C 06 - The Last Three Petitions

6. The Last Three Petitions Introductory remarks

First we should note a change of attitude in the second part of the Lord’s Prayer, which begins with the request, Give us . In the first three petitions, although, while we pray, we are in some sort of relation with the heavenly Father, our prayer is like a sigh; we are dazzled by the majesty of that which fills our minds - the name, the kingdom, the will of God himself; we pray from afar, not daring to address him directly; ’may thy name, thy kingdom, thy will ..: With the last three petitions we come to prayer properly speaking. But this change, though real, is, as we shall see, in keeping with the first three petitions.

Here two observations may be made

I. The us of the `Our Father’ now becomes explicit and clearly heard. The words our, we or us occur eight times in these three verses. We may recall that the us of the Lord’s Prayer is, so to speak, created by Christ’s invitation and command : ’Follow me.’ We are those who would learn to pray with Jesus Christ. In this connexion four points may be noticed.

(a) The us refers to the brotherhood of those who are with Jesus Christ, God and Man, who allows and commands them to join with him in his own intercession with God, that is, to pray with him. And (b), it is the us of the brotherhood which unites men to one another, even as they are united to Jesus Christ, by the same permission and commandment. This brotherhood, however, is not a closed one; it is open inasmuch as it is involved with this world and represents it, including in that word ’world’ those who have not yet heard and obeyed the Lord’s invitation.

(c) The us of the last three petitions is that of a united community which thinks and acts as one body and knows, through profound experience, the wretchedness, of man’s state. Nevertheless, in the midst of this wretchedness, of which it is well aware, this community is free to call on God in communion with Jesus Christ risen from the dead and with the common accord of its members, and to ask from our Father in heaven, the sovereign Creator, Lord, and Saviour, a complete and final deliverance, knowing that this Sovereign can and will grant it.

(d) It is the us of those who, being united with Jesus Christ crucified, are able to pray with him as members of God’s family and, for that very reason, know, as no one else can, the extent of their own wretchedness and the wretchedness of the world, the depth of wickedness and the incurable sorrows of human existence, the downfall and ruin of God’s good creation. They know that man cannot, by his own determination and his own efforts, extricate himself from this situation; they know that it is absolutely necessary to return to God and trust in him alone; in short, they realize the impossibility of living without God’s free grace. Observe that us means those who, implicitly and silently, have already prayed the first three petitions concerned with God’s cause and his glory. In the last three petitions the same people (us) put forward their own cause.

2. A second observation. Now, in these three petitions, prayer becomes explicit, direct, and insistent. It is one thing to pray : May thy name . . . thy kingdom . . . thy will . . ., and quite another to say : Give us today .. . forgive us . . . lead us not . . . deliver us . . . Note the boldness, I might even say the effrontery, of this demand. Here is a man who dares to put God to the trouble of concerning himself with human affairs, who dares to issue orders; how can such a thing be? Our answer is : we are the only ones who are allowed, even commanded, in the first three petitions, to concern ourselves with God’s affairs, with the hallowing of his name, the advent of his Kingdom, the doing f his will. Is this our business? Certainly it is; we are permitted to concern ourselves with it. God has accepted us as fellowworkers (this is a biblical term); he has made his cause ours. And now, in consequence of those first three petitions, it is, so to speak, quite natural for us to call on God in the terms of the three petitions that follow. We are saying : Our Father, behold us; thou seest us as we are and, it would seem, in the condition in which thou desirest to meet with us. We are concerned about thy cause (assuming that we are in earnest in our prayer), burning with the desire to see thy name hallowed. We have no other task; this is our care. There is no question of our being able to help ourselves; any such thought could only be faithlessness, disloyalty, disobedience. Therefore we place our lives in thy hands, who hast bidden us and commanded us to pray and to live for thy sake. Look on us, and do thou make our human cause thy care.

Here is the source from which springs the audacity of these three petitions. They express this movement of thought : by asking God to give us what we need, both inwardly and outwardly, in order to live, we comply with his command to serve him for his glory. In the first three petitions, Jesus Christ asks us to join him in his fight for God’s cause and, at the same time, he invites us to join in his victory over the world and over everything which would prevent the realization of the longings expressed in those petitions. Jesus Christ has conquered and now he invites us to share in his victory. So that we may be free to utter those longings-May thy name . . thy Kingdom ... thy will . . . we avail ourselves of Christ’s invitation to take part in his victory. Here is the right and sufficient reason for what I have called the boldness and effrontery of that appeal: Give us . . . forgive us . . . ; this is the reason for our daring to approach God in this manner. For we must admit that this appeal is astonishing; it cannot be made except in the freedom that issues from our commitment as children of God and brothers and sister of Jesus Christ.

These are the two essential aspects of what I have called the change of attitude between the two parts of the Lord’s prayer. This change is, in fact, only the consequence of the freedom which dominates the first part of the prayer.

We proceed now to the interpretation. We must not forget, however, that any development can only be tentative. We shall follow the same order as before : first explaining the terms, then the way in which God answers and has already answered this prayer, and finally we shall examine the prayer itself.

We must remember that Luther and Calvin never ceased emphasizing this point : that God has already heard us, and that is why we are free, and are commanded, to pray. No petition of the Lord’s Prayer can be understood in any other way.