In an earlier episode, we reflected on Jesus’ parable of the unmerciful servant from Matthew 18. In this episode, we revisit that parable, because its ending is similar to the warning that Jesus gives after the Lord’s Prayer: if we don’t forgive others as we should, God will not forgive us. But how can we understand that warning in a way that doesn’t contradict a gospel of grace?
Bread isn’t the only thing we need every day. We also need forgiveness, and Jesus teaches his hearers to pray for that too. But even as we pray for God’s mercy, we are reminded to be merciful to others; in that way, the prayer echoes what Jesus already taught in the Beatitudes.
In Matthew 4, the chapter just before the Sermon on the Mount, we read the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan in the wilderness. Jesus had been fasting for forty days, and the first temptation was for him to do a miracle to satisfy his hunger. He refused, quoting a speech given by Moses centuries before. Both of these stories give us some important context for understanding the prayer for our daily bread.
In the previous episode, I suggested that we need to keep a big-picture perspective throughout the Lord’s Prayer. When we pray for our daily bread, for example, we can remember that Jesus himself claimed to be the bread of life. Even praying for our daily needs can be done against the background of God’s provision for the world and for the future.
The first part of the Lord’s Prayer is what I call a “big-picture” prayer, a prayer not just for the things we want or need, but for the world. The second half of the prayer then seems to turn to the smaller matters of our daily needs. But it’s important, even when praying for these, that we not lose the big-picture perspective with which the prayer began…
Part of the Lord’s Prayer sounds like were asking for “heaven on earth.” But that sounds like we’re asking for God to turn the world into a vacation paradise. Rather, we are asking that God’s will would be done on earth in a way that matches how God’s will is done in heaven. And if we assume that God’s will is done perfectly in heaven, what does such a prayer ask of us?
Often, we speak of “God’s will” as something we seek when we have an important decision to make; we want to know what the “right” decision is, the one that God wants us to make. But this is far too narrow a way of thinking of God’s will, and that’s not what we’re praying in the Lord’s Prayer. The question is, “What does God want from his people?” And Jesus has already taught much of this in the earlier part of the sermon. Can we pray that we would be obedient to his teaching?
As human beings, we are all naturally storytellers. We inherit stories from our families and from the cultures in which we live. And there is a sense in which the Bible not only tells stories, but is a story. That’s one way to understand the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not just a set of religious words to be recited by rote. In and through the prayer, we are immersing ourselves in the story of God.
What does it mean to treat a name as holy? The idea may be a little odd to people who live in a day and culture in which names function like labels and have little real significance in themselves. To begin to get a feel for this, we need to go back to the Old Testament, beginning with the story of God revealing himself to Moses for the first time.
In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that God’s name would be “hallowed.” That’s a word that contemporary speakers of English almost never use. But the prayer is an important one. It recognizes that God is holy, and thus so is his name—and we are praying that his name would be revered as holy by others. We’ll explore that idea both here and in the next episode.
Jesus taught his hearers to pray to God as their heavenly Father, using the Aramaic word, “Abba.” Some have said that this means “Daddy,” but biblical scholars generally agree that this isn’t quite right. So what’s the significance of being able to address the God of heaven as our Father?
Many of you listening to this can probably recite the Lord's Prayer from memory. But do we ever think about what we’re saying when we pray those words? The prayer sits at the center of the sermon, and indeed, some of the prayer’s themes are central to the spirit of the sermon itself. We’ll begin exploring the prayer here, and will continue to examine it closely over several episodes.
Jesus has already condemned the practice of praying in public in order to be noticed by others. But it’s not just about where one prays, but how. In this episode, we explore his next critique: some people pray in a way that just piles up religious sounding words. He reminds his hearers that there’s no need to try to impress God with their words; the Father already knows what they need.
Some prayers are public, which is as it should be. But there will always be the temptation to turn it into a performance of piety, using more sophisticated words than we would normally use, or using the catchphrases that mark us as part of the in-group. We might even try to sneak in a mini-sermon, or a bit of gossip disguised as prayerful concern. Against such things, Jesus teaches his hearers to pray in secret to God alone.
Some of us are reluctant to pray out loud in front of others, worried that we may not “get it right.” That fear already suggests how our concern over what others think may get in the way of being able to pray freely to God. But some people pray in order to be noticed by others—a practice which Jesus labels as hypocritical.
Jesus gives three examples of public piety to distinguish between hypocritical and true righteousness: charitable giving, prayer, and fasting. All three were common religious behaviors in his day. In this episode, we’ll tackle the first. Jesus encourages generosity—but do we give in a way that draws attention to ourselves?
What kinds of things do Christians do that people might consider “religious”? Pray, go to church, read the Bible? Yes, all these, and more. But in the first part of Matthew 6, Jesus will teach that it’s possible to do good things for the wrong reasons. It’s one thing to engage in religious practices because we want others to think of us as pious people; but it’s another to do them in a way that only God sees.
It’s common these days to make a distinction between “religion” and “spirituality,” as if the former was bad and the latter was good. But that’s too much of a simplification. Christianity has always included a variety of religious practices, and always will. Having said that, however, Christianity is more than a set of religious behaviors. That’s important to remember as we transition from chapter 5 of Matthew to chapter 6.
Before we move on to Matthew 6, let’s take an episode to review. What Jesus is giving his hearers in Matthew 5 is a vision for a kind of righteousness that is different from what they’ve learned from their religious leaders. We can’t turn his teaching into a new legalism, as if he were asking us to out-Pharisee the Pharisees. Rather, we need to let his words transform our imagination of what true righteousness could be.
Some of us struggle with some degree of perfectionism. And if so, what Jesus says at the end of Matthew 5 may be particularly disturbing: he suggests that we are to be “perfect” like our heavenly Father. And that’s in the context of teaching that we should love our enemies! Does he mean that we have to be flawless in love, even in loving our enemies, to be accepted by the Father?
It’s not easy to love one’s enemies. We remember the things people have done to hurt or wrong us. But Jesus is not asking us to be best friends with those who have abused us. If we don’t know where to start in loving our enemies, Jesus has a suggestion: pray for them.
It’s natural to love our friends and hate our enemies. But in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus calls his hearers to live with the kind of righteousness that lets others see the character of God our Father. God’s gifts of sunlight and rain are for everyone, even for those who rebel against him. Can we live with the same merciful character?
The command to love our neighbor can be found in the Old Testament—but there is no command to hate our enemies, contrary to what the Pharisees may have taught. It’s understandable that the Pharisees would teach that Jews should love their fellow Jews and hate Gentiles. But to do this takes even the command to love one’s neighbor out of context, as we’ll see.
Research has demonstrated again and again how easily humans form in-groups and out-groups, and the Pharisees seem to have reinforced that tendency with their teaching, saying that we should love our neighbor but hate our enemies. But Jesus teaches differently. Those who would be truly righteous must love their enemies as well.
Have you ever been attacked in a way you felt was undeserved? Everyone should have the right to be treated with fairness and justice, and one day God’s justice will reign. But what do we do until then? It can be dangerous to turn the hard sayings of Jesus into new laws of behavior. In this episode, therefore, I will suggest that as peacemakers, we should always be asking ourselves what behavior—even in the face of injustice!—would move the needle toward greater shalom .
An eye-for-eye kind of retaliation may seem fair, but in his teaching about righteousness, Jesus calls his hearers to something higher. He asks them to forgo retaliation. We must be careful here, for in saying this Jesus is not teaching that Christians should ignore injustice. But he wants his hearers to have a vision for how the pursuit of shalom is radically different from the world’s way of thinking.
The idea of an “eye for an eye” kind of justice is an ancient one, found even in the Law of Moses. And the principle may make intuitive sense: if you hurt me, I get to hurt you back in equal measure. But in the Old Testament at least, this is a less a matter of having the right to revenge than setting a limit on what kind of retribution was permitted. Moreover, as we’ll see, Jesus sets a higher standard of righteousness.
Many of us have suffered from broken promises—or from the violation of what we took to be a promise. The Law of Moses required people to fulfill their oaths, but the legalism of the Pharisees actually made it possible for people to weasel out of their commitments on technical grounds. What Jesus wants instead is a people whose word can be trusted. How else will others believe that God can be trusted?
Have you ever heard someone swear “on a stack of Bibles” that what they were saying was true? Or have you heard someone say, “I swear to God”? Verbal formulas like these are meant to convey that the person’s word can be trusted. People in Jesus’ day used similar formulas when they made oaths or vows. Unfortunately, it was possible to get lost in the technical details of what was and wasn’t a binding oath—and Jesus wanted something different from his hearers.
The rabbis of Jesus’ day had different views about divorce, and some of the teaching gave men a tremendous amount of power and freedom in ridding themselves of their wives. The culture, after all, was strongly patriarchal. To read Jesus rightly today, it’s necessary to recognize how his teaching was not trying to establish a new law, but to point to matters of the heart.
