Matthew 6:9-13 — The Lord's Prayer

LINDA: The most prayed prayer in the history of the world fits in a single breath. You can say it start to finish before a traffic light changes, and this week it'll be spoken out loud in hundreds of languages, in cathedrals and hospital chapels and at kitchen tables, mostly without anybody slowing down on a single word. Which is a shame, because every word in it was chosen.

FRANK: Chosen by Jesus, and handed over on purpose. Welcome to Dig Deeper, everybody, I'm Frank Edwards, Linda Brown's across the desk from me, and we are so glad you're here. Today is Matthew six, verses nine through thirteen, the Lord's Prayer, set right in the middle of those three acts of piety we walked through, giving, prayer, fasting. Linda, would you read it for us, and take it slow?

LINDA: Matthew chapter six, beginning at verse nine. "So then, this is how you should pray: 'Our Father in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one.'"

FRANK: Picture who first heard that. A devout Jew in the first century did not lack for prayers. He had the Amidah, the great standing prayer, recited three times a day—morning, afternoon, and evening—rich and ancient and soaked in Scripture, and it opens by naming God as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, approaching him through the covenant fathers. So Jesus isn't teaching people who've never prayed. He's handing a well-prayed people a new pattern. And the first word is... [short pause] Father. Behind the Greek most likely stands the Aramaic Abba, the word a child used at home, at the table, warm and unguarded. To open your mouth before the God of Sinai with that word was not casual. If I had to put the claim of this passage in one line, it's this: you come to a Father whose glory is your good. The prayer starts in heaven, it ends at your kitchen table, and it's one Father from the first line to the last.

LINDA: Father is also the most worn-out word in religion, though. Homer calls Zeus the father of gods and men. Half the traditions on earth have some sky-father. Sell me on why Jesus saying it is different, and not just the local dialect for a universal idea.

FRANK: Zeus is a fair test. When Homer calls him father, he means origin, the patriarch at the top of the heap, and nobody in that world expected Zeus to be tender with them. What Jesus hands his disciples is something Scripture had been building toward for a very long time. In Exodus four, before Israel has a law or a tabernacle, God sends Moses into Pharaoh's court to say, "Israel is my son, my firstborn. Let my son go." A slave nation, claimed as a son, by sheer redeeming love. Then Romans eight: "You received the Spirit of adoption, by whom we cry, Abba, Father." That's the doctrine of adoption, and in plain terms it means you aren't God's child simply because he made you, the way a potter makes a jar... you're his child by a legal act of grace, brought into the family and given the name. And it cost. The Son took the curse so the rest of us could become sons and daughters. As a word, "Father" is common enough. As a right? Who do you think paid for it?

LINDA: Paid for is the difference. Anybody can say the word, but only the adopted get to say it and mean, you're mine, and I'm yours, and you know my name.

FRANK: Yours, and heard. One more edge on it, too: the word is "our." Nobody prays this as an only child. Now count how far into the prayer you get before asking for anything for yourself. His name. His kingdom. His will. Three petitions go by before bread comes up. The order is the sermon.

FRANK: Take the first one, "hallowed be your name." In Scripture a name isn't a label on a jar, it's the whole character and reputation of a person, and in Ezekiel thirty-six God says his people profaned his name among the nations, dragged it through the mud, and then he declares, "I will sanctify my great name." He stakes his own glory on it. So when we pray this line, we're joining a longing God has already spoken over himself. It's the fall run in reverse. In Eden the creature grabbed for the center. Here the child asks the Father to have the center back.

LINDA: His name is already holy, though. It doesn't need me. Asking God to make his name holy sounds like asking the ocean to please be wet. What am I actually asking for?

FRANK: The ocean is closer than you think. The verb is hagiazō, to set something apart as sacred, to treat it as utterly other than everything around it, and the form here is a request, a "let it be so," not an announcement. God's holiness doesn't wait on anybody; he's holy if not one tongue on earth admits it. What you're asking is that it be recognized, given its real weight, in hearts that cheapen it every hour, and you can start with your own. Isaiah sees the seraphim cry "Holy, holy, holy," and he says, "Woe is me, I am undone." That's hallowing. Then in John seventeen Jesus prays, "I have revealed your name to the people you gave me." He doesn't just teach this petition. He is its answer. On the days you can't want God's glory more than your own comfort, there was one who did, every hour, to the cross, and his zeal is counted as yours. Does that change what the first line asks of you?

LINDA: It turns the first line into a gift instead of a test. The next line is harder. "Your will be done." Picture the hallway outside the oncology ward, your dad's scan results on a clipboard nobody's handed you yet. In that hallway, "your will be done" sounds like the thing you say once you've given up.

FRANK: Given up is how a lot of people hear it, and the text won't let you. Look at what it's attached to: "your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven." As we talked about earlier in this series, the kingdom is God's saving reign breaking in through Christ, and here it's something we pray toward. We don't build it. We ask for it to arrive, and we ask knowing the throne is occupied. Then turn to Matthew twenty-six. Jesus in Gethsemane, face to the ground, and he prays the exact phrase, word for word in the Greek, "your will be done." Was he giving up? He was asking a Father whose will is good to win, under more weight than any of us will ever feel. That's not the prayer of someone who stopped hoping. It's the prayer of a son who trusts his Father more than his own plan.

LINDA: Bread, then, is the petition people are tempted to skip. Is it really a prayer for the hungry? Because for anyone with a stocked pantry, "give us this day our daily bread" is basically a thank-you note for groceries.

FRANK: Groceries are exactly what hides it. The people Jesus was talking to had no pantry for the week. A day laborer stood in the marketplace at dawn hoping to be hired, and the Law insisted he be paid before sundown, Deuteronomy twenty-four, because that coin was the evening meal. No work, no sickness pay, grain that spoiled in the heat... life ran one loaf at a time. And the word translated "daily," epiousios, is so rare that scholars still argue over it, but its best sense is the bread for the day now upon us. Today's ration. That's the laborer's prayer, the prayer of someone who can't see past sundown, and Jesus puts it in the mouth of the rich man and the poor man alike. A full pantry doesn't exempt you. It just keeps you from noticing that you live from his hand every single day, whatever the account says. And the pantry never stocked the thing you're actually short on. What is it?

LINDA: Patience. Enough of it for the fourth time she asks what day it is. The strength to lift him from the chair to the bed at eleven at night when your back is already gone. The nerve to sit in the pediatric waiting room while they run the test again. None of that keeps. You can't bank Thursday's patience on Monday.

FRANK: None of it keeps, and that's the design. The same lips that said "hallowed be your name" are now asking for today's ration, and the prayer refuses to split the two. Worship and need in one breath. You don't graduate from the bread line into the sanctuary; you're a child in both.

FRANK: Here is where it turns, though, because the next line is the costliest in the prayer and the one people race past. "Forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors." Matthew's word is opheilēmata, what's owed, an unpaid balance on the books, and Jesus ties the asking to the giving.

LINDA: Ties it how? "As we also have forgiven." Past tense, even. That reads like I have to settle my accounts before God will settle his. Which makes grace sound like a transaction with a lot of fine print.

FRANK: Grace isn't for sale, and this prayer isn't selling it. Paul gives the order in Colossians three: "even as Christ forgave you, so you also do." His forgiveness is first; ours follows. Matthew Henry captured the same truth this way: "Those who desire to find mercy with God, must show mercy to their brethren."

LINDA: "Must." That's still a toll booth. Jesus doesn't soften it either. Two verses later he says if you don't forgive others, your Father won't forgive you. I'm not reading that into it. It's right there.

FRANK: Right there, and nobody should soften it. Look at how Jesus tells it in Matthew eighteen. A servant is forgiven ten thousand talents, a debt he could never repay in a hundred lifetimes, and he walks out and grabs a fellow servant by the throat over a hundred denarii. What's wrong with him? He didn't fail to earn his mercy. He never grasped that he'd received it. Forgiving others is the fruit in this prayer, not the root; grace that never flows outward was never really taken hold of. So is it a condition? The way breathing is a condition of being alive. It's not how you get life. It's how anyone can tell you have it.

LINDA: Breathing I'll take. The text is clearer than I wanted it to be. The hard case isn't a coworker, though. You're driving your mother to the cardiologist, and she owes you the apology, for years of things, and some mornings now she doesn't know your name. That apology is never coming. What does forgiving her even look like?

FRANK: It looks like a decision, not a feeling. It's saying to God, maybe only to God, "I release what she owes me. I won't collect it anymore." Letting go of your right to be repaid, to hear the words, to see her finally understand... and those were real rights, because the wound is real. From the outside it might look like nothing at all. The same drive, the same parking garage. Just no ledger open on the seat between you. And nobody does that on willpower. You do it standing inside a debt already cancelled at the cross, cancelled while you were still the debtor. You forgive out of a full account, not an empty one.

LINDA: "Lead us not into temptation" worries people for a different reason. The concern is that God might be steering us toward it. Is he?

FRANK: He isn't. James says it flatly: God tempts no one. The word is peirasmos, and it can mean a lure to sin or a testing that squeezes you, and here it's a child's plea: don't bring me into the hour I can't bear, and when it comes, rescue me from the evil one. Matthew's Greek most naturally points to a person there, not a vague badness. There is an enemy, and you're asking your Father to stand between. Many later copies close with "Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever," which is nearly David's praise in First Chronicles twenty-nine. Whoever added it heard the logic right. The prayer ends where it began, every petition lifted back into the hands of God, who owns all things.

LINDA: One breath has room for the Father's name and the cardiology appointment and the grudge you can't put down. Said to the same Father.

FRANK: The same Father is the point. The order was never "God first, and you if there's time left over." His name, his kingdom, his will come first because his glory is your good; they aren't competing for the top line. And he put the words in your mouth himself, so you'd never have to wonder whether you're allowed to ask. [quietly] If the first word really is Father, and it was bought for you, what are you still asking him for as if he were a stranger?

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