play. The spiritual world, obviously, is the very place where God’s will is accomplished, since nothing stands in the way. In the earthly domain, on the contrary, there are many forces present, many of which are heterogeneous to God, since we are in the place of material creation. And precisely in this domain, many things happen that are not the will of God… The best we can do is to put our own capacity for action in this world at the service of God’s will so that this earthly world can become an image of Heaven, which is the only place where God truly and totally reigns.
What kind of bread are we talking about, material bread, or only spiritual bread?
The question of whether one can ask God for material things is highly controversial in Christianity. Some think that since God is all-powerful, it is obviously within his powers to give or not give material things, to intervene in one way or another in the course of events. Others think that in the short term, God can only act according to his nature, that is to say in the domain of the spirit, love, forgiveness, life, etc.
To be able to decide, we must see in the whole of the New Testament what seems most probable. However, it appears that there are in fact very few passages allowing us to found the practice of material requests to God. Certainly, there is this passage from Philippians 4 6.7: Do not be anxious about anything; but in everything by prayer and supplication, with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God, but the promise of an answer is certainly not material: And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus, it is indeed a spiritual action.
The second essential role of the father is to give the law. He is in a way the educator, the one Similarly in the great passage on the effectiveness of prayer in Luke 11, with the parable of the importunate friend who asks incessantly and who ends up having satisfaction, Christ concludes by saying: What father among you, if his son asks for bread, will he give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give him a serpent instead of a fish? Or if he asks for an egg, will he give him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give… and here, a dramatic turn of events, Christ does not say that God will give everything that can come into our heads to ask him, but he says that he will give: the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. And the Holy Spirit is certainly not just anything. In fact, it is reasonable to think that the key to this question is found in this often-quoted verse from the New Testament: “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it (John 14.13)”, or else: “Whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive it. (Matt 21.22)”. In both cases, it is not a question of asking in any way, but “in faith”, or “in my name”. This too has been understood in different ways, it has been thought that it was necessary to have a lot of faith for God to submit to our will (while it is not up to him to submit to our will but rather us to submit to his!), or that it was enough to add at the end of a prayer of request: “in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” to be sure of its granting. But on the contrary we can understand that everything we ask for which is not related to the name of Christ, that is to say his person or what he represents, has no more chance of being answered than what is asked outside of faith which is the domain of spiritual truths.
Likewise, the famous words of Christ: Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only will you do what was done to the fig tree, but if you say to this mountain: Be removed and thrown into the sea, it will be done (Matthew 21:21) can only be understood in a spiritual sense. We have indeed seen many great mystics since ancient times, and we have seen or believed to see many miracles, but no one has ever really moved a mountain, not even Christ, and besides, it would be an act of little interest. On the other hand, it is not unreasonable to believe that if one has great faith, then even at the bottom of the sea which is the place of death, trial and despair, one can find there the mountain of revelation, the mountain of the presence of God. And this, certainly, can be the object of the request of our prayer.
The same ambiguity is found in our request of the Our Father, which can be understood in both senses. Even if we do not want to reject a priori the meaning of a material request, we must nevertheless be aware of the extreme theological difficulties to which such an interpretation inevitably leads. If in fact we ask God to make sure that we have material food, it is because we assume that it is within his power to make sure that we actually have food. What then should we think of people, or of peoples who are dying of hunger? Should we see there the effect of a divine will? Do we really think that it is within God’s power, or in accordance with his nature, to make it otherwise and that these tried peoples suddenly find food for all? And then why does he not do it? Is it because they have not prayed the Our Father enough, and should we not then replace all humanitarian aid to Third World countries with the distribution of papers containing the text of this prayer to be recited?
It seems that one can legitimately refuse to answer this type of question in the affirmative. Unless one has a theology like Calvin could have with an extremely strong conception of divine sovereignty, thinking that everything that happens is in any case the will of God, who can make live or die, who can save or lose whoever he wants, without having to answer to anyone, and without us even having to understand his eternal plan.
So there is a fundamental option here in theology, an option that touches very closely on the problem of evil (could God make it so that there is no evil or suffering on Earth?), and we just have to be aware of the inevitable implications of choices that may seem trivial at first. Yes, why couldn’t we thank God for the fact that we have something to eat today? True, it comes from a good feeling… but it is assuming that it depends on him… and what would we say if we had nothing to eat today?
In any case, one cannot hear of “bread” in the mouth of Christ without thinking essentially of the spiritual bread which is mentioned several times in his mouth. In particular, the Gospel of John has this beautiful chapter 6 devoted to the “bread of life”. There, Jesus says: (v. 35) I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never hunger, and he who believes in me will never thirst. This is obviously not a question of material bread in what is promised by Christ. And in the same sense, it is even more well-known that at the end of his life, Jesus, inviting his disciples to a last meal, handed them bread to eat… not to nourish their bodies but saying: this is my body given up for you, eat of it all… It is indeed this bread that we need, the spiritual bread of the Word of Christ, of his presence, of his very person who can nourish us for eternity and give us the strength that comes from God. Man will not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. This is a word from Deuteronomy (8.4), quoted by Christ himself during his temptations (Matt. 4.4), when the Devil whispers to him that he could ask God to feed him materially, and that he precisely refuses by quoting this verse.
The biggest difficulty in translation is found concerning the word that is usually translated as “daily” or “of this day”… The word in question is: epiousion, and the difficulty with this word is that it is not only rare and of a less obvious meaning, but also that it is a “hapax”: a word that is used only once in the entire New Testament, and we therefore have no element of context to infer a meaning… We can always resort to the etymology, which is clear: epiousion is formed from two words that we know well: epi which means: “above”, and ousia which designates the essence, the substance, the existence. Thus, epiousion simply designates that which is above the substance. And besides, certain old Latin versions of the New Testament translate it as “super-substantialem”. The simplest meaning of our word is therefore in fact not mysterious and corresponds well to the meaning found in many places in the Gospel: we ask God to give us this food that we need daily, this bread which is above the concrete and material substance, the spiritual bread.
In classical Greek, epiousion could also mean in its very rare appearances: “of tomorrow”, we can easily understand why, because in fact, the bread of tomorrow is that which is not yet, that which we speak of but which is beyond immediate concrete existence. This meaning can be, in a certain way, possible for our prayer. Certainly, the “give us this day our tomorrow’s bread” that some translations have is insane if it is a material gift, it would even be mocking God to ask him for a sort of advance on salary, to give us now what we would only need tomorrow… but if we hear in the “tomorrow” an allusion to an eschatological future, a tomorrow which does not concern this earthly time, but the tomorrow of the Kingdom of God, then we find in a certain way the same meaning that we had just found, to give us here below on earth the spiritual gifts which are specific to his eternal Kingdom, and which we need to live as children of God.
And it is true that we can ask God to give us each day the spiritual bread we need to advance on our path, to nourish ourselves daily with his presence, his spirit, his strength and his word.
It is not surprising that the model prayer given by Christ mentions forgiveness, the central point of his preaching and an important part of the good news of his Gospel. There are indeed these two dimensions in Jesus’ message: on the one hand, that we are forgiven by God, according to an effect of his grace, and on the other hand, that he invites us to forgive one another. In this sense, we could consider that Paul’s formulation: “As Christ has forgiven you, so forgive you… (Col. 3.13) is one of those which says the essential in a few words. Here too, we have God’s forgiveness and the forgiveness that we are invited to give to others. The difficulty lies in the ”as“ … Some have wanted to see a proposition expressing a condition: ”forgive us our trespasses… to the same extent that we have forgiven…" But we can find that this type of theology sins by a lack of confidence in the first grace of God, it would be there, in fact, the forgiveness of man which would be first, and not the forgiveness of God. Now more than numerous are the texts showing that it is the opposite which is the very meaning of the Gospel, it is because God loves us that we can love, it is because he has forgiven us that we can love, and forgive in our turn. […]
We can nevertheless think that the second part of the request: “as we also forgive…” indicates the active part of the request, as far as man is concerned. Indeed, all the other requests up to now implied a participation of man, with the help of God. Here, the risk would be to think that forgiveness has God as its only subject, and that man in this approach is only an object. However, this is not the case, man also has a role to play, and he is reminded here: he can also forgive, it is both a duty… and a power that are given. That man has the power to forgive is more important than it seems, because according to several passages of the Gospel, this power is a real power. As we see in John 20:23: “To whomsoever you forgive, it is forgiven them.” " (as in Matt. 16:19, 18.18), this seems to mean that the forgiveness that we can offer to one of our fellow men can, in some way, condition the very forgiveness of God. If I forgive, then God also forgives.
In any case, this power, according to Matthew, is not given only to the apostles, or to their successors, but to all believers, and we can think that in the “Our Father”, it is the same. Thus, we do not have to ask God to forgive others, if we do nothing in this direction. Considering others, I have only one thing to do: try to forgive, and ask God for his help so that I can do it. But for myself, I cannot forgive myself, so I ask God to give me this forgiveness that I need so much.
What is ultimately important is to note that whatever the logical link between the two propositions, the forgiveness received is necessarily linked to the forgiveness offered. We can only truly forgive if we know we are forgiven, and similarly we can only feel truly freed from any feeling of guilt if we ourselves stop being demanding and judgmental of others. Forgiving and being forgiven is in fact the same movement; it is ultimately believing and wanting to experience forgiveness in ourselves in all its dimensions.
The translation suggests that God could intentionally send us evil to tempt us, to put us to the test. The request would then be to beg him not to send us any additional trials…
There is no unanimity in the Bible, but it is certain that the constant evolution found in biblical theology is to make God more and more independent of the evil that happens on Earth, or that happens to us quite simply. Thus, in the oldest texts we see God as the source of both good and evil, where more recent texts involve the action of the “devil” to designate the origin of evil, so that God cannot be involved in it. The New Testament obviously goes in this direction, and the “temptations” of Christ never, in any of the Gospels, have God as their author…
Certainly temptation can be a test, but we can also say that in every test there is a temptation: that of giving up, of admitting defeat by this test and of ceasing to fight against it. And here again, if it is a question of fighting against a test, it goes without saying that this cannot come from God, we do not have to fight against anything that is given to us by God.
Then, the translation “submit” is certainly bad for rendering the verb eisenegkein which, itself, is not a difficult verb, and which does not contain any notion of submission. This word simply means “to bring in somewhere”. It is in particular the verb which is used in the Gospel to designate the action of the friends of the paralytic who bring him “in” into the house so that Jesus can heal him (Luke 5.19). As for the verb form used, it can indifferently designate an action coming from God himself or an action that God would allow to be done. It would therefore be better to translate: “Do not let us enter into the test”, or again, "make sure that we are not introduced into the test as if shut up in a house, or in a cell. » This, we can well ask God: that he gives us a way out, that he frees us, that he opens a passage before us, as he freed the people of Egypt, opening a passage for them in the Red Sea.
We could even then rehabilitate the usual translation that we criticized earlier: what we ask of God is that we are not “subjected” in the ordeal, that we are not irremediably defeated, losing our autonomy, our own sovereignty, but that we can recover a certain freedom and dignity. That we can raise our heads without losing all hope, without being lost, annihilated by the ordeal. One of the old translations which said: “do not let us succumb in the ordeal” was certainly far from the original text in terms of literalness, but in essence it restored the meaning of this request well.
The rest of the request itself says as precisely as possible what we had just found. However, it adds an essential clarification: we can indeed notice that the request of the Our Father concerning this evil which could happen to us expresses a very particular conviction: it is in no way a question of asking that evil does not happen to us, but that God frees us from it. The action of God is not seen as intervening on the evil itself, but on the believer.
Pastor Louis Pernot