This requires a Copernican revolution in prayer, putting God at the center rather than ourselves, to love God more than ourselves.
The first three requests in the Lord’s Prayer are about God’s agenda-before we even get to our own needs. What God values above everything else is his good name. And what God wants is to be honored and worshiped. It says rather that the first thing we want in life is God’s good. It is not just an obligatory bowing of the head to the monarch. Here’s the shocker to modern sensibilities about that way to begin a prayer: our first concern is for God rather than for ourselves. Later the congregation would respond with these words:īlessed and praised, glorified and exalted,īe the name of the Holy One, blessed be he! In the world which he created according to his will! May his great name be exalted and hallowed Here is the beginning of the Kaddish said by the rabbi:
The Kaddish would also be used by the rabbi at the end of his teaching to break up the service. This line-“Hallowed be your name”-would have been familiar to Jesus’ disciples as the deep wish of the prayer called the Kaddish which started the synagogue service and is also used to this day at funerals. It may surprise us that the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples was a Jewish prayer-enough so that members of the synagogue on the island have no problem praying this prayer with Christians around the men’s breakfast table. This was a very traditional Jewish prayer. May your name be held in high regard, may it be respected above every other name. It means to be made holy or to be treated as holy. “Hallowed” is an old word that goes back to Wycliffe’s translation in the 1300’s. I want to focus on the second part of that first line, “hallowed be your name.” One of the old “Family Circus” cartoons in the Sunday paper had the little boy praying, “Our Father who art in heaven, how’d ya know my name?” In another version the kid insists that God’s name is “Howard”-as in “Our Father who art in heaven, Howard be thy name.” When I was a kid I used to joke that the prayer said “Hollaway be thy name.” That’s not it.
It is almost like saying, “Dear Daddy, you are so different and wonderful that I dare not speak your name.” On the other hand, he teaches us to pray that God will be shown to be holy, separate from us, utterly different, far above and other. On the one hand, Jesus teaches us to speak to God as our Father, in familiar terms, in human terms. There is a paradox in how we start the prayer.
When we begin to pray the Lord’s Prayer, it may not occur to us that the very first line holds two ideas in tension. Steve Hollaway, Harbor Church, February 26, 2012
0 kommentar(er)
