A look at the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer, excerpted from my book THE HEART OF CATHOLIC PRAYER.
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In Luke’s gospel, the “Our Father,” like so much else in Jesus’ teaching, is occasioned by a request from his disciples: “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples” (Luke 11:1). This should get our attention, because as is typical of Jesus’ method of revelation, instead of going around announcing, “Hey! I’m the Messiah!” he appears to leave so much to the initiative of others. Half of his sayings are replies and rejoinders to things somebody else said or asked. Even the great and shocking revelation of his identity as the Christ, the Son of the living God is made, not by him directly, but through the apostle Peter. The disciple makes the great confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” Jesus then confirms it by telling Peter that flesh and blood has not revealed it to him, but “my heavenly Father” (Matthew 16:16-17). In both cases—the revelation of the “Our Father” and the Messianic Revelation—had the disciple not made the request for instruction on prayer or plucked up the courage to make the shocking confession, we might never have received the revelation. That should stagger us, because it points to the first thing we should realize about prayer: the fact that we pray at all.
Of course, psychologically, prayer is perfectly understandable. There’s no big shock about weak flesh crying out to the heavens for some sort of help in making it through this vale of tears. If we were all pagans, there would be no great surprise in the idea of our trying to wheedle and cajole the various clashing egos and agendas of the Olympians into playing favorites with us or scheming against other gods and humans in order to obtain some desired outcome to our plight.
But Christians do not believe in such a deity. We believe in a God who is omnipotent, all-knowing, and all-loving. That raises a huge question, namely, what’s the point of prayer to such a God? We can neither tell him anything he does not know, nor urge him to love more than he already does (a candle may just as well command the sun to shine more brightly), nor can we add one particle to his infinite and endless happiness by our praise. We are pretty much the definition of a kind of Cosmic Fifth Wheel. In light of such a God our prayer—and indeed our very existence—is utterly superfluous. We are, in the words of Robert Farrar Capon, “radically unnecessary.”[1] God not only doesn’t need us to pray, he doesn’t need us to do anything. He doesn’t need us to exist at all!
Yet Jesus teaches us to pray and makes his actions, in a certain sense, so dependent on ours that his very instruction on prayer is given because we ask him to tell us how to pray. Why this seeming passivity on the part of him who is Pure Act?
The answer is found in the immense gulf between Jesus’ reference to God as “my heavenly Father” and his instruction to us to refer to God as “Our Father.” Jesus uses the term “my Father” in a way that makes clear that he enjoys by nature a relationship with God that we do not enjoy. God the Father is the Father of Jesus the Son. Jesus shares his divine nature. He is of the same “God stuff” as the Father. We are not. We are creatures, not sons and daughters. We are related to God as a statue is related to its sculptor, not as a child is related to his parent. Moreover, to complicate matters, we are creatures in rebellion. Evil has distanced us from God in ways that merely being a creature never could.
Jesus repeatedly emphasizes that distinct relationship when he tells us things like “You are from below, I am from above” (John 8:23) and when he takes for granted the fact that he is without sin and entirely pleasing to the Father while we are sinners, etc. To be sure, his teaching, particularly in the Sermon on the Mount, insists that we must call God “Father.” But the whole point of this language is to make clear that this is shocking and revolutionary.
Occasionally, in the Old Testament, one of the prophets will speak of God as the Father of Israel. Now and then, a psalmist will posit a Father/Son relationship between God and some dignitary such as a Davidic king. But Jesus makes this the absolutely normative relationship between his followers and his Father. In doing so, he tells us that this is permissible only because he has authorized and commanded us to enter such an intimate relationship with our “Abba” (cf. Romans 8:15-16). The corollary is that without that authorization and command, it would be sheer impudence and effrontery on our part. In short, the clear implication of Jesus’ teaching is that, apart from him, we would have no right whatsoever to call God “Father.”
That comes as a shock to many people in our post-Christian culture, who take it as a natural right simply because the Christian tradition has, for so long, called God “Father.” Perhaps that shock is not a bad thing since the Christian revelation should shock. Christianity tells us that, not because we are That Kind of Chap, but because of the Passion, Death, and Resurrection, a radical change has been wrought by the God-Man in the relationship between God and Man so that we can, after eons of estrangement, call God “Father.” It declares that after the Resurrection, the One who had hitherto referred to “my Father” in starkly exclusive terms now says to Mary Magdalene, “Go to my brethren and say to them, I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God” (John 20:17).
When the second Adam ascends, humanity is planted squarely in the heart of heaven and God and man are now reconciled. God is no longer merely the Father of Jesus Christ the Son, but of all who believe in him. So, as the Church puts it in the Mass, we “dare” to say, “Our Father.” In the words of C.S. Lewis, we are given the right and duty to “dress up as Christ.”[2]
That’s why prayer (and we) are not superfluous to God. For he who needs neither us nor our prayers is nonetheless the God who loves us. And, in loving us, he not only utters us into being out of nothing, but raises us to become what St. Peter calls “partakers of the divine nature” (2 Peter 1:4). As the Catholic philosopher and teacher Blaise Pascal observes, God instituted prayer in order to lend us the dignity of being causes. What is more, we are not mere “causes” (a cue ball can be that), but sons and daughters in his Son, Christ Jesus.
[1] Robert Farrar Capon, The Supper of the Lamb: A Culinary Reflection (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978), 85.
[2] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan, 1984) p. 161
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