Thursday in the Eleventh Week of Ordinary Time, June 17, 2021

Matthew 6:7-15

Jesus said to his disciples: “In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This is how you are to pray: ‘Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.’  If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you. But if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your transgressions.” 

The Lord Jesus teaches us how to pray, in the Gospel reading for today’s Mass.  The reading begins with, “In praying, do not babble like the pagans”, which might be better translated as, “Do not chatter like the pagans.”  To babble” means to speak in such a way as to be incomprehensible.  The Greek word means “to speak empty words”, or, “to chatter”.  The Lord explains, “the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words”, as though they might wear down their gods through the bulk of their rhetoric.  “Do not be like them”, that is, “Do not do as they do”.  The Lord emphasizes this because there is a great deal of difference between trying to convince an image of stone to do something for you and beseeching the living God.  “Your Father knows what you need before you ask him”: that is, “Your Father knows your business or necessity which you have before you ask him.”  

Now, we ought to pay attention to how the prayer the Lord gives us is constructed: “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”  The first words are an address (literal translation from the Greek): “Our Father, who is in heaven, may your name be sanctified!”  We can compare this to an address to a powerful king in the Old Testament: “O king, may you live forever!” (Daniel 6, 21).  The next phrase tells us what the prayer is asking for: “May your kingdom come!”  The “Our Father” asks God to bring human history to an end, to usher in divine justice, and to welcome the righteous into eternal life.  In this, we ask for God to hasten the working of his will.  In Revelation 6, 10, we hear the holy martyrs cry out to Almighty God, “How long, O Lord, Holy and True, do you not judge and give justice for our blood on them that dwell on the earth?”  It is the cry of all the saints: “For we know that every creature groans and labors in pain, even till now. 

And not only it, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit: even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for the adoption of the sons of God, the redemption of our body” (Romans 8:22–23).  Next, the Lord teaches us to pray for the sanctity we need in order to be saved in the kingdom for which we pray: “Give us now our bread, sufficient unto the next day; and forgive us our sins, as we also forgive those who sin against us.”  This “bread” is the Bread of Life, of which the Lord Jesus says, “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever” (John 6, 51-52).  And of the necessity of forgiveness for salvation, the Lord tells us, “If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.”

“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”  This is the final phrase of the prayer as it was translated into English in the sixteenth century, preceded by, if not influenced by, the earlier Middle English translation.  The Greek, translated into modern English, reads more like this: “Do not lead us into the test, but deliver us from evil (or, the evil one)”.  “The test” was judicial torture intended to cause an accused or a witness to give evidence.  We still use the phrase “putting to the test”, meaning to find out what something or someone is made of.  The Christian believer is here beseeching God not to allow him to be put into a position in which he might apostatize or inform on other Christians during persecution.  The confusion in the translation arises from the fact that in both the Greek and the Latin, the word under discussion could be translated as either “temptation” or “test”, and, originally, the word meant both.  Thus, the believer is asking God for the virtue of perseverance.

If I remember right, at the time of the revision of the lectionary a few years ago, the U.S. bishops decided to put the traditional English version of the Our Father into the readings featuring the prayer, as it is more recognizable to most Catholics, although it does jar a bit with the more modern English surrounding it.  Every now and then, someone in the Church proposes to update the translation or to retranslate it, but the ideas brought up are not intelligent and they reflect ignorance of language and history, as well as theology.   I think we should keep the prayer as it has been handed down to us, but its meaning should be taught better.