UNDERSTANDING JESUS: A GUIDE TO HIS LIFE AND TIMES

There’s one thing troubling about the most famous prayer in the Bible—the 30-second masterpiece that Jesus created on the spur of the moment to teach his disciples how to pray.

Luke’s Gospel says the disciples had asked for the lesson: “Lord, teach us to pray” (Luke 11:1). Then Luke reports a condensed, 15-second version of the prayer. Matthew’s Gospel preserves a longer version of the prayer and sets the scene during the Sermon on the Mount.

What’s troubling to some Christians today is that Jesus’ example of what prayer should be—a conversation with God—has become an example of what prayer should not be: mindless repetition. Many Christians today recite the Lord’s Prayer in every worship service. It’s a ritual. And it’s so familiar that some Christians try to fly this prayer to heaven on automatic pilot.

Prayer at its best, Jesus practiced and preached, comes from the heart. It doesn’t come from snapping synapses that automatically retrieve memorized words and feed them to the mouth without bothering to ask our thoughts on the matter.

Yet when we do pause to think about the words in this short prayer, they become a wonderful guide to the art of conversation with God.

HOW NOT TO PRAY

It was a strange question the disciples asked Jesus. They knew how to pray. They were Jews. The Jewish religion was a praying religion. Like Jews and Christians today, the Jewish people of Jesus’ time prayed both spontaneous prayers and written prayers.

Jewish historian Josephus, writing in Jesus’ century, said the Jews offered sacrifices and prayed twice a day: “in the morning and about the ninth hour [3:00 p.m.]” (Antiquities of the Jews 14.4.3). Many prayed three times a day.

Yet there was plenty of holier-than-thou self-promotion going on during those prayer times. Some Jews—especially some religious leaders—wanted others to see how religious they were. So, thinking more like real estate agents than religion scholars, they focused on location, location, location. Their daily to-do list might have included three lines:

HOW JEWS PRAYED IN JESUS’ DAY

Jews had their own version of the Lord’s Prayer—one that was especially important to them and that played a key role in their prayer lives and in their worship services.

It was a collection of prayers called Amidah, Hebrew for “standing.” Jews stood while they recited these prayers at the customary prayer times each day.

Some called the prayers by their ancient name, Shemoneh Esrei, Hebrew for “eight plus ten.” This refers to the original 18 prayers, though some Jews added a nineteenth prayer in about AD 100. The collection includes three prayers of praise, followed by 13 requests and then three prayers of thanks.

Here’s a prayer from each of these three sections:

PRAISE

“You are holy and your name is holy, and your holy ones praise you every day. Blessed are you, my Lord, the God who is holy.”

REQUEST

“Forgive us, our Father, for we have sinned; pardon us, our king, for we have rebelled; for you are the one who pardons and forgives. Blessed are you, Lord, the gracious one who abundantly forgives.”

THANKS

“We thank you, for it is you alone who is my Lord our God and the God of our fathers, forever and ever. You are the Rock and Shield of our salvation, you alone, from generation to generation. We thank you and tell of your praise, for our lives are in your hands and our souls are trusting in you. Every day your miracles are with us: Your wonders and favors are at all times, evening, morning, and afternoon. O Good One, your compassions are never exhausted and your kindnesses are continual. We put our hope in you.”

Jesus had a word to describe these prayerful people: hypocrites. And he had advice for his disciples about this kind of self-promotion:

Prayer tip 1. “When you pray, don’t be like the hypocrites who love to pray publicly on street corners and in the synagogues where everyone can see them. I tell you the truth, that is all the reward they will ever get” (Matthew 6:5).

Jesus said to pray in private. He often slipped away from the disciples to pray. Sometimes “before daybreak” (Mark 1:35). Sometimes late in the day, retreating “up into the hills by himself to pray” (Mark 6:46).

That’s not to say Jesus argued against praying in public. He prayed in front of the disciples, the crowds who followed him, and the worshippers in synagogue services. But his prayers weren’t to draw attention to himself.

Prayer tip 2. “When you pray, don’t babble on and on as people of other religions do. They think their prayers are answered merely by repeating their words again and again” (Matthew 6:7).

The most famous Bible example of babbling prayer was when the prophet Elijah took on 850 prophets of Canaanite gods. It was a battle of the gods, to see whose god could send fire from heaven to burn up a sacrificed bull. Team Baal prayed all day, dancing and cutting themselves, trying to wake up their chief god, Baal. They got nothing. Elijah’s turn. He prayed a 30-second prayer, and the fire fell.

No need for long-winded prayers, droning chants, or carefully constructed arguments about why God should give us what we want. “Your Father knows exactly what you need even before you ask him!” (Matthew 6:8).

With that in mind, Jesus recommended prayer that is short, simple, and straight from the heart.

DID JESUS BORROW THE LORD’S PRAYER?

Several lines in the Lord’s Prayer sound remarkably like other prayers that Jews were praying at the time.

The most obvious parallel shows up in the way Jesus started his prayer. He seemed to pull from one particular Jewish prayer that was—and still is—recited in worship services: the “Holy Prayer.” Jews call it the Kaddish, meaning “holy.” When we look closely at this prayer, it seems obvious why Jesus chose to build on it.

Here are the opening lines, alongside the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer.

HOLY PRAYER (KADDISH)	LORD’S PRAYER
Holy and honored is his great name	Our Father in heaven, may your name be kept holy.
in all the earth, which he created according to his will.	May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.
May he set up his kingdom in your lifetime.	May your Kingdom come soon.

What may have attracted Jesus to the Holy Prayer is the very next line: “May his salvation blossom and his Anointed near.”

The “Anointed” and the “Anointed One” are names the Jewish people used for the Messiah. This Holy Prayer of the Jews not only praised the holiness of God; it asked for God to send the Messiah to save them.

Hidden within the opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer, it seems, is a clue that God has already started to answer the prayer. The Messiah has come—“in your lifetime.” And he has brought with him the Good News of how to find salvation and become citizens of God’s kingdom.

LEARNING FROM THE LORD’S PRAYER

Bible experts see a wealth of insight in the short prayer that Jesus offered as a model for his disciples. “Pray like this,” Jesus said.

“Our Father in heaven.” God’s only Son didn’t have a monopoly on the word Father when it came time to address God. In prayer, Jews often called God their heavenly Father.

• “The LORD is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him” (Psalm 103:13).

• “Surely you are still our Father! Even if Abraham and Jacob would disown us, LORD, you would still be our Father. You are our Redeemer from ages past” (Isaiah 63:16).

What’s unique about Jesus calling God “Father” is that Jesus had an intimate relationship with him: the intimacy between a loving father and son. Jesus seemed to invite his followers to share in that intimate connection—to talk with God as people who are part of the family, as God’s other sons and daughters.

“May your name be kept holy.” The first half of Jesus’ prayer is actually a prayer for God. Jesus wasn’t talking about God’s name alone, but about God himself, whose holy name reflects his character. In our day, it’s a bit like saying, “His name opens doors,” or “His name is mud.” It’s not the name we’re talking about, it’s the person.

Many Jews in ancient times, as today, considered God’s name so holy that they wouldn’t even speak it when they read it in the Bible. God revealed his name to Moses at the burning bush: “I AM WHO I AM” (Exodus 3:14). In Hebrew, this name is represented by four letters: YHWH, usually spelled Yahweh (YAH-way). But when Jews come to that name in their Bible, out of respect they generally inserted another word: Adonai, meaning “my Lord.”

When Jesus prayed, “May your name be kept holy,” he may have had in mind something God had said about the sinful Jewish nation: “They brought shame on my holy name” (Ezekiel 36:20). If so, Jesus was saying he wanted people to respect God’s holiness.

“May your kingdom come soon.” Respect wasn’t enough. Jesus wanted more for God. This phrase reads like a plea for God to carry out his plan to defeat sin once and for all and to reign over everyone, not just the willing few of the current age, but the willing all of the ages to come.

“May your will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.” Jesus was admitting that God’s kingdom hadn’t come in its fullness, because not everyone was doing God’s will. Jesus was asking for that kingdom to come because he wanted everyone in the world to worship the Lord as their one and only God—as is already done in heaven.

“Give us today the food we need.” This begins the second half of the prayer—the part concerned about human needs. One word in this phrase hasn’t shown up anywhere else in ancient Greek writing. It’s a word that describes food—or “bread,” a metaphor for food. Bible experts suggest at least three possibilities. Bread for today, as in

No matter which bread Jesus had in mind, he was saying that we depend on God for our survival—like the Hebrews of the Exodus who needed their daily manna: bread from heaven.

“Forgive us our sins, as we have forgiven those who sin against us.” An older version of the prayer asks for forgiveness from “our trespasses.” Trespass means “overstepping the boundary,” which is sin. In William Shakespeare’s day, when the King James Version of the Bible was translated, trespass was a polite way of saying sin.

Jesus said we should not only ask God to forgive us, but also cultivate a spirit of forgiveness toward others.

A lot hangs on that second phrase. In what some Christians hope is hyperbole—exaggeration to get the point across—Jesus later added a PS: “If you forgive those who sin against you, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you refuse to forgive others, your Father will not forgive your sins” (Matthew 6:14–15).

There’s a similar verse in the Apocrypha, a collection of ancient Jewish writings inserted between the Old and New Testaments in many Christian Bibles, especially those of Catholics and Eastern Orthodox religions. It comes from a book written about 200 years before Jesus: “Forgive your neighbor the wrong he has done, and then your sins will be pardoned when you pray” (Sirach 28:2 NRSV).

“Don’t let us yield to temptation, but rescue us from the evil one.” Jesus may have adapted this line from a similar prayer in the Talmud, a collection of ancient Jewish writings passed along by word of mouth before being written down in about AD 200. Among the prayers that Jews said each morning and evening, this one begins: “Don’t lead us into the power of temptation and sin, or let the tug of evil drag us down” (Talmud, Berakhot 60b, author’s paraphrase).

The Greek word for temptation is the same for a spiritual “test.” Many Bible experts prefer the second word in this prayer because God doesn’t tempt people: “Do not say, ‘God is tempting me.’ … He never tempts anyone else. Temptation comes from our own desires, which entice us and drag us away” (James 1:13–14).

Jesus, it seems, was teaching us to pray that God wouldn’t put us through difficult times that test our faith. Hard times like Job faced, including health, family, and financial problems. A prayer request like this would reflect not only our weakness and our fear of failing the test, but also our confidence in his ability to spare us the hardship—or to see us safely through. That’s why we go to God for help.

Jesus prayed a similar prayer the night of his arrest, hours before his execution on the cross: “My Father! If it is possible, let this cup of suffering be taken away from me. Yet I want your will to be done, not mine” (Matthew 26:39).

“For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.” Jesus probably didn’t say this. It’s not in the oldest copies of the prayer or in the oldest Bible commentaries. That’s why most versions of the Bible today omit it.

It does show up, however, in the Didache—the oldest Christian manual of worship rituals. Written by the AD 200s, the Didache instructs Christians to say the Lord’s Prayer three times a day.

A NEW TAKE ON THE LORD’S PRAYER

Given what many Bible experts see in the background to the Lord’s Prayer, a paraphrase that reflects these insights could read:

Father in heaven, I want everyone in the world to worship you as their one and only God.

Please make this happen soon, so that everyone will live as you want them to live, just as those in heaven live.

Give us the food we need.

Forgive us when we sin. And help us forgive those who sin against us.

Don’t put us through spiritual tests, for we’re afraid we’ll fail and do what Satan wants. Save us from that.

You have the power to do all of this and more. What an awesome God you are.