The Lord's Prayer: A Dilemma

I have a dilemma concerning the Lord's Prayer. Neither horn of the dilemma is scary, but there really are two horns and I am hesitating between them. Maybe you can give me a hand.

Raymond E. Brown, a noted biblical scholar, has a series of lectures on the beginnings of the church, let’s say from about 40—100 A.D. In those lectures, he talks about how the first Christians, who were Jews with special associations with Jesus, began to learn to pray as Christians. He says they prayed the Jewish prayers with which they had grown up. Then they began to adapt them, very gradually, to the idea that the promised messiah had actually come. And they had the training prayer of Jesus, the “Lord’s Prayer,” to use as a guide. So far, so good.

Brown holds what I understand is now the majority view among biblical scholars, that the Lord’s Prayer is to be understood as an eschatological prayer. What does that mean? It is a prayer that is clearly understood only if you believe that the last times are imminent. So the words that could, absent any particular context of meaning, be understood to mean nearly anything, really should be understood to mean something specific: they have to do with the awful trials and great hopes of the end of time. If the Lord’s Prayer is really an eschatological prayer, then those meanings should be privileged; other meanings should be moved on down the list of “likely meanings.”

With that in mind, the first three petitions make a great deal of sense: God’s name is to be blessed, God’s kingdom is to be realized, God’s will is to be done on earth as it is done in heaven. The verbs that fuel these petitions are what Brown calls “one time acts.” So, in the aorist tense, I suppose. And they are all what are sometimes called “divine passives.” When the text asks for something to be done that only God can do, it is understood not as a hope that it will happen, but as a request that God make sure it happens. So the petitions would have the flavor of: “Dear God, make your name hallowed; make your kingdom come; make your will be done.”

If these are acts, rather than processes, then we may ask, “When is God to do these things we have requested?” The answer, if this is truly an eschatological prayer, is, “Now.” If these are the last times—let’s say that Jesus gave the disciples this prayer around 30 A.D.—then we need to be looking for God to do these things in the immediate future. You would expect the early church, in praying this prayer, to be consulting each other on whether anyone had seen the first signs that day.

The second three petitions follow the same pattern, although the question of what “daily bread” means, is complicated by the fact that the word translated as “daily” appears nowhere else in the Greek language—ever. This is the single use of epiousios. So we don’t actually know what it means. The other two petitions are not quite so daunting. “Forgive us our debts, for we have forgiven the debts of those who would otherwise be indebted to us.” The second presupposes that the end times will be truly awful and that in those times, the Evil One will do to the covenant people whatever he chooses to do. This is the awful trial (pierasmos), which we ask to be spared. So “do not open us to the awful trial” and “deliver us from the Evil One” are parallel expressions. Both of them make immediate sense in the context of the awful last days, the eschaton. If a German Jew in the 1930s were to pray, "Do not allow us to be subjected to the Holocaust," it would have this meaning precisely. The picture I chose to illustrate this can be interpreted several ways, but it doesn't look like any of them are good.

The final petition could mean “that which we need all the time,” reasoning from the ousios part of the word. It could mean “spiritual bread,” the bread that is “above” material bread. It might even mean, following an Aramaic gospel text, “tomorrow’s bread,” referring to the manna that fell in abundance on the day before the Sabbath. In the context of the eschaton, it could mean the feast God provides for his children in the last times. Brown says he doesn’t know and that means that I don’t know either.

But the end didn’t come by the end of the First Century or by the end of the Second. The context required for this reading of the Lord’s Prayer became hypothetical and remote. New meanings, meanings Brown calls “pastoral,” come to the fore. “Give us each day the bread we need for that day.” It is not an eschatological meaning, but it fits very well with Jesus’ instructions not to worry about tomorrow, but to trust God for the meeting of today’s needs. “Deliver us from evil” can be an urgent prayer by any disciple in any era, who feels the world pressing him into its mold. It has no association, now, with “the Evil One,” but “sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof” still has to do with Jesus.

So, briefly, the “meaning” of the prayer changed. It cannot mean for us what it meant for the disciples to whom Jesus taught it. Now what?

I come now to the dilemma I mentioned. Praying the prayer Jesus taught requires accepting the eschatological context that gave it meaning. That context is unavailable to us as believers. It is possible that scholars could come to approximate it. They could know in some detail what was meant by “end times” among Jesus’ contemporaries; they could dwell in those details until “the last times” became an emotionally significant possibility. Such people could meaningfully pray the prayer Jesus taught. Or mystics. By processes that I know next to nothing about, but which I respect, mystics could so apprehend the sense of the end times that they, too, could meaningfully pray for the climactic establishment of God’s kingdom or pray to be spared from an immediately sensed Evil One. I don’t think I could do either of those, myself. Not, particularly, starting at my age.

But what is the alternative? It is “adapting” the prayer of Jesus. We remove the context of meaning and substitute another context, the ongoing practice of living our daily lives as disciples. So the hallowing of God’s name and the onset of His kingdom are “good ideas” in some general way, but they are not things we look for and hope for. The daily bread becomes just “enough to live on;” the Evil One becomes “pervasive evil.”

That’s not a bad prayer. Nearly every element of it can be found in Jesus’ teaching somewhere. It is a prayer of admirable sentiments. It is a prayer worth praying. But it is not Jesus’ prayer.
I honestly don’t know whether to hold to what I “know”—keep in mind how tenuous my grasp on this is—and come as close to it as I can or to pray for what I need and cut the connection to the teacher of the prayer. I like the meanings of the Lord’s Prayer as I learned it as a child and as I have practiced it all my life. I probably can’t give it up now. Maybe if I just treated it the way I treat some of the early church confessions, I can have a little of each world.

That’s the problem about dilemmas. You really can’t own both sides and you have to choose.