Thursday, Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

The prayer that Jesus gave to his disciples to pray is the one prayer that Christians of all denominations are comfortable praying. Perhaps that is because this prayer is really about the basics. It focuses on what really matters. Jesus had a way of zooming in on the essentials and that is evident in this prayer, the only prayer he is recorded as asking us to pray. For Jesus the primary essential was, of course, God his Father, which is why the first three petitions all relate to God. They are really variations of one petition, ‘your kingdom come’. When God’s kingdom comes to earth, God’s name will be held holy and what God’s wills will finally come to pass. At the beginning of this prayer, Jesus is teaching us to look beyond ourselves to God’s programme, God’s agenda. Within that setting, the focus of the remaining petitions are on the essentials for human living and human relationships. Yet, these petitions are closely related to the prayer for the coming of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. We are to prayer for our daily bread, the material and spiritual resources we need each day for our journey through the present world. It is an imperfect world, we ourselves are imperfect and we have to deal with imperfect people and, so, we will always stand in need of God’s forgiveness and we will always need the freedom to allow the forgiveness we receive from God to flow through us and embrace those who offend and hurt us. In this imperfect world, we will be assailed by evil in various forms, which will often put us to the test, as disciples, as human beings. Jesus teaches us to ask God to keep us faithful when the test, the temptation, comes, so that we don’t succumb to evil but, rather, as Paul says, overcome evil with good. In many ways, this prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, displays the fundamental shape of our lives as followers of Jesus.