Chapter 13

Matthew 6:7–15

LISTEN to the Story

7“And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans,1 for they think they will be heard because of their many words. 8Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.

9“This, then, is how you should pray:

“ ‘Our Father in heaven,

hallowed be your name,

10your kingdom come,

your will be done,

on earth as it is in heaven.

11Give us today our daily bread.

12And forgive us our debts,

as we also have forgiven our debtors.

13And lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from the evil one.’2

14For if you forgive other people when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15But if you do not forgive others their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.”

Listening to the text in the Story: Exodus 32; 1 Kings 18:16–46; Isaiah 44:6–20; also Deuteronomy 6:4–8; the Psalms.

You may well be preparing to preach or teach this passage and so may feel as I do. Thus, I will ask your question: How does one say anything fresh about the Lord’s Prayer? The first thing to say is this: Don’t try to say something new because you’ll be wrong. The second thing to say is this: Let traditional significance shape what you say. And third is this: Say what it says. Its value is its heritage, and its heritage will guide you.

Observe that Matthew 6:7–15 is an intrusion into what is otherwise a tightly organized section. If you regard 6:1 as the theme verse and then look at the units on almsgiving (6:2–4), prayer (6:5–6), skip the next unit (6:7–15), and then fasting (6:16–18), you will easily observe an almost obsessive organization of those sections. Matthew 6:7–15 doesn’t fit in two ways: first, thematically, it isn’t concerned with acts of piety done by Jewish “hypocrites” to impress others but with long-winded, gassy prayers by Gentiles designed to manipulate God into answering; second, grammatically and syntactically 6:7–8 isn’t like 6:2–4, 5–6, or 16–18, but varies significantly. Along this line, 6:9–13, the Lord’s Prayer itself, has no similar type of positive instruction in the other sections of 6:1–18; moreover, 6:14–15 is yet another intrusion—a parenthetical set of lines that form a “commentary” on 6:12. In our day, an author would have put 6:14–15 into a footnote at the end of 6:12.

Our section, then, draws on the contrast between pagan piety and God’s design. The theology of the pagans involves a god who can be manipulated, against which view Jesus teaches a God who already knows and can be trusted. This unit draws out Israel’s strict monotheism (Exod 20:3–5; Deut 6:4–8) and the Story of Israel in their interaction with pagan gods, including the golden calf episode in Exodus 32 and Elijah’s challenge of the Baalim on Mount Carmel in 1 Kings 18 as well as the standard trope against idolatry in the prophets (e.g., Isa 44:6–20). Furthermore, what Jesus teaches here expresses again the ongoing Jewish denunciation of pagan gods and religious practices (e.g., 1 Macc 2).3

God, the one and only true God, who loves Israel as a father loves his children, forms the foundation of the theology of the Lord’s Prayer. But the content of the prayer is shaped by hope: this is preeminently a prayer that expresses a longing for God’s promises for Israel and the earth to come true. It mirrors the Magnificat of Mary (Luke 1:46–55) and the Benedictus of Zechariah (1:67–79), but instead of announcing the dawn of the kingdom, this prayer teaches the disciples to orient prayers toward the dawn of that kingdom. As the Son of the Father, Jesus shows the disciples how he himself prays to the Father. Using this prayer, then, is one way of entering into the perichoretic, or inner-relational life, of the Trinity: this prayer reveals how God communicates with God.

EXPLAIN the Story

There are two natural parts: the setting (6:7–8) and the response (6:9–15).

The Setting (6:7–8)

The NIV’s “when you pray” is identical to “when you give to the needy” (6:2), “when you pray” (6:5), and “when you fast” (6:16), but “when” does not bring to the surface that the Greek construction in 6:7 varies from the Greek in 6:2, 5, 16.4 One way of translating this in a way that reflects the Greek variation from the pattern in 6:2, 5, 16 would be to translate it as “In your praying….” Such a translation tips the reader off to the variation and prevents one from thinking there are actually four identical sections in 6:1–18.

Jesus has Gentiles in mind with their piling up of the names of their gods.5 Sometimes the Gentiles seemed to be hoping a god would be awake or listening—and it is not wrong here to humanize these gods because that his how they come off in texts like The Iliad and The Odyssey. Catullus wrote a poem about the goddess Diana; the fourth line from the end perfectly illustrates the problem Jesus sees in Gentile prayers (put in italics):

Under Diana’s protection,

we pure girls, and boys:

we pure boys, and girls,

we sing of Diana.

O, daughter of Latona,

greatest child of great Jove,

whose mother gave birth

near the Delian olive,

mistress of mountains

and the green groves,

the secret glades,

and the sounding streams:

you, called Juno Lucina

in childbirth’s pains,

you, called all-powerful Trivia

and Luna, of counterfeit daylight.

Your monthly passage

measures the course of the year,

you fill the rustic farmer’s

roof with good crops.

Take whatever sacred name

pleases you, be a sweet help

to the people of Rome,

as you have been of old.6

Jesus’ observation about Gentile prayer is common in Judaism: “do not keep on babbling like pagans.”7 The Greek word behind our “babble” is a bit of a mystery when it comes to its origins, but that Greek word (battalogeō) creates the impression of mindless babbling.8 At the end of this verse the words “many words” (polylogia) is used, and it permits us to combine it with “babble” to see Jesus’ criticism directed at a nonstop prattling in the presence of God. Jesus focuses on intent. The pagan intent is the belief that if they are long-winded or pray long enough or if they show their sincerity by going on and on, God will hear them. Pushing Gentile anxiety in prayer was the offendability and capriciousness of the gods. Jesus teaches the goodness and love of God, here speaking of God’s loving care of all (5:43–48) and calling God “Father.”

Contrary to pagan perceptions of who God is, Jesus’ Father knows needs before God’s people ask. Perhaps this idea is from one of the predictions about the new heavens and the new earth from Isaiah 65:24:

Before they call I will answer;

while they are still speaking I will hear.

This does not say the Father knows what they will ask before they ask but that the Father knows their needs before they make them known. Jesus’ intent is not to discourage his followers from petitioning the Father but from thinking they can manipulate or cajole God. This means that the major intent of the Lord’s Prayer is to reveal a short prayer in contradiction to the long prayers of the pagans. Few prayers say so much in such few words, but good examples of “short” prayers can be found in the Psalms, none perhaps more notable than Psalm 23.

The Response (6:9–15)

Gentiles, because of what they believe about God, are defective in their prayers. Jesus knows God as Father and as good, kind, and benevolent and as holy and just. That theology empowers him to teach his followers to approach God in confidence. Prayer is not informing God of something unknown but drawing oneself in the divine life of the Trinity and into the very mission of God in this world—this God loves us and invites us into his presence with our petitions.

Tradition has observed that the Lord’s Prayer is broken into two parts: You petitions and We petitions—those directed at God and those directed for others. The Jesus Creed sharpens this tradition of seeing the Lord’s Prayer in two parts. With the Jesus Creed, the Lord took the Jewish Shema, rooted in Deuteronomy 6:4–8, and added Leviticus 19:18. Thus, his fundamental creed is to love God and to love others as ourselves. Jesus hereby adds a horizontal dimension to the Shema to supplement the vertical.

The same sort of addition happens in the Lord’s Prayer. Many scholars observe that the Lord’s Prayer has notable connections to a Jewish prayer now called Qaddish, to which Jesus added concerns for others. I provide a common translation of Qaddish, though we cannot be sure about its precise form in the first century, and I have italicized words that show similarities to the Lord’s Prayer.

Magnified and sanctified be His great name in the world which He created according to His will.

And may He establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future, and say Amen.

Response: May His great Name be blessed forever and ever.

Blessed, praised and glorified, exalted, extolled and honored, adored and lauded by the Name of the Holy One, blessed be He, beyond all blessings and hymns, praises and songs that are uttered in the world, and say Amen.

The parallels are notable, and they can’t be ignored. We have every reason to think the Lord’s Prayer builds on and modifies the Qaddish, with one notable difference: instead of the prayer/creed being focused solely on the vertical, the horizontal is added. The Lord’s Prayer adapts the Qaddish’s focus on God (the You petitions) and adds without parallel in the Qaddish the We petitions. True piety for Jesus transcends our relationship with God and becomes relation to both God and others. True piety is about loving God and loving others, and this works into prayer: prayer is about praying for God’s glory and for blessings for others. Those who love God yearn for his Name to be sanctified, his kingdom to come, and his will to be done. Those who love others yearn for their daily bread, their reciprocal forgiveness, their growth in holiness, and their deliverance from the evil one.

Introduction (6:9a)

The introduction to the Lord’s Prayer, when compared with Luke’s version, introduces us to the world of Jewish prayer at the time of Jesus. Matthew’s text reads: “This, then, is how you should pray.”

Matthew’s “this” and “how” translate houtōs, an adverb. One could translate, “Pray thusly.” That is, the Lord’s Prayer is how the disciples are to pray, and this would throw emphasis on the brevity and directness of the Lord’s Prayer in contrast to the length of Gentile prayers. The Lord’s Prayer is a model of how to pray; some infer that the Lord’s Prayer is not a set of words to be recited.9 Such a view ignores the plain meaning of Luke’s text. Here is Luke 11:1–2.10

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.”

He said to them, “When you pray, say….11

The disciples approach Jesus and ask him to teach them to pray, and they ask to be taught the way John taught his disciples to pray. But the next words clarify what they are requesting and make the request much more concrete. Jesus says to them, and now I translate more literally to bring out the nuances of the Greek text, “Whenever you pray, recite this.” Jesus’ words show that he is thinking they are asking for a set prayer—something very Jewish to do—and he gives them just that. Then he says they are to pray this prayer whenever they (perhaps only as a group but probably whenever any of them prays) pray. And the word “say” can be translated “recite.”

These verses, then, don’t teach so much how to pray but what to say whenever they pray. Jesus taps into the great Jewish prayer tradition of memorized prayers and gives a new template of prayer,12 but the kind of template that is recited over and over as a form of spiritual formation. We have the book of Psalms because these were prayers deemed worthy of recitation in public, and we have the Lord’s Prayer as another instance of recited prayer.

What is for me the clincher in this issue: the church has always recited the Lord’s Prayer. The recitation of the Lord’s Prayer among Catholics, the Orthodox, the Protestants (the Reformers emphasized the Lord’s Prayer as template and as recited), and among all Christians occurred until the informality of prayers became the rule in the twentieth century for some groups of Christians. It’s time for many of us to regain what we dropped. Informality has had its day; it’s time for some formality too.

Our Father (6:9b)

Those who love God know God as Father. Jesus includes the disciples and excludes the hypocrites and Gentiles in the model prayer by saying “our” (making it a public prayer). By calling God “Father”13 Jesus focuses on his own relationship—he is Son—and the kind of relationship he wants his followers to have (John 10:30). But the first comes first: our “sonship,” or “familial relation with God as Father,” derives from and participates in the Son’s relationship to the Father. We are not equal children but sons and daughters through and in the Son’s filial relation with the Father (cf. Matt 5:45; Gal 3:26; 1 John 5:1).

Long ago Joachim Jeremias explained at length that calling God “Father” was profoundly important to Jesus and should be connected to justification and adoption in Pauline theology.14 The heart of the message of the term Abba meant something like “Daddy,” partaking as it did in the intimacy of the Jewish family. Jeremias was right to point to the intimacy dimension of the term. But he also pushed harder to suggest that this was not only innovative and unique on the part of Jesus but transcended Jewish religion, and on this scholarship has firmly pronounced Jeremias mistaken. Calling God “Father” (Abba) is not unique to Jesus,15 and neither is it a revelation of a religious profundity that Judaism had not yet comprehended (what can be more intimate than Hosea 1–2 or 11:1–4?).

Instead of its being unique, “Father” is characteristic of Jesus but would not have been at all offensive in Judaism. All of Jesus’ prayers, except his cry of dereliction (Mark 15:34), begin with “Father” (e.g., Matt 11:25–26; John 17). The term “Father” brings together at least two attributes of God: his intimate love for his children as well as his sovereign power, which is evoked with “in heaven.” To call God “Father” in prayer is to receive that love, to know his power, and to seek to embody his will, which are expressed in the You petitions of the Lord’s Prayer.

The Name (6:9c)

Those who love God long for God to be honored. The “name” of God is often referred to as the sacred tetragrammaton (the holy four letters), often spelled YHWH and sometimes as Yahweh. Many Christians are sensitive to Jewish scruples, so they write the unpronounceable YHWH. This name is said to derive from God’s conversation with Moses in Exodus 3:13–15. There are interesting variants on the Name in the New Testament, including both a focus on the name of Jesus (Yeshua; Phil 2:9) and the Trinitarian formula (Matt 28:18–20). Anything said of YHWH can be said of Jesus, or of the Trinitarian God, but YHWH remains the Old Testament name for God.16 In the “lexicon” of the Bible and ancient Judaism, the “name” represents the person and that person’s character. Not using the Name is not simply about protective speech but is about God—to honor God’s Name is to honor God, the God who is so impeccably perfect that language is to be given full consideration when speaking to and about God.

Nothing in the Old Testament prohibits pronouncing the sacred Name, though the strict warning about “misusing” it in the Ten Commandments (Exod 20:7) led to restrictions. One sure way of never taking God’s name in vain is never to use it, and not saying the Name was Jewish custom at the time of Jesus. The Lord’s Prayer is a good indicator that Jesus joined his fellow Jews in not uttering the sacred Name. Jesus routinely uses language that reveals respect for God through indirect mention (as in “the Mighty One” at Mark 14:62),17 and he seems also to have substituted “the Name” (HaShem) for the sacred Name when speaking (Matt 23:39).

It is customary, and I have said this myself, to say that Jesus exhorts his followers to “hallow” the Name in how they live, but this is not accurate: the first three petitions are aimed at God in prayer.18 Thus, Jesus here petitions God to hallow God’s Name.19 To be sure, if God acts to honor God’s Name, then surely the followers of Jesus will too, but this text actually speaks of a divine action and in this evokes a common theme in the prophets. Note Ezekiel’s words:

Therefore say to the house of Israel, Thus says the Lord GOD: It is not for your sake, O house of Israel, that I am about to act, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations to which you came. (Ezek 36:22 NRSV)

… when I have brought them back from the peoples and gathered them from their enemies’ lands, and through them have displayed my holiness in the sight of many nations. Then they shall know that I am the LORD their God because I sent them into exile among the nations, and then gathered them into their own land. I will leave none of them behind. (Ezek 39:27–28 NRSV)

The word “hallow” translates the Greek word hagiasthētō, which means to honor, sanctify, set apart, and treat with the highest of respect. In this context, since it refers to divine (not human) action, this petition is a prayer that God will act in a way that glorifies himself (cf. John 12:28). What Jesus has in mind is clear: he wants God to act to bring in the kingdom in order to display God’s rule. Humans, particularly Israelites or the Romans occupying the Land, defile and profane the name of God in sinful living (Lev 18:21).20 Again, focusing on how we profane God’s name is not the point of Jesus’ words; this petition is not a veiled act by the pray-er to get more Torah observance, nor is it a side glance at others to become more obedient. This is a petition for God to act.

The opposite is our cold, shallow choice not to desire or pray for God’s glorious name to be established above all names. This, then, is more about our hopes, our desires, our affections, and our aches than it is about what we are doing or not doing in the realm of behaviors. Again, this request casts light on what we most want to be raised on high—God’s name or something else? The petition is about priorities and a request for revival.

Pastors, theologians, and writers reflect on the significance of beginning the Lord’s Prayer with this petition to hallow the name as the model for prayer; that is, all prayer should begin with God. However sound theologically, there is a difference between beginning with God and teaching us always to begin with God. Jesus does begin with God, but he is not teaching that here.

The Kingdom and Will of God (6:10)

What Jesus meant by “kingdom” has a long history. Some focus on the time element. One group of scholars, teaching what is often called “consistent” eschatology, focuses on the kingdom as on the verge of arrival at the time of Jesus. That is, Jesus believed the kingdom was about to arrive. Two elements are at work in this view: that kingdom would entail a total restoration of creation and the redemption of Israel; also at work here is the view that Jesus was at least in some sense mistaken.21

Resistance to this interpretation surfaced in the English scholar C. H. Dodd. His tiny book The Parables of Jesus22 was the beginning of his exposition of the eschatology of Jesus under the lens of what is now called “realized” eschatology because for Dodd the kingdom was already present in Jesus. What remained was only the apocalyptic completion of history.

Between these poles of eschatology, one emphasizing imminent arrival of the kingdom and the other its “already” manifestation, lies a host of scholars in what is probably the consensus of scholars today: the kingdom of God for Jesus is both present and future. It is present but without consummation; it is both now and not yet. This view is often called “inaugurated” eschatology. The most influential presentation of this view for the more evangelical audience was George Eldon Ladd.23

Ladd defined the kingdom as dynamically active in Jesus (see Matt 4:17; 12:28). He was pressed hard in his day by dispensationalists, who more or less saw the kingdom as millennium/heaven; in response Ladd probably exaggerated both the abstract and “dynamic” nature of the kingdom. Consequently, for some of his followers “kingdom” gets close to personal salvation and the experience of surrendering one’s life to God as King.24 Now, surely submission is inherent to kingdom language, but when it is reduced to the personal experience of surrender, we are mistaking what “kingdom” meant in Jesus’ world. Ladd did not teach such simplicities.

But I want to suggest a way of thinking about the kingdom that modifies inaugurated eschatology, though I cannot defend that view at length here. A first-century Jew would have at least had the following ideas in mind whenever the word “kingdom” was mentioned, and all of this rolls out of the Old Testament expectations for God’s future:25 God as King, and for Jesus this mutates into the Davidic hope with himself as the messianic King; an Israelite society governed by the Davidic Messiah; a society or a people marked by peace, holiness, love, and wisdom in the land of Israel; a people governed by the Torah of Moses, but now once again mutated by Jesus into his teachings; and finally, since the kingdom would be the final realization of prophetic hopes, the kingdom would also be marked by new creation, new power, new obedience, and the healing of all sicknesses and diseases. The essential society-shaped, or people-shaped, form of the kingdom must be recovered, and this means the kingdom cannot be divorced from the church. So for Jesus “kingdom” would have meant the society of God’s people flourishing in this world under Christ as the King.

The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer, then, expresses, as found in the Qaddish and expressed by Simeon (Luke 2:25) and Joseph of Arimathea (Mark 15:43), the Jewish ache for God’s society to be fully established on earth. The vision of Revelation 21 is what Jesus has in mind. The highest form of loving God is longing for what most glorifies God. The Story of God in the Bible is the Story that God is Creator, Lord, and Redeemer, and that God’s plan for history is for it all to be summed up with Christ as Lord and with God ruling over the entire world.

The first and second petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are fundamentally gospel aches: they ache for the full Story to become complete where God is All in All. But this ache is not just for the global, cosmic, and universal reign of God. Since the kingdom is already making itself present, and since we are called to live now in light of that future consummation, each and every act of love, peace, justice, and wisdom that we do enters into that final kingdom reality. But again, this petition is about God’s acting and not about our moral behaviors. A beautiful, poetic and prophetic announcement of what Jesus is saying can be found in Isaiah 52:7–10:

7How beautiful on the mountains

are the feet of those who bring good news,

who proclaim peace,

who bring good tidings,

who proclaim salvation,

who say to Zion,

“Your God reigns!”

8Listen! Your watchmen lift up their voices;

together they shout for joy.

When the LORD returns to Zion,

they will see it with their own eyes.

9Burst into songs of joy together,

you ruins of Jerusalem,

for the LORD has comforted his people,

he has redeemed Jerusalem.

10The LORD will lay bare his holy arm

in the sight of all the nations,

and all the ends of the earth will see

the salvation of our God.

The second petition of the Lord’s Prayer unfolds into a third. Some have thought Matthew himself defined “your kingdom come” by adding the explanation: “your will be done.” Its absence in the Lukan version of the Lord’s Prayer adds support to such a view, but when one is pushed to demonstrate that Matthew added the line, the evidence gets flimsier. Whatever its pedigree, “your will be done” is both an eloquent explanation of “your kingdom come” as well as a slight variant. The kingdom emphasizes a social order and a cosmic redemption, while “will” emphasizes the redemptive and moral intent of God for this world and for God’s people (see 7:21; 12:50; 18:14; 21:31; 26:42). Again, this is a prayer for God to act.

“On earth as it is in heaven” is fundamental to the entire Lord’s Prayer as well as all of early Christian eschatology.26 Jesus clearly has no desire, as was the case in Platonic and the wider reaches of much of Greek and Roman thought, to move through this life with as little hassle and suffering as possible. The release of souls from this embodied life into a celestial disembodied existence is not a biblical notion. The opposite is the case with Jesus and for the entire Bible.

A simple tracing of the word “heaven” and “new heavens and a new earth” in the New Testament shows that the final ending is found in Revelation 20–22. There it is not about our going up into the sky or into a disembodied state in heaven but of heaven coming down to earth. The final state according to Revelation 20–22 is on earth. That is why the Lord’s prayer says, “on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s redemptive power aims at realizing the heavenly condition on earth. It follows, then, that “kingdom of heaven” entails the idea that the earthly kingdom will be like the heavenly kingdom; that is, it will be a perfect manifestation of God’s will.

The Bread (6:11)

The Lord’s Prayer now shifts into a second part: from the You petitions to the We petitions. This second half finds itself in asking God for bread, for forgiveness, and for a moral life that flows out of a God whose name is to be hallowed, a kingdom whose desire is uppermost and a divine will that shapes all we do.

It can be put baldly: we do not know exactly what “daily bread” means.27 For some this wrecks what we have always known to be true, but “our daily bread” uses a Greek term that is used but one time in the ancient literature. Dale Allison, a master in the history of interpretation, says “daily” is “an unresolved puzzle.”28 After observing that the third-century scholar Origen said that perhaps the Evangelists invented the word themselves, Allison begins to list and sort out the options: it could mean “needful” or “needed,”29 or “for the current day” (which is what Luke seems to suggest when he adds “each day” in Luke 11:3), or the Eucharist (“supersubstantial”; a majority of the church fathers read it this way; Matt 26:26), or spiritual sustenance (John 6, which can be narrowed as Luther did to the Word of God),30 or Jesus himself (6:48); it could also mean the kind of bread served in the kingdom (Luke 14:15), or the bread of “the coming [final] day.”31

Allison himself leads a number of interpreters when he opts for the “coming day” view, observing that it has ancient support in both patristic writings and early translations of the Bible. That interpretation is rooted in the hope of the eschatological manna (Exod 16; Num 21:5), and the eschatological themes of the first three petitions would then come in to support such a view: eschatological manna for the eschaton.

Do we need to limit our views to one? Allison, for instance, sees it as a blur of daily provision, the eschatological banquet, and the Eucharist, which anticipates that banquet.32 It is wisest to ask what Jesus would have meant, what Matthew’s own horizon could have comprehended, and then to give some freedom to reading this text in light of the Story of God. What appears to be in view is prayer for daily provisions. In support of this view is that the second half of the Lord’s Prayer is concerned with the normal needs of humans. But because the first three petitions focus on the consummation of history, perhaps the bread petition is about the so-called eschatological or kingdom manna. But again, both in the Sermon on the Mount and elsewhere in the Gospels there are indications of routine needs being met (6:25–34), and this leads me to think Jesus was thinking of ordinary bread for ordinary days,33 even if his listeners thought the divine provision was partaking in the bounty of kingdom redemption.34 I doubt that that Eucharist is in view.

The sweep of the Gospels, not to mention 6:25–34, where Jesus points a long finger at consumerism and preoccupation with money and possessions, suggests that when Jesus says, “Give us today our daily bread,” the word today suggests we are not to worry about tomorrow or about storing up food but to trust God for what we need that day. We perhaps need to remind ourselves that the followers of Jesus were not wealthy with pantries and refrigerators filled with food.

The Forgiveness (6:12) and a Clarifying Commentary (6:14–15)

Forgiveness is difficult at the personal and pastoral level, and the twofold reason is because Jesus was so forceful about its necessity for his followers and we find forgiveness so demanding and difficult. We attend to the words of 6:12 as well as the commentary on those words in 6:14–15, words probably added by Matthew on the basis of Mark 11:25–26.35

We begin with the obvious: what Jesus says strikes the Christian as backward and conditional, and we are tempted to fill in the blanks. But what Jesus says in 6:12 as a petition to God is what Jesus says elsewhere in 7:1–5 and in 18:21–35. What Jesus forcefully focuses on his kingdom vision for his followers can be summarized in these two lines, and they summarize both 6:12 and 6:14–15:

Verse 12 is a prayer request: forgive us our sins as we have forgiven those who have sinned against us. In other words, the appeal to God for forgiveness is rooted in our forgiving others. For most of us this seems backward because it seems to make God’s forgiveness conditioned on our forgiving others. But that’s what Jesus says! Matthew 6:14–15, which interrupts the flow from 6:13 to 6:16–18 (but 6:7–13 is an interruption already, and 6:14–15 interrupts further), repeats this. It is likely that Matthew added this as a footnote, or a clarifying comment, by grabbing Mark 11:25–26. Forgiveness from God and our forgiving others are tied together by Jesus. This jars our Christian sensibilities, but that is precisely why Jesus says it as he does: we need to hear how connected our forgiveness and God’s forgiveness are—not so we will go about trying to earn our forgiveness by forgiving others but so we will see the utter importance of being people who forgive.

In our faith we are taught that the real #1 is God has forgiven us, so the real order, and implied by Jesus, is this:

  1. 1. God has graciously forgiven us (of much greater sin/s).
  2. 2. Therefore, we are to forgive others to extend God’s grace.
  3. 3. If we don’t forgive others, we show we are not forgiven.
  4. 4. Forgiven people forgive others.
  5. 5. But our forgiveness does not earn God’s forgiveness.

These five points can be taken as a rough-and-ready sketch of the process of how God’s gracious forgiveness finds a moral compass of forgiveness in the life of the follower of Jesus without compromising the priority of grace; I am confident it is consistent with the kingdom vision of Jesus, and it is confirmed by Matthew 18:23–35.

We are bound in any teaching on forgiveness to speak to the seeming conditionality of how forgiveness works, and this can be taken as a footnote to #1 in the paragraph immediately above. This is where this prayer partakes in Jesus’ Ethic from Above, forcing us to see God’s demand, and an Ethic from Beyond, showing that new creation is already at work. In the Bible God is good, gracious, loving, and forgiving; God offers forgiveness. But Jesus’ intent in this passage is not to frame a forgiveness ethic in the deeper forgiveness by God. Instead, Jesus’ aim is to demand forgiveness of his followers and threaten them with God’s judgment if they don’t become forgiving people. His theory, then, is that forgiveness is reciprocal.36

Jesus is teaching a kingdom perspective on how to deal with those who have sinned against us. Since the kingdom is a world of reconciliation, kingdom people are to forgive. He doesn’t need the above five points to make his case. He reduces the five points in order to sharpen the rhetoric of his concern. He’s staring into the face of fellow Israelites who don’t know the grace of enemy love and who want to appeal too quickly to the lex talionis or who want to become judges like God (7:1–5; cf. Jas 4:11–12). Moreover, that same audience needed to hear that forgiveness is the way kingdom living works. Those who genuinely love others forgive. Those who don’t are not kingdom people.

Back now to the fifth petition of the Lord’s Prayer. The petition to forgive finds its first-century life in the kingdom vision of Jesus to become forgiving people. So important to Jesus is forgiving others that he teaches his followers to ask God for forgiveness for themselves and others because we are grace-receiving and grace-giving people. Such an appeal to one’s own virtues, righteousness, and morality is consistent with a long string of prayers in the Psalms, and though the language may grate against our grace-shaped nerves, that language never expunges the priority of God’s grace. These words are designed to sharpen the edge of the need to forgive others, beginning with the Roman enemies. Jesus teaches his followers to ask God to forgive their “debts,” and this metaphor “debt” is interpreted in the surrounding verses and parallel.

We’ve already mentioned this, but it needs to be said again. In the world of Judaism there were two major ways to express the implications of sins and trespasses: burdens and debts.37 If sin incurred a burden, a person wanted it lifted. Forgiveness in that world is the removal of a burden. The second way to express what incurred from sin was a debt. This opened a new linguistic game for how forgiveness worked: for the debtor, what one needed was cancellation of the debt or credits to compensate the debt. This kind of debt language, which was perfectly common to Jews of Jesus’ day, also produced a way of expressing good moral deeds: they were seen as merits or credits.

Again, this does not mean Judaism was a works-based religion but that it chose to express sins and the removal of sin in that kind of language. Jesus, too, expressed himself in this kind of language, and he does not thereby imply a works-based religion. So, while we are prone to critique Judaism as a works religion because of its debt-merit language, we are prone also to relieve Jesus of such a charge when he speaks of heaven as a reward (which is debt-merit language that correlates one’s “reward” from God to one’s behaviors). We need to be more honest. Jesus talked like his contemporaries.

As we release Jesus from the charge, so we ought to release Judaism from the accusation. What perhaps pokes us in the eye in this issue is that Judaism doesn’t have a prayer seeking for God’s forgiveness that is as conditional as the Lord’s Prayer.38 I’m not saying that Judaism didn’t have pockets of works-shaped religion, but so also does Christianity. What goes alongside any kind of compensatory language in the Bible is a God who is gracious, who acts first to establish covenant, who redeems and transforms and restores, who in that covenant redemptive model exhorts the people of God to live obediently, and then who rewards them for their behaviors.

The Temptation and the Evil One (6:13)

At one level, the sixth petition seems preposterous. Does Jesus really mean we are to ask God to pave the road of life in such a way that we are never tempted? I wonder how many millions of Christians have prayed this sixth petition without ever thinking of the shocking nature of its words if taken at face value. Interpreters tend to assume this request hinges on the meaning of two words: the meaning of “temptation” and the meaning of “the evil one.”

What does it mean to ask God not to lead us into “temptation”? Since the word peirasmos, used here, means either “test, trial” or “temptation,” one could also render it, “Lead me not into the test, or the trial.” The word itself doesn’t decide for us but context does, and this leads to the question of why God would test/tempt, or even more, could God tempt/test. While it is possible that God could test, which is the whole point of the wilderness wanderings of Israel and was recently the experience of Jesus (Matt 4:1–11), both Jewish and Christian tradition affirm both the utter goodness of God as well as the impossibility for the good God to be complicit in evil. This is clearly taught in James 1:13: “For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone.”

This means the word “temptation” must mean “test” if God is the one “leading.” But this is where “deliver” rescues us, for the word “lead” gains clarity in the next verb, rhysai, “to rescue,” which means to deliver both from and out of or to preserve (see, e.g., Matt 27:43; Luke 1:74; Rom 7:24; Col 1:13; 1 Thess 1:10; 2 Thess 3:2; 2 Tim 3:11; 2 Pet 2:7, 9). As a result, this petition is not so much about God’s not leading us into testing or about God’s leading us into temptation, but about God’s protecting and rescuing us from temptation (or testing). In fact, this approach encourages us to read this temptation as a request not to endure what Jesus endured in his test in Matthew 4:1–11. In this case, then, “lead us not into temptation” could be understood as an equivalent to the apostle Paul’s famous line in 1 Corinthians 10:13:

No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.

Thus, this request is about preservation from sin in temptation.

But using the seventh to interpret the sixth petition does not resolve the meaning of “temptation.” Does it mean moral “temptations”39 or divine tests (Gen 22:1–19) or the eschatological40 “test” or “tribulation”? Many scholars today, not the least of whom is Raymond Brown, contend that the Lord’s Prayer is thoroughly eschatological—that it is a prayer shaped entirely by the prospect of an imminent arrival of the fullness of the kingdom.41 It is hard to gainsay such a reading of history for it is part of the earliest Christians’ way of thinking; but when one reads history like this, the eschatological dimension—because it becomes so all-pervasive—seems to diminish. I’m inclined to think that temptation/test and the evil one are, like bread and sins, ordinary dimensions of ordinary life for those who follow Jesus.42

This leads us to “evil one” or to “evil.” Is “deliver us from evil” referring to deliverance from sin in general, or is this about Satan, the evil one?43 In the gospel of Matthew, ho ponēros can refer to the evil one (see 5:37; 13:19, 38) and in another prayer of Jesus this expression refers to Satan (John 17:15),44 but the evidence is not as clear as some think. For example, in 2 Timothy 4:18 Paul prays that the Lord will “rescue” (same word) him from every “evil” attack, and Didache 10:5 prays the church may be saved from evil—and this in contrast to love. Evidence then can be brought in to support both views.

These two petitions, at the safest level, are about aching that one’s fellow followers of Jesus will live morally holy and loving lives and will be rescued through trust in God from temptations and from evil or the wiles of the Evil One. What Peter says in 1 Peter 5:8 confirms this interpretation: “Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour.”

A brief note on the doxology. Readers of most editions of the Bible will find a note that the best and earliest manuscripts do not have the commonly recited doxology at the end of the Lord’s Prayer: “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen” (KJV). Neither does Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:1–4 have a doxology. Those words appear to have been formed on the basis of 1 Chronicles 29:11–13 by someone later than Jesus and the writing of the gospel of Matthew; the doxology was added to the Lord’s Prayer in public prayer, and then was gradually added to the text of the New Testament itself. We recite them today because the public recitation of the Lord’s Prayer seems incomplete without such an ending.

LIVE the Story

Whenever we talk about prayer, major questions arise, even if this is not the context in which to attempt answers to them. And since I’ve extended my limits already in a more extensive commentary on the passage, I’m already running short of space. But still, we ask, why pray? Does prayer make a difference, and if so, how?45 Is God changeable?46 How should we pray, and is there a better way to pray? It is too simplistic to propose, as Luther once did, that prayer does not enter into some form of an interactive relationship with God. Thus, he writes:

The reason He commands it [prayer] is, of course, not in order to have us make our prayers an instruction to Him as to what He ought to give us, but in order to have us acknowledge and confess that He is already bestowing many blessings upon us and that He can and will give us still more.47

Undoubtedly this is true, but it is inadequate as a basis for our theology of prayer. The biblical facts are clear: God’s changeability, not the least of which is to withdraw judgment upon repentance, is more often part of the biblical narrative than the rather rare comment that God is unchangeable, which pertains to God’s utter faithfulness to promises. Good examples include Exodus 32:14; Psalm 106:45; Amos 7:3–6; Joel 2:13–14; and Jonah 4:2. Other biblical facts are also clear, though it is not often clear how we ought to bring them into a cohesive and compelling order: humans are in some sense free, with the stronger position believing in libertarian free will, while at the other end we have some form of compatibilism. As Calvin expresses this compatibilist view, which is undergirded by a view not unlike the citation from Luther above: “Keep hold of both points, then: our prayers are anticipated by Him in His freedom, yet, what we ask we gain by prayer.”48

I affirm what Tiessen calls the redemptive intervention model, in which God’s overall plan is established and known to God while granting freedom within that plan. In this model, prayer changes things, and I believe the biblical models of prayer, from Abraham to David to Elijah to Isaiah to Jesus to Paul and the early churches, affirm this interactive model in which prayer sometimes alters the path of history within the overall plan of God in response to the prayers of God’s people. The upload from this theoretical sketch is that our yearning and our aching for God’s name to be hallowed, for God’s kingdom to come, and for others to experience the blessing of God can prompt God to actions that satisfy those yearnings and aches.

The Lord’s Prayer as Our Prayer

Perhaps the most neglected feature of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon is that the long-winded prayers of the Gentiles form the foil for Jesus’ prayer. In other words, the Lord’s Prayer is a short and to-the-point prayer over against long prayers. Short prayers are good prayers. But again we need circumspection: there are lengthy prayers in the Bible that are commended, and Jesus prayed all night on occasions. The shortness of the Lord’s Prayer, then, is not an instruction that all prayers on all occasions must be short, but that the long and gassy prayers of the Gentiles do not enter into the presence of God as does the Lord’s Prayer.

The Lord’s Prayer marks God’s people. In the context of the Lord’s Prayer in the Sermon and at Luke 11:1–4, its possible presence in 2 Timothy 4:18, but even more in Didache 8, the Lord’s Prayer both formed and became a prayer that marked off the followers of Jesus from other groups in Judaism and the broader Roman world. Luke 11:1 informs us on the context of the Lord’s Prayer. As Jews of Jesus’ day had Ha-Tepillah (recited two to three times per day according to tradition), and as John’s disciples had their prayer (Luke 11:1), so the Lord’s Prayer is the distinctive prayer for the followers of Jesus.

This leads to the focus of this section: the Lord’s Prayer is meant to be recited whenever the follower of Jesus prays.49 This observation derives from the grammar of Luke 11:2: whenever you pray, say this [or, recite this]. What this means in the Jewish world is that at the set hours of prayer, which are almost certainly morning, midafternoon, and evening, the followers of Jesus either added the Lord’s Prayer to Ha-Tepillah, or they replaced Ha-Tepillah with the Lord’s Prayer. We are not to think every whisper of a prayer had to be accompanied with a Lord’s Prayer. The facts are that the first-century Jew lived in a world where piety was marked by pausing three times a day (cf. Ps 55:17; Dan 6:10; Matt 6:5–6; Acts 3:1) and saying one’s prayers, adding to them one’s personal prayer requests.

Anyone who has been to Israel or been among the Orthodox Jews, or who has experience with a Muslim community, knows that set times for set prayers is an old, old tradition. It was pervasive among the Jewish community in the first century. To this day monastic communities pray at set times, and Kris and I have been the accidental beneficiaries of such prayer times. Once we entered a basilica in Norcia in order to cool off from the searing heat of Umbria only to discover a concert of prayer as the Benedictine monks chanted their morning prayers—in Latin of course! This experience of set times and set prayers is growing among many Protestant Christians in the world today, the sales of Phyllis Tickle’s three-volume Divine Hours confirming this movement. A simple form of set time and set prayers is the recitation of the Jesus Creed as well as the Lord’s Prayer, followed up by one’s own personal prayers. The most typical times for such prayers are upon awaking, at noontime, and in the evening after dinner.

Before we put the second foot in the water, however, it must be observed that praying recited prayers is only one part of prayer. Alongside recited prayers, and our Bible’s Psalter involves the use of set prayers, are personal prayers, spontaneous prayers, breath prayers, and meditative prayers done whenever and wherever we find ourselves. This too is how the Psalter arose: those were personal prayers raised to the level of set prayers.

For some it is tempting to use only set prayers, while for others it is almost a solemn requirement to use only spontaneous prayers. We need both, and in my Praying with the Church book I use an image from an experience in Italy. In Assisi Kris and I eventually found the famous Portiuncola church of Saint Francis, the small church that Francis restored shortly after his conversion. Today one can see that small chapel but, remarkably, it is in the middle of a large basilica—and these two “churches” illustrate two kinds of prayer. We are to pray our personal and spontaneous prayers in our own little Portiuncola while we are also encouraged to join the large assembly in the basilica as we pray set prayers at set times with the church.

The Didache, a Jewish Christian document, informs us that the Christians were instructed to pray the Lord’s Prayer “three times a day” (Did. 8:3). This fits with the Jewish custom of three set times of prayer per day. Now turned toward us, this early Christian tradition found in Luke 11:2 as well as the Didache is not good advice but commandment: Jesus expected his followers to use this prayer daily. The early Christians used this prayer daily. The church prayer tradition has always used this prayer daily. We would do well to get back in sync with our Lord’s instructions and the tradition of the church. I say this as one who grew up being taught and then believing that set prayers were for sissies, or to put it more piously, set prayers were nothing more than “vain repetition.” This attitude is profoundly unbiblical and directly contrary to what Jesus taught and the church has always practiced.

Dale Allison has marshaled evidence in favor of the view that the Lord’s Prayer is an example or a model rather than a set prayer, even if the earliest evidence, as noted above, counters that later evidence. Here are two examples from Allison’s sketch.50 Origen saw the Lord’s Prayer as a form or an outline, and Isaac of Nineveh said that those who say we should “recite the prayer … in all our prayers using the same wording and keeping the exact order of the words, rather than their sense, such a person is very deficient in his understanding.” John Gill, the Baptist theologian, said the variants between the two Lord’s Prayer accounts reveal that it was not a set prayer. But the examples of adding to the Lord’s Prayer probably reveal the opposing viewpoint: namely, once one recited the Lord’s Prayer, one then added personal prayer petitions, which also conforms to how some Jews used the Ha-Tepillah.

Allison’s final examples also illustrate the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Ambrose urged it be prayed only one time per day, while Cyril of Jerusalem shows its prominence in the Sunday liturgies. John Calvin, who did not think it had to be recited, is nonetheless right in the effects: the Lord’s Prayer is our teacher and from it we learn the art of prayer. “So no-one,” Calvin observed, “will learn to pray aright whose lips and heart are not schooled by the heavenly Teacher.”51 The Lord’s Prayer is designed to control our prayers and provides the substance of our prayers.

Yes, the Lord’s Prayer is our teacher; and the Lord’s Prayer teaches us what we are to yearn for. Yet how can the Lord’s Prayer accomplish such lofty goals—and learning how to pray aright is a lofty thing indeed—if we don’t memorize it and recite it and let its words work their way into our heart and bones? Perhaps some have learned another way, but the age-old church way is the way of memorizing and reciting—daily—as a way of learning to pray with our Lord and as our Lord. This is perhaps why Luther, who himself had an aversion toward anything pedantic or pompous, said: “Hence it is a very good practice, especially for the common man and for children and servants in the household, to pray the entire Lord’s Prayer every day, morning and evening and at table, and otherwise, too, as a way of presenting all sorts of general needs to God.”52

Prayer as Aching and Yearning

In the Lord’s Prayer our desires are reordered into the ways of God and the ways of the kingdom. For seventeen years I taught college students a course called “Jesus of Nazareth.” We begin each class period by reciting the Jesus Creed, and we end each class period by reciting the Lord’s Prayer. I cannot tell you the number of times I have repeated, just after our recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, how appropriate a line or two is for what we discussed that day. In other words, I stand with those who see in the Lord’s Prayer an essential guide to the message and mission of Jesus. It falls short, of course, of being a compendium to Christian theology, though some have with ingenuity, if not downright manipulation, tried to wring all of Christian theology from this prayer. That won’t do, but it will do to emphasize that his prayer expresses the heart of Jesus’ kingdom vision. The Lord’s Prayer teaches us to pray, not to theologize, but there is a theology at work in the Lord’s Prayer, and that theology is the essence of Jesus’ vision.

As such, it reorders our desires. We learn in the recitation, memorization, and repetition of this prayer to yearn for God’s glory and for God’s name to be held in highest honor, and we learn to long for God’s kingdom (not ours) and for God’s will (not ours) to be done. Then we learn to yearn and ache for the good of others. We yearn that each person will have sufficient food, that each person will find reconciliation with God through forgiveness of sins, and that each person will be protected and preserved by God’s grace from the snares of temptations and the grasps of evil (or the evil one). When we are done, our desires have been reordered to God and to others, and in having those desires we find ourselves as God made us to be: beings designed to have proper loves, that is, love for God and love for others.

Is Calling God “Father” Patriarchal?

I want to end this sketch of the Lord’s Prayer with an excursus on a debated topic. Charles Talbert, in a brief but insightful discussion of this question,53 contends that language has two primary connotations: one relational and one political. In the first, a label—in this case calling God “Father”—describes a relationship. That is, God relates to us as a father relates to one of his children, and we are children as children relate to their parents or to a parent. In the second, one uses language to project onto the canvas of the cosmos one’s beliefs, or one’s cosmological world imposes language on the way we talk. Thus, to say God is a father is to project God as a father in the political landscape of the world, or we use “father” because, like fathers in this world, we get to impose power on others the way fathers impose on children.

But Talbert contends biblical language does not work politically, or else goddess language would have emerged from matriarchal cultures. But it didn’t; it emerged from patriarchal cultures. Thus, the political approach to the biblical language for God isn’t helpful. Talbert further argues that a relational view of language transcends sexuality in the Bible, for God is often described in maternal images, not the least being that God can cry out like a woman in travail (Isa 42:14). He then suggests that God is called “father” in the Bible because of Israel’s experience of God and because Jesus taught us to. Neither of these elements has anything to do with making God male or a sexual being.

Talbert has adequately discussed the language of the Bible and mined the sources to show that the language was not sexist in the way many talk today, but he has only gone halfway round the track. The issue is as much today as it was then. That is, “father” today evokes a kind of paternalism or male authority that creates problems in understanding what God is like in the Bible. We are in need of sensitivity training here, and I would urge us to spend more time explaining both what fatherhood meant in that ancient world, where intimacy and authority were combined but where authority could be unquestioned, and what fatherhood evokes today, where once again authority can be unquestioned and abusive.

I don’t think any term—and family language is at the heart of the biblical vision of God—will escape the problems of abuse. Instead, the teacher of Scripture is called to teach what the Bible says, apply it ruthlessly against abuses, and at the same time embody a godly fatherliness (or motherliness) so that children can both see the Bible’s vision and experience the love and intimacy of the family—from fathers and mothers. This approach, in other words, calls into question many cheap and authoritarian views of parenting in our world and draws us to reform society on the basis of what God is like. So I would urge us to double our efforts to restore what “father” means and embody it in our world so that the day will come when the term “father” will never evoke abuse or authoritarian behaviors.

1. KNT: “don’t pile up a jumbled heap of words!”

2. KNT: “Don’t bring us into the great trial, but rescue us from evil.”

3. For an excellent source on Hellenstic and Roman religions, see E. Ferguson, Backgrounds of Early Christianity (3rd ed.; Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003), 148–317.

4. Instead of an indefinite temporal clause with the subjunctive (introduced by hotan), 6:7 has a subordinating (perhaps temporal) participle (proseuchomenoi).

5. As an example, in Lucius Apuleius’s famous novel, The Golden Ass, a prayer begins to “O Queen of heaven” and then proceeds to wonder which god is being addressed: “if you are Dame Ceres … or Celestial Venus” (Apuleius, Golden Ass [Metamorphoses] 11.2 [ch. 47]). In Philostratus, Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the emperor Domitian imprisoned a man for failing to mention that he, Domitian, was son of Athene (7.24).

6. From: www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Catullus.htm#_Toc531846759.

7. The “keep on” is an unsuccessful attempt to translate the combination of the present participle (proseuchomenoi) alongside the aorist subjunctive (battalogēsēte). There is too much time emphasis in the “keep on.” I suggest “In your praying, do not babble like the Gentiles.”

8. See Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:587–88.

9. So Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:205; Wesley in Kinghorn, Wesley on the Sermon, 157. Also Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 308; France, Matthew, 241, who calls it “the Pattern Prayer.”

10. Variation between Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the Lord’s Prayer does not prove the prayer was not recited, any more than variation in other set prayers in Judaism, like the Amidah, shows they weren’t recited. Variations reveal both a fixed prayer but willingness to shorten or lengthen according to context. There is no good evidence that the followers of Jesus didn’t recite this prayer, and the entire history of the church counts in favor of reciting it.

11. Didache 8:2–3 says to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times a day and uses the words of Matthew: “pray thus.” This becomes our earliest commentary on the Lord’s Prayer as given in Matthew and indicates, as I’ve said, the use of the Lord’s Prayer as recited prayer.

12. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:599–600. Thus, I stand here with Luther, Sermon on the Mount, 145.

13. S. McKnight, A New Vision for Israel: The Teachings of Jesus in National Context (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 49–65; Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 711–18.

14. J. Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus (London: SCM, 1967), 11–65; idem, The Central Message of the New Testament (London: SCM, 1965).

15. Thus, see Old Testament texts like Pss 68:5; 103:13–14; Isa 63:15–16; Jer 31:9, 20, the famous avinu malkeinu (“Our Father, our King”) lines in classic Jewish prayers, like Ahabah Rabah and The Litany for the New Year, and texts like 4Q372 fragment 1:16.

16. See my New Vision for Israel, 27–30, with correction from Pennington in the next note.

17. On kingdom of heaven see esp. J. T. Pennington, Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009), 13–37.

18. The third person singular imperative is used, in passive form, to read: “May your Name be hallowed,” instead of a second person singular imperative, which would have been “(You) hallow your Name.” Perhaps the third person is used out of reverence, which the passive voice could also indicate, or perhaps the third person does open it up more for human inclusion and responsibility. I’m inclined toward the former view. There is, of course, moral implication for the one who so addresses God, but had Jesus wanted this to be a moral imperative, he could have said it directly, as in “May your people hallow your Name.”

19. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 289; Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 148. But see Luz, Matthew 1–7, 317–18; France, Matthew, 246, focuses on the human dimension.

20. Martin Luther, An Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer for Simple Laymen (Luther’s Works 42: Devotional Writings, v. 1; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969), 27–37.

21. This view is classically connected with Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (ed. J. Bowden: Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001).

22. C. H. Dodd, The Parables of Jesus (London: Religious Book Club, 1942).

23. Ladd, The Presence of the Future.

24. A good example is R. T. Kendall, The Sermon on the Mount (Minneapolis: Chosen, 2011).

25. Beasley-Murray, Jesus and the Kingdom of God; McKnight, King Jesus Gospel, 93–100; idem, One.Life, 27–34.

26. See here N. T. Wright, Surprised by Hope: Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church (New York: HarperOne, 2008).

27. Luz, Matthew 1–7, 319–22. Already with Jerome we read of debates on the meaning of the term translated “daily” (epiousios): see Jerome, Matthew, 88–89.

28. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 125.

29. Strecker, Sermon on the Mount, 117–18.

30. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 52–53. Later Luther narrows this to Jesus himself, dispensed through Word and sacrament.

31. The etymology of this rare term favors this last view: “coming day.” The Gospel of the Nazarenes, a second-century Jewish Christian text, uses the word mahar, which means “of tomorrow.”

32. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 127.

33. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:209–10; Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 293, 312; France, Matthew, 247–49; Keener, Matthew, 220–22.

34. Hagner, Matthew 1–13, 150.

35. The words are not connected to the Lord’s Prayer in Luke 11:1–4.

36. France, Matthew, 249–51.

37. The best discussion of the various images of sin in the Bible is J. Goldingay, “Your Iniquities Have Made a Separation between You and Your God,” in Atonement Today (ed. J. Goldingay; London: SPCK, 1995), 39–53, who explores nine terms for sin in the Old Testament.

38. Both Ha-Tepillah and Avinu Melkenu plead for forgiveness from God but do not condition forgiveness on our forgiving others. But, as Allison cites the texts (Sermon on the Mount, 128), there is connection between God’s forgiveness and our forgiving others at Sir 28:2; m. Yoma 8:9; b. Šabbat 15b; Roš Haššanah 17a. And he also cites Col 3:13.

39. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:213.

40. Davies and Allison, Matthew, 1:612–14.

41. R. E. Brown, “The Pater Noster as an Eschatological Prayer,” in his New Testament Essays (Garden City, NY: Image, 1968), 265–320.

42. With Luz, Matthew 1–7, 322; Keener, Matthew, 223–24.

43. Apo tou ponērou is neuter in the general sense but masculine in the Evil One sense.

44. So Guelich, Sermon on the Mount, 314. See also Luke 22:28–32. But there is counterevidence as well: see Luke 6:45; Rom 12:9.

45. T. Tiessen, Providence and Prayer: How Does God Work in Our World? (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), with an exceptional chart on pp. 363–64 that sorts out the options.

46. For an excellent sketch of this topic, see D. Lamb, God Behaving Badly (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011), 135–52.

47. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 144.

48. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:204.

49. For my own journey into set prayers at set times, see my Praying with the Church.

50. Allison, Sermon on the Mount, 132–33.

51. Calvin, Harmony of the Gospels, 1:205.

52. Luther, Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, 145.

53. Talbert, Reading the Sermon on the Mount, 112–15.