'Can Quakers pray this prayer?' Photo: Nathan Dumlao / Unsplash.
Winging a prayer: ‘Our Father.’ (Matthew 6:9)
Janet Scott reads from the gospel of Matthew
I n the middle of the sermon on the mount Matthew sets the prayer which Jesus teaches his followers. Putting it here is deliberate and significant. Matthew is presenting Jesus as a new Moses. Like Moses, he has escaped death at the behest of a cruel king; he has been brought out of Egypt; and now he is giving the people a new law and new teaching.
This prayer is perhaps the one thing that all churches have in common. But it is so familiar and routine that some of the meaning can be lost.
It is worth looking at how Matthew leads up to the prayer. In what are called the Beatitudes we find (5:9) ‘Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called the children of God.’ And in the antitheses, where the new law is set against the old law (5:43-5), to the command to love your enemies is added the explanation, ‘so that you may become the children of your heavenly father’. It seems to me that Matthew is saying that to address God as a parent is to make a claim to be a peacemaker and to love one’s enemies. We must already have started on the path of peace before we can begin this prayer.
The content of the prayer reinforces this, as it sets out the qualities of life in the peacemaking community. Firstly, we should note that it is a community prayer. All the petitions are in the plural. It is our father. One prays this not for oneself but for all those for whom God is a parent. The relationship of those who pray is familial, where all are sisters and brothers, all equally loved.
Secondly, the community is based on that essential for peacemaking, forgiveness. It is both forgiving and forgiven. The two are interdependent. Matthew has a clear use of tenses, Forgive us… as we have already forgiven. After the prayer, the first comment Matthew records (6:14-15) stresses that the father’s forgiveness follows the forgiveness of offences.
But there is even more to this petition, for the Greek which we commonly translate as ‘Forgive us our trespasses’, can just as easily be translated as, ‘Let us off our debts as we have let off those who owe us’. It is committing to a form of economic justice based on generosity and redistribution from those who have to those in need. It is putting the good of the community above the accumulation of wealth.
There is also a form of justice in the petition about bread. The word usually translated ‘daily’, epiousion, is uncertain of meaning but can mean necessary or sufficient. Give us, says Matthew, the bread we need today. Whether this is the bread which is the symbol of the Kingdom or the bread of everyday sustenance, this petition looks to meeting everyone’s need. The peaceable community will see that resources are shared and that all have sufficient. Calling God a parent is a commitment to peace and justice.
Can Quakers pray this prayer? The words of the prayer can be a reminder of our call to be peacemakers, but this is, I would suggest, a prayer that has to be lived rather than spoken.
