“Last night going to bed alone I suddenly found myself (I was taking off my waistcoat) reciting the Lord’s Prayer in a loud emphatic voice, a thing I had not done for so many years, with deep urgency and profound disturbed emotion. While I went on I grew more composed. As if it had been empty and craving and were being replenished my soul grew still. Every word had a strange fullness and meaning which astonished and delighted me. It was late; I had sat up reading and I was sleepy but as I stood in the middle of the floor half undressed saying the prayer over and over, meaning after meaning sprang from it, overcoming me again with joyful surprise; and I realised that this simple petition was always universal, and always inexhaustible, and day by day sanctified human life.”
This is one testimony to the power of the Lord's Prayer to awaken faith and trust, to stir up restlessness for a deeper, more durable peace. I once used the Lord's Prayer as a Rule of Life for a year, praying it each day and creating a number of practices to live into and beyond the Lord's Prayer. These included working out how praying "Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven..." could find traction in the ordinary life situations and relationships of my day to day living. Or asking how I could more generously, faithfully and sacrificially pray "Give us this day our daily bread" in relation to those in my city, country and my neighbours and fellow humans across the world, for whom daily bread is not a certainty.
Those words of Jesus have been prayed for two thousand years. The Paternoster, the Lord's Prayer, has had a central place in the liturgies of the church universal. The overly righteous might accuse others of saying the Prayer by rote, without paying attention, not seriously and practically engaging with those petitions, allowing the familiar to slip past unnoticed for all the difference it makes. That may be so, and yet. The very act of speaking the words, the process of thought and the repeating of a habit, isn't to be so easily disparaged or discouraged. Who knows but the slow accumulation of prayers spoken, the echoes and re-echoes of words returned to, and the disciplined faithfulness that at least knows, recites, or even only occasionally remembers the Lord's Prayer, may act on our soul like the slow irrigation of ground that would otherwise be barren.
But where the Lord's Prayer is intentionally prayed and faithfully lived, it gives expression to a radical trust in the Father and a costly service in His Kingdom; it urges us to embody practices which ensure the neighbour has bread and that forgiveness is a way of life; and it forces upon us a healthy realism about temptation, evil and our own tendencies to sin, compromise and live otherwise than in the way of the Father's Kingdom.
For those reasons amongst others, the Lord's Prayer has always been part of my Christian devotion, and has served as a constant reality check when all the other stuff is happening in life and clamouring to be attended to. Which brings me to the book pictured above. I'll do several blog posts on this book between now and Easter. Nijay Gupta is a writer with a growing reputation as an exegete whose scholarship is deep, and who writes for the building up of the church as well as for the academy. I've read several of his books, and a number of his articles.
The good news is that this book, originally hardback and seriously expensive to obtain from America, is now available to UK readers through Amazon as a print on demand paperback. I've just received my copy. It is a high quality production, durably bound, the same contents and style which includes sidebars of additional and illustrative material, graphics and art and a superb bibliography. As well as careful exegesis, Nijay explores the history of the interpretation and use of the Lord's Prayer, making it a rich and satisfying exposition. It costs around £17.50 on Amazon, post free. That makes it a bargain.
More later.
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