If we are serious at all about our Christian commitment, we will want to learn and grow in prayer. When we kneel down, or settle in the quiet chair that serves as our personal place of prayer; when we’re walking along, or riding in the train to work; whenever we pray, this is what we are coming to do: to pursue the mystery, to listen and respond to the voice we thought we just heard, to follow the light which beckons round the next corner, to lay hold of the love of God which has somehow already laid hold of us.
We want all this, at our best, not because we selfishly want, as it were, to maximize our own spiritual potential. To think that way would be to import into our Christianity a very modern, materialist, self-centred ideology. No. We want it because we know, in our heart of hearts, that we want the living God. We want to know him; we want to love him. We want to be able truly to call him Father.
In a sense, therefore, the first words of the Lord’s Prayer, which we examine in this first chapter, represent the goal towards which we are working, rather than the starting point from which we set out. It is no doubt true, here as elsewhere, that the end of all our striving will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. But that means, I think, that, although we are given the Lord’s Prayer in our baptism to be our own prayer, a special personal gift for each one of us, this prayer is not just the spiritual version of the baby’s mug and spoon set, though it is surely that as well. It is the suit of clothes designed for us to wear in our full maturity. And most of us, putting the suit on week by week, have to acknowledge that it’s still a bit big for us, that we still have some growing to do before it’ll fit. It is true, then, that as soon as someone becomes a Christian, he or she can and must say ‘Our Father’; that is one of the marks of grace, one of the first signs of faith. But it will take full Christian maturity to understand, and resonate with, what those words really mean.
In many ancient liturgies, and some modern ones, when the Lord’s Prayer is said at the Eucharist, it is introduced with solemn words which recognize that to say this prayer properly, and to mean it from the heart, would imply that we had become fully, one hundred per cent, converted, Christian; that the Holy Spirit had completed the good work that God had begun in us. And, since we know that’s not true, the priest says words such as these: ‘As our Saviour Christ has commanded and taught us, we are bold to say . . .’. In other words, we don’t yet have the right to say this prayer, but it’s part of the holy boldness, the almost cheeky celebration of the sheer grace and goodness of the living God, that we can actually say these words as though we really meant them through and through. It’s a bit like a child dressing up in his grown-up brother’s suit, and having the cheek to impersonate him for a whole morning, and just about getting away with it; and learning to his surprise, as he does so, what it must be like to be that elder brother.
And that, of course, is exactly what the Lord’s Prayer invites us to do. The Lord’s Prayer grows directly out of the life and work of the Lord himself, whom both St Paul and the author of the letter to the Hebrews describe precisely as our elder brother. We call Jesus ‘the Son of God’ in our hymns and creeds and prayers, and we are right to do so; but we don’t often stop to think what that meant for Jesus himself. What was going on in Jesus’ life when he called God ‘Father’, and taught his followers to do so too?
People used to say that nobody before Jesus had called God ‘Father’. They also used to say that the word Abba, which Jesus used in the Garden of Gethsemane and quite possibly on other occasions, was the little child’s word, ‘Daddy’, in the Hebrew or Aramaic of his day. People therefore used to say that Jesus thus introduced, and offered to the world, a new level of personal intimacy with God. This conclusion may, in some sense, be true; but the two pillars on which it stood are shaky. Plenty of people called God ‘Father’, in Judaism and elsewhere. And Abba is in fact a word with much wider use than simply on the lips of little children. So what did it mean for Jesus himself that he called God ‘Father’?
The most important thing, which is really the starting-point for grasping who Jesus was and is, is that this word drew into one point the vocation of Israel, and particularly the salvation of Israel. The first occurrence in the Hebrew Bible of the idea of God as the Father comes when Moses marches in boldly to stand before Pharaoh, and says: Thus says YHWH: Israel is my son, my firstborn; let my people go, that they may serve me (Exodus 4.22–3). For Israel to call God ‘Father’, was to hold on to the hope of liberty. The slaves were called to be sons.
When Jesus tells his disciples to call God ‘Father’, then, those with ears to hear will understand. He wants us to get ready for the new Exodus. We are going to be free at last. This is the Advent hope, the hope of the coming of the kingdom of God. The tyrant’s grip is going to be broken, and we shall be free:
I see my light come shining,
From the west down to the east.
Any day now – any day now –
I shall be released.
The very first word of the Lord’s Prayer, therefore (in Greek or Aramaic, ‘Father’ would come first), contains within it not just intimacy, but revolution. Not just familiarity; hope.
The other strong echo of ‘Father’ within Jesus’ world reinforces and fills out this revolutionary, kingdom-bearing meaning. God promised to King David that from his family there would come a child who would rule over God’s people and whose kingdom would never be shaken. Of this coming King, God said to David, ‘I will be his Father, and he shall be my Son’ (2 Samuel 7.14). The Messiah, the King that would come, would focus in himself God’s promise to the whole people. And in Isaiah this promise, though still affirmed, is thrown open to all God’s people. ‘If anyone is thirsty, let them come and drink . . . and I will make with them an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David’ (Isaiah 55.1, 3). The two pictures go together. Freedom for Israel in bondage will come about through the liberating work of the Messiah. And Jesus, picking up all these resonances, is saying to his followers: this is your prayer. You are the liberty-people. You are the Messianic people.
You see, the Jews had clung on to that Exodus-hope, down through the years in which they still lived with slavery, with exile, with the awful sense that the promises were taking a mighty long time to be fully fulfilled. ‘Surely you are our Father’, says one of the later prophecies, ‘though Abraham does not know us, and Israel does not acknowledge us’ (Isaiah 63.16). In other words, the national hope seems to have slipped away; the things we thought were so secure have turned to dust and ashes; yet we cling on to the fact that you are our Father, and that fact gives us hope where humanly there is no hope. Assyria, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Egypt, Syria, and now Rome; when would the tyranny of evil end? When would Israel be free? Most Jews knew in their bones, because they celebrated it at Passover and sang about it in the Psalms, that freedom would come when God gave them the new, final Exodus. Many believed that this would happen when the Messiah came. The very first word of the Lord’s Prayer says: Let it be now; and let it be us. Father . . . Our Father . . .
Jesus’ own life and work and teaching, then, was not simply about a timeless new vision of God. Jesus didn’t come simply to offer a new pattern, or even a new depth, of spirituality. Spiritual depth and renewal come, as and when they come, as part of the larger package. But that package itself is about being delivered from evil; about return from exile; about having enough bread; about God’s kingdom coming on earth as it is in heaven. It’s the Advent-package. Jesus was taking the enormous risk of saying that this package was coming about through his own work. All of that is contained in the word ‘Father’, used in this way, within this prayer.
For Jesus, it was a great wager of faith and vocation. It meant leaving the security of home, family and job because his Father was calling him to a new job. He called the fishermen to become fishers of men. He himself, the carpenter, was called to take wood and nails to accomplish the real Exodus, the real defeat of evil. Calling God ‘Father’ was not simply comfortable or reassuring. It contained the ultimate personal challenge.
That is why, in the Garden of Gethsemane, he called God ‘Father’ once more. In John’s gospel Jesus uses the image of father and son to explain what he was himself doing. In that culture, the son is apprenticed to the father. He learns his trade by watching what the father is doing. When he runs into a problem, he checks back to see how his father tackles it. That’s what Jesus is doing in Gethsemane, when everything suddenly goes dark on him. Father, is this the way? Is this really the right path? Do I really have to drink this cup? The letter to the Hebrews says, with considerable daring, that the Son ‘learned obedience by what he suffered’ (Hebrews 5.7–9; compare 2.10–18). What we see in Gethsemane is the apprentice son, checking back one more time to see how the Father is doing it. And what is the project that Father and Son together are engaged upon? Nothing less than the new Exodus, rescuing Israel and the whole world from evil, injustice, fear and sin. The daring thing about that passage in Hebrews is this: Jesus too, like us, went on learning what it actually meant to call God ‘Father’. And the learning process was only complete when he said, ‘Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.’
The word ‘Father’, then, concentrates our attention on the doubly revolutionary message and mission of Jesus. It is the Exodus-message, the message that tyrants and oppressors rightly fear. But it isn’t a message of simple human revolution. Most revolutions breed new tyrannies; not this one. This is the Father’s revolution. It comes through the suffering and death of the Son. That’s why, at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, we pray to be delivered from the great tribulation; which is, not surprisingly, what Jesus told his disciples to pray for in the garden. This revolution comes about through the Messiah, and his people, sharing and bearing the pain of the world, that the world may be healed. This is the kingdom-message, the Advent-message.
But if we in turn are to be the messengers, we need to learn to pray this prayer. We, too, need to learn what it means to call God ‘Father’, and we mustn’t be surprised when we find ourselves startled by what it means. The one thing you can be sure of with God is that you can’t predict what he’s going to do next. That’s why calling God ‘Father’ is the great act of faith, of holy boldness, of risk. Saying ‘Our Father’ isn’t just the boldness, the sheer cheek, of walking into the presence of the living and almighty God and saying, ‘Hi, Dad.’ It is the boldness, the sheer total risk, of saying quietly, ‘Please may I, too, be considered an apprentice son.’ It means signing on for the kingdom of God.
This is what Jesus meant when he gave us this prayer. At the end of John’s gospel, Jesus says to his followers: As the Father sent me, so I send you (John 20.21). We live between Advent and Advent; between the first great Advent, the coming of the Son into the world, and the second Advent, when he shall come again in power and glory to judge the living and the dead. That’s why Advent is sometimes quite confusing, preparing for the birth of Jesus and at the same time preparing for the time when God makes all things new, when the whole cosmos has its exodus from slavery. That apparent confusion, that overlap of the first and second Advents, is actually what Christianity is all about: celebrating the decisive victory of God, in Jesus Christ, over Pharaoh and the Red Sea, over sin and death – and looking for, and working for, and longing for, and praying for, the full implementation of that decisive victory. Every Eucharist catches exactly this tension. ‘As often as you break the bread and drink the cup, you proclaim, you announce, the death of the Lord – until he comes’ (1 Corinthians 11.26). We come for our daily, and heavenly, bread; we come for our daily, and final, forgiveness; we come for our daily, and ultimate, deliverance; we come to celebrate God’s kingdom now, and to pray for it soon. That is what we mean when we call God ‘Father’.
And as we do this, as we pray this prayer in this setting, we begin to discover the true pattern of Christian spirituality, of the Christian way of penetrating into the mystery, of daring to enter the cloud of unknowing. When we call God ‘Father’, we are called to step out, as apprentice children, into a world of pain and darkness. We will find that darkness all around us; it will terrify us, precisely because it will remind us of the darkness inside our own selves. The temptation then is to switch off the news, to shut out the pain of the world, to create a painless world for ourselves. A good deal of our contemporary culture is designed to do exactly that. No wonder people find it hard to pray. But if, as the people of the living creator God, we respond to the call to be his sons and daughters; if we take the risk of calling him Father; then we are called to be the people through whom the pain of the world is held in the healing light of the love of God. And we then discover that we want to pray, and need to pray, this prayer. Father; Our Father; Our Father in heaven; Our Father in heaven, may your name be honoured. That is, may you be worshipped by your whole creation; may the whole cosmos resound with your praise; may the whole world be freed from injustice, disfigurement, sin, and death, and may your name be hallowed. And as we stand in the presence of the living God, with the darkness and pain of the world on our hearts, praying that he will fulfil his ancient promises, and implement the victory of Calvary and Easter for the whole cosmos – then we may discover that our own pain, our own darkness, is somehow being dealt with as well.
This, then, I dare say, is the pattern of Christian spirituality. It is not the selfish pursuit of private spiritual advancement. It is not the flight of the alone to the alone. It is neither simply shouting into a void, nor simply getting in touch with our own deepest feelings, though sometimes it may feel like one or other of these. It is the rhythm of standing in the presence of the pain of the world, and kneeling in the presence of the creator of the world; of bringing those two things together in the name of Jesus and by the victory of the cross; of living in the tension of the double Advent, and of calling God ‘Father’.
Jesus took the risk of referring to God obliquely. In John’s gospel, one of his regular ways of talking about God was ‘the Father who sent me’. He wanted people to discover who the Father really was by seeing what he, Jesus, was doing. When we call God ‘Father’, we are making the same astonishing, crazy, utterly risky claim. The mission of the church is contained in that word; the failure of the church is highlighted by that word. But the failure, too, is taken care of in the prayer, and in the cross. Our task is to grow up into the Our Father, to dare to impersonate our elder brother, seeking daily bread and daily forgiveness as we do so: to wear his clothes, to walk in his shoes, to feast at his table, to weep with him in the garden, to share his suffering, and to know his victory. As our Saviour Jesus Christ has commanded and taught us, by his life and death, even more than by his words, we are bold, very bold – even crazy, some might think – to say ‘Our Father’.