One key to understanding Scripture is to develop the habit of noticing apparent anomalies and seeking a biblical explanation for them. An example I found today illustrates the point: the commentary Jesus gives on his model prayer in Luke 11.
We know the story well: the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray, and he teaches “The Lord’s Prayer.” In Luke, Jesus then expounds on this with the parable of a man begging his sleepy neighbour for food when a friend turns up unexpectedly. “Ask, and it will be given you,” etc. So far so good: our first assumption is that he’s mainly explaining “Give us this day our daily bread.”
But then, without any explanation or obvious connection, the passage concludes:
“If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”
Where did the Holy Spirit come from suddenly? Now, because I think we usually understand the prayer as some kind of model for seeking God regularly for our ongoing need for sustenance (daily bread), forgiveness, and protection from evil, with some serious recognition of God’s sovereignty attached, our default position is to assume that in this verse Jesus is simply adding our ongoing need for the Holy Spirit to the daily wish-list.
Either that, or Luke has arbitrarily decided to retroject hunger for the Spirit from his own times into the teaching of Jesus (for the other gospels don’t mention it). But there are a few problems with this. The first is that it entails the Liberal claim that the Evangelists just made stuff up and put it on Jesus’s lips. The second is that Luke is not usually such a bad writer that he throws in random ideas simply because they were topical when he sat down to write. But thirdly, and most importantly, Luke’s clear teaching in Acts 2, on the lips of Peter, is that after the Pentecost event, the giving of the Spirit was a sure promise to all believers, coinciding immediately with faith (which itself is a work of the Spirit) or at least baptism:
“Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.”
Luke’s only exceptions to this are at epochal stages of the Church’s spread: the conversion of the Samaritans, the gentiles, and the disciples of John. In all these cases, nobody asks for the Spirit: rather an apostle ministers the gift.
The anomaly increases when you realise that at the time Jesus gave this prayer to his disciples, there was no way any prayer of theirs for the Holy Spirit would be quickly answered, for he was only given, in accordance with Jesus’s promise, at Pentecost. Therefore, whatever he might have meant for future generations, Jesus was apparently telling the disciples to pray for the fulfilment of the promise of Pentecost. Jesus was, then, teaching the disciples as a body to pray eschatologically for the delivery of a promised one-time event. This fits the preceding parable, which is about badgering a reluctant neighbour with an unusual request, rather than about being mindful of God’s consistent care in daily provision of food.
This casts a completely different light on the prayer as a whole. Jesus’s preaching, remember, was that the Kingdom of God had arrived in him, so that “Your Kingdom come” is not a vague hope, but a specific prayer for Jesus’s ministry to be divinely confirmed. In the prophets, it is the coming of God’s Kingdom, through Messiah, that will finally deal with rebellion and so enable God’s will to be done on earth: that line, then, is also about the completion of Jesus’s work in that time, and not simply about hope for the distant future.
Now, admittedly “Give us today our daily bread” is a reminder of God’s immanence in the world, and particularly in covenanted Israel, for which they scarcely needed instruction, unless I’m missing a deeper meaning. But the following “Forgive us our sins” needs to be taken in the context that Jesus’s Kingdom preaching was all about the arrival of forgiveness for sins, which was another promise of the New Covenant prophecies.
When Jesus pronounced forgiveness to the man let down from the roof, or to the woman taken in adultery, he was speaking to a generation in need of forgiveness, despite the provisions of the law (see Acts 13:39). Perhaps in particular, Jesus’s hearers were aware of the national sin that had left them still in spiritual exile since their time in Babylon. Whatever the case, the disciples saw Jesus, rightly, as the Messiah who was bringing definitive forgiveness to Israel (through his atoning death, though they did not yet understand that). “Forgive us our sins,” therefore, is also a prayer for the success of Jesus’s Kingdom-building – it is another eschatological prayer.
Likewise, it is possible to interpret “Lead us not into temptation” in terms of Jesus’s Kingdom ministry, for the only use of the particular Greek word for “temptation” (πειρασμος) in the Septuagint OT is about the time the Israelites tested God at the waters of Massah and Meribah (Exodus 17:7) with the consequence that their whole generation missed out on the Promised Land (see Hebrews 3:7-4:13).
Now, if I’m right in saying that the Lord’s Prayer was given firstly as a prayer for the fulfilment of Jesus’s own Kingdom ministry, that does not make it irrelevant for us. For as we know, it is a commonplace of Reformed theology that the Kingdom is “already, but not yet.” It was inaugurated by the finished work of Jesus in his death, resurrection, and ascension to God’s right hand, bringing definitive forgiveness, victory over Satan and over sin’s dominance, and the promised Holy Spirit. This is the teaching of the New Testament by which we live as Christians.
But the Kingdom awaits its full fruition in the return of Jesus. So it is still utterly appropriate to pray for the fullness of the Kingdom in the new creation, and for our own final liberation from sin and temptation, and from the fear of punishment: that is, to continue to pray the Lord’s Prayer. Meanwhile, that all-too-short “shopping list” about daily bread reminds us to depend on the Lord for everything, knowing that even before the consummation of the Kingdom, he rules creation so intimately and immanently that even our morning toast is a personal gift from our Father.
But I wonder if we are praying for the imminent success of the Great Mission as intensely as, I now realise, the Lord’s Prayer asks of us.
Marana tha!
