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Lord’s Prayer 7. Forgive us our debts
David Hill:
The greek opheilema means a literal 'debt' in the LXX(Septuagint) and NT, except at this point: but the Aramaic word hoba was often used for 'sin' and 'transgression'. Matthew gives a literal translation of the original Aramaic word, whereas Luke has reproduced its meaning. as we have also forgiven our debtors: this translation suggest that disciples' forgiveness precedes God's forgiveness, and that it must do so . . . but it should probably be understood as an Aramaic perfectum praesens, indicating an action which takes place here and now ('as we herewith forgive our debtors').
Frederick Buechner:
This does not mean that God's forgiveness is dependent upon ours. First of all, conditional forgiveness isn't really forgiveness at all, just fair warning. Second, our unforgivingness is one of the areas for which we stand in greatest need of God's forgiveness and healing.
Dale Bruner:
The privilege of praying for the Father's forgiveness is placed by Jesus before the rider of our forgiveness of theirs. This means that Jesus reminds us of our standing privilege of access to the Father before he reminds us of our standing responsibility to be forgiving with our neighbor. This order makes me prefer the expression "consequence" to "condition".
Simone Weil:
At the moment of saying these words we must have already remitted everything that is owing to us. To have forgiven our debtors is to have renounced the whole of the past in a lump. It is to accept that the future should be virgin and intact, strictly united to the past by bonds of which we are ignorant, but quite free from the bonds our imagination thought to impose upon it.
To remit debts is to renounce our own personality. It means renouncing everything that goes to make up our ego, without any exception. It means knowing that in the ego there is nothing whatever, no psychological element, that external circumstances could not to away with. It means accepting that truth. Happily.
Lord’s Prayer 6. Give us this day our daily bread
Dale Bruner:
The prayer for bread should be allowed to be a prayer for bread. It is possible to be more spiritual than God. Why should Jesus who fed his five thousand not want us to pray for our five billion? Bread costs money, money requires work, work requires good government, good business, and good labor. Thus when we pray for bread we are praying at the same time for money, jobs, government, business, labor, good crops, good weather, roads, justice, and for everything economic, political, and social.
We are not told to pray for daily cake. We my be grateful, of course, when cake is given. But we may only legitimately pray for bread, that is, we pray for necessities.
John Calvin:
Yet those who, not content with daily bread but panting after countless things with unbridled desire, or sated with their abundance, or carefree in their piled-up riches, supplicate God with this prayer are but mocking him. For the first ones ask what they do not wish to receive--mere daily bread--and cover up before God their propensity to greed, while true prayer ought to pour out before him the whole mind itself and whatever lies hidden within. But others ask of him what they least expect--what they thing they have within themselves.
Simone Weil:
Christ is our bread. We can only ask to have him now. Actually he is always there at the door of our souls, wanting to enter in, though he does not force our consent. If we agree to his entry, he enters; directly we cease to want him, he is gone. We cannot bind our will today for tomorrow; we cannot make a pact with him that tomorrow he will be within us, even in spite of ourselves. Our consent to his presence is the same as his presence.
There is a transcendent energy whose source is heaven, and this flows into us as soon as we wish for it. It is a real energy; it performs actions through the agency of our souls and bodies.
We should ask for this food. At the moment of asking, and by the very fact that we ask for it, we know that God will give it to us.
Lord’s Prayer 5. On Earth as in Heaven
Dale Bruner:
We do not pray "in my heart as in heaven" or even "in the church as in heaven," though these will be important desires in Christian prayers. "On earth as in heaven" girdles the globe; it makes the Lord's Prayer cosmic. Thus whenever we come to this phrase and pray it carefully we experience a "mid-course correction." It is the unavoidable and almost magnetic tendency of our prayers to be taken up primarily with our duties.
The word "earth" teaches us that the Father's concerns are earth-wide, bigger than ours.
The expression "as in heaven" teaches us that God has come kind of lively enterprise going on with angels and spirits and that the earth is not all there is to history. There is some kind of exciting invisible world at work in perfect obedience to God. Moreover, this phrase asks us to believe that something like heavenly worship and obedience can touch earth.
John Macquarrie:
The crowning end-times idea is that of the Kingdom of God. This refers to the destiny of the individual to that of the fulfillment of Holy Being itself.
The Kingdom of God would be the full manifestation of the holiness of Being . . .with Christ as its focus.
Simone Weil:
The association of our desire with the almighty will of God should be extended to spiritual things. Our own spiritual ascents and falls, and those of the beings we love, have to do with the other world, but they are also events that take place below, in time.
It is a necessary correction of the petition that the Kingdom of God should come.
The three foregoing petitions are related to the three Persons of the Trinity, and also to the three division in time (present, future and past).
Lord’s Prayer 4. Thy Will Be Done
Karl Barth:
This conformity is obviously the point of obligation under which we stand. Only one answer can be considered as the answer to this question. There is only one possible use of the creaturely freedom that is given to us. This freedom is not freedom of choice. It is freedom to do God's will. Hence we do not have two choices. This is why only one answer comes into consideration. This answer is Faith.
Westminster Confession:
We pray that God, by his Grace, would make us able and will to know, obey, and submit to his will in all things, as the angels do in heaven.
Dale Bruner:
We do not pray "May we do your will," though this is certainly wanted. Rather, we pray that God the Father will do his will, that he will supply the power for his will to happen on earth. How his will is done is not in focus.
We are asking God to hallow his name, bring his kingdom, and do his will. If he chooses to do these through us, and we hope he will, it is all to the good; if he chooses to do these things in some other way through other people, that is his privilege.
Simone Weil:
We are only absolutely, infallible certain of the will of God concerning the past. Everything that has happened, whatever it may be, is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Father. That is implied by the notion of almighty power.
We are asking for the infallible and eternal conformity of everything in time with the will of God.
We have here quite a different thing from resignation. Even the word acceptance is too weak. We have to desire that everything that has happened should have happened, and nothing else. We have to do so, not because what has happened is good in our eyes, but because God has permitted it, and because the obedience of the course of events to God is in itself an absolute good.
Lord's Prayer 3. Thy Kingdom Come
John Calvin:
Here it is not a question of his secret will, by which he controls all things and directs them to their end. For even though Satan and men do violently inveigh against him, he knows that by his incomprehensible plan he not only turns aside their attacks but so orders it that he may do through them what he has decreed.
And again by this prayer we are formed to self-denial so God may rule us according to his decision. And not this alone but also so he may create new minds and hearts in us (Psalm 51:10 Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. ), ours having been reduced to nothing in order for us to feel in ourselves no prompting of desire but pure agreement with his will. In sum, so we may wish nothing from ourselves but that his Spirit may govern our hearts; and while the Spirit is inwardly teaching us we may learn to love the things that please him and to hate those which displease him.
In consequence, our wish is that he may render futile and of no account whatever feelings are incompatible with his will.
Simone Weil:
This concerns something to be achieved, something not yet here. The Kingdom of God means the complete filling of the entire soul of intelligent creatures with the Holy Spirit.
The Spirit bloweth where it listeth? We can only invite him. We must not even try to invite him in a definite and special way to visit us or anyone else in particular, or even everybody in general; we must just invite him purely and simply, so that our thought of him is an invitation, a thirst; then one no longer thinks of the act of drinking in relation to oneself, or even of the act of drinking in a general way. One merely thinks of water, actual water itself, but the image of water is like a cry from our whole being.
Lord’s Prayer 2. Hallowed Be Thy Name
John Calvin
We should never speak or think of him without the highest reverence. To this is opposed the profanity that is abroad in the world. Here we are to request not only that God vindicate his sacred name of all contempt and dishonor but also that he subdue the whole race of mankind to reverence for it.
Simone Weil
God alone has the power to name himself.
His name is unpronounceable for human lips.
His name is his word. It is the Word of God.
The name of any being is an intermediary between the human spirit and that being; it is the only means by which the human spirit can conceive something about a being that is absent.
God is absent; he is in Heaven. Our only possibility of gaining access to him is through his name. The name is the mediator. We have access to this name, although it is transcendent. It shines in the beauty and order of the world and it shines the interior light of the human soul. This name is holiness itself; there is no holiness outside it; it does not therefore have to be hallowed.
In asking for its hallowing we are asking for something that exists eternally, with full and complete reality, so that we can neither increase nor diminish it, even by an infinitesimal fraction.
To ask for that which exists really, infallibly, eternally, quite independently of our prayer, that is the perfect petition.
We cannot prevent ourselves from desiring; we are made of desire; but the desire that nails us down to what is imaginary, temporal, selfish, can, if we make it pass wholly into this petition, become a lever to tear us from the imaginary into the real and from time into eternity, to lift us right out of the prison of self.