There’s a story I once
heard from Amy-Jill Levine, who’s probably the foremost Jewish scholar of the
gospels around. It’s about how she first learnt what we call the Lord’s Prayer.
It was in her public elementary school in the fifties, when they would start
every day with the Our Father, followed by the pledge of allegiance, followed
by the Star-Spangled Banner. As a child, she didn’t think there was anything
odd about that prayer, although it wasn’t one she could ever remember hearing
in the synagogue, because it seemed so like the ones her family prayed there
and at home. Calling God Father, talking about the holiness of God’s name,
talking about food, and forgiveness; this was exactly how they prayed. And it
wasn’t just Amy-Jill as a child unable to pick up on some subtlety; this is a
very Jewish prayer.
This means
that when Jesus’ disciples ask him to teach them how to pray, and he teaches
them this, in a sense, they didn’t learn anything new. I wonder if they
expected to. I wonder if they thought Jesus was going to teach them some
super-secret esoteric advanced technique that would drive them at warp-speed to
new-found intimacy with God, or even, more cynically, to new-found ability to
get what they want.
Well, that’s
not what they get. They get called to re-commit to the basics. To the holiness
of God’s name. To pray for God’s kingdom, which means, first of all, asking God
to rule them, to rule our hearts, and also to confessing all the ways in which
the current kingdom is not the kind of rule God dreams of. To pray this prayer
back-to-back with any uncritical promise of allegiance to any earthly
nation is maybe what should have struck Amy-Jill as odd. And then to pray, as
children really, to the God they call Father. What might an infant pray to a
parent if the infant had words? Maybe, feed me, clean or change me, don’t drop
me. That’s what we pray to God: give me bread each day; give me the grace of
forgiveness; never let me go, not even at the final test. And there’s a
commitment to a stance there: I’m not clinging to old grudges, I forgive
others, so my hands can be open to receive.
The version
of this prayer we heard from Luke’s gospel is a little different from the one
we probably know by heart, that we pray at Mass. That’s the version from
Matthew’s gospel. The fact that Matthew and Luke don’t record the exact same words
mean that Jesus probably wasn’t concerned to teach his disciples a specific set
of words. He was concerned to bring them back to the basics in their prayer, to
get them to re-commit to what they knew, to go deeper, bring more pressing
concerns to prayer, to let themselves be changed by the act. And he gives them
images of what they might be changed into.
The man in
the parable isn’t asking for something for himself. He’s asking for bread for a
friend, and from a friend. Is he a model for how Jesus wants us to pray? With
urgency, unhesitantly, and with others’ hungers in mind? With a conviction that
God is friend? Yes, that man shows us one side of the prayer life Jesus calls
us to.
The
children asking their parents for food he speaks of next show us another side.
The trusting children. And it’s interesting that they don’t ask for bread, but
for protein, fish and egg. They are daring in what they ask for, but not frivolous.
They want to grow. And they receive.
But what
Jesus then promises at the end isn’t satisfaction for our stomachs, but for our
souls. He says, won’t God, then, give you the Holy Spirit? The Spirit that
rests on our heads like a tongue of fire, drawing us up, warming us, and
lighting up our world. The Spirit who, Paul tells us, prays for us in sighs too
deep for words. The Spirit that means that unlike the man in the parable, we
don’t have to shout our prayers up several stories of building, or fear that our
God is asleep and not listening. The Spirit who assures us that God is closer
to us than we are to ourselves. That God is a God who hears us.
In a few minutes,
N. will be baptized. She will, as Paul told the Colossians, experience the
rising, the resurrection, the new life of Christ. It’s the Spirit, tenderly lapping
her head like a flame, who’ll pull her up. The Spirit who will always assure
her: God hears.
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