As I’ve said, the Lord’s Prayer (Matt 6:9b-13) is only a very small portion of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt 5-7), Matthew’s general overview of Jesus’ teaching. It’s four and half verses out of a total one hundred and nine. The sermon contains other prayer teaching, and deals with far more than prayer, but this small portion does set out the main principles of prayer according to Jesus. Though people quite properly recite it as a formal prayer, it’s more than that. It’s the pattern Jesus expects in the prayer lives of his disciples. So, lets begin with the very first words, "'Our Father...”; two words that have profound implications, not just for prayer, for everything.
The first thing we see is that, for Jesus, prayer is uncompromisingly communal. The emphasis on the “individual” that characterizes so much Evangelical theology, is essentially a heresy. Creation is an immense web of interdependent relationships in which nothing and no one can be “individual” in any meaningful way. Each of us is the product of two other people who are themselves products of genealogies that go back virtually forever. We share a community, language and culture with countless others. What is there about any of us, from our eye colour to our ideas, that did not come from someone else? – I remember my mom telling me, “The only reason people say you’re like your father is that they never knew my father.” Truth is, I never knew her father, but somehow I shared his body type, mannerisms, sense of humour, annoying eccentricities, etc.
Each one of us is a particular instance of a communal reality. When we stand before God in prayer, therefore, we do so with all the others who stand before him, whether they acknowledge it or not. And that means everyone: brothers and sisters, friends, neighbours, strangers, fellow Jesus followers, and enemies.
But this is not just a great community, it’s a family. When we go to prayer it’s not just our common God, but our common “Father” we address. Surely God, as any good parent, relates to each child particularly, but it’s a particular instance of the relationship he has with all his children. I cannot, in my relationship with God, set myself against my brothers and sisters, any more than my children can set themselves against their siblings with me. What God desires for me, though it may be specific to me, is only a particular instance of what he desires for all his children, and what I must desire for them too.
Elsewhere in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus says, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.” (Matt 5:44-45)
Why do good things happen to bad people? Perhaps it’s just part of the randomness of the universe, but Jesus suggests a much more unsettling possibility. God loves them just as he loves us, and he desires good for them. And Jesus goes even further to suggest that, if we are God’s children, we should love them and desire good things for them too.
As surely as prayer is founded upon my relationship with God, it is also founded upon my relationship with everyone and everything else. I suppose everything, including radical monotheism, has its downside. If there is only one God, and only one creation, I cannot have my own personal God any more than my own personal sun or my own personal air.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, in his poem The Death of Arthur, said it beautifully”:
"More things are wrought by prayer
Than this world dreams of. Wherefore, let thy voice
Rise like a fountain for me night and day.
For what are men better than sheep or goats
That nourish a blind life within the brain,
If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer
Both for themselves and those who call them friend?
For so the whole round earth is every way
Bound by gold chains about the feet of God."
I would add only that we pray for friends and enemies alike. Prayer is an expression of the family of God and a longing for the unity of all things.
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