by Ptr. Art Calaguas
Shalom.
In the Sermon on the Mount, the Lord Jesus continues to teach on many and varied discipleship aspects about the Kingdom of Heaven. Then he teaches about prayer as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew (6:5-15), and with a (shorter) parallel in the Gospel of Luke (11:1-4). In Luke 11:1 the Lord was asked by his disciples to teach them how to pray as John the Baptizer also taught his disciples how to pray.
Prayer to God is such a big thing for Christianity and its underlying roots in Judaism. It is our direct connection with God. It is our means of intimacy, our “lambing” moments with God. Prayer is our means to release the blessings in store for us as God’s children. Prayer is our pathway to healing, both the individual and the nation. Prayer is also our shield and weapon against the enemy. And with prayer, we can set others and society free for our Lord Jesus Christ. And when we ask in prayer, God empowers us with his Holy Spirit to achieve what we can never do alone. With prayer, we are activated, enabled and empowered to do our part to become effective witnesses and to do God’s will for our mission field in UP Diliman, our country and beyond.
We will concentrate on studying the elements of prayer as our Lord Jesus Christ taught us and in the process, discover the rich Hebraic/Jewish origins and foundations of our prayer beliefs and practices. We will now focus on Matthew 6:9-13 which are closely paralleled in Luke 11:2-4. The Greek verses are given below, followed by my formal translation:
9…Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς· ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου,
10ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου, γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς·
11τὸν ἄρτον ἡμῶν τὸν ἐπιούσιον δὸς ἡμῖν σήμερον·
12καὶ ἄφες ἡμῖν τὰ ὀφειλήματα ἡμῶν, ὡς καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀφήκαμεν τοῖς ὀφειλέταις ἡμῶν·
13καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν, ἀλλὰ ῥῦσαι ἡμᾶς ἀπὸ τοῦ πονηροῦ.
9…Our Father the One in the heavens; may your name be sanctified,
10May your kingdom come; may your will happen, as in heaven also on earth;
11Our daily bread, may you give us today;
12And may you forgive our debts, as we forgive our debtors;
13And bring us not into trials, but deliver us from the evil one.
When I was studying Biblical Languages at the Asian Theological Seminary (ATS), in particular Biblical Greek, this prayer was one of the first things our professor asked as to memorize. So while we sing the “Lord’s Prayer” at CRL, I actually pray it in the original Greek. Aside from memorizing this prayer, we were also tasked to translate it later on, in our own words. Hence, the result is a grammatically close approximation of how the Greek words chosen would have been understood by the original listeners/readers.
Now, while the prayer is in Koine Greek, Biblical scholars have discovered that the underlying thought, the beliefs, presumptions and expectations behind this prayer is undeniably Hebraic or Jewish. What Biblical research is showing us is that the structure of this prayer closely parallels that of the Jewish Amidah Prayer or the Shemoneh Esreh, the 18 Benedictions. They call it “Amidah” because the ancient Jews stood up to recite these benedictions or prayers. “Shemoneh Esreh” literally means eighteen (18), but nowadays, there are said to be more than eighteen (18) benedictions or prayers although the original started with just eighteen (18). And these eighteen (18) prayers were subdivided into a praises/worship section, a petition section and a thanksgiving section. These benedictions are ancient; they were apparently in existence in the 5th century BC and were probably prayed by the Jews during their exile to Babylon. And we know a late contemporary of Jesus, a Rabbi Eleazer summarized the Amidah in his own way. Jewish Rabbis were expected to give condensed statements about prayers, emphasizing this point or that, depending on the occasion and the teaching objective. We will see later that Rabbi Eleazer parallels portions of the Lord’s Prayer.
An extra-Biblical Second Temple era Jewish source, discovered as part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, also show that prayers, specifically thanksgiving prayers were quite important. In fact, archaeologists found some 34 Thanksgiving Hymns (“Hodayot”) as part of the manuscript finds in Cave 1 (1QHa and 1Q35) and Cave 4 (4Q427-432) from the Qumran caves on the shore of the Dead Sea. See pictures below:
As we do a more in-depth study of the prayer our Lord gave us, we will be able to explore the Jewish origins of this prayer and how our Lord condensed several teaching points from the general Jewish Old Testament (OT) religious belief system plus his own unique insights into a compact prayer and taught this as Matthew (and Luke) recorded in the Gospels.
We will continue next week
God bless us all.