Perfect Prayer

Loving and living the Lord’s Prayer

10/09/19

Luke 11:1-4 Jesus was praying in a certain place, and when he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, "Lord, teach us to pray just as John taught his disciples." He said to them, "When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test."

I love it when our daily Mass readings bring up the Our Father, or the Lord’s Prayer, as it is sometimes called. Jesus’ perfect prayer provides a fountain of meditation from which thirsty Christians – you and me – can drink deeply. The Lord’s Prayer can be found in both Mt. 6 and in today’s gospel from Luke 11. The prayer is at once both concise and pithy but also comprehensive and profound, a kind of Reader’s Digest compendium of Christianity. If you’d like a longer reflection on the Our Father, I highly recommend St. Teresa of Avila’s book The Way of Perfection, or more recently, Pope Benedict XVI’s book Jesus of Nazareth, both of which contain oceans of wisdom to go deep sea diving and find precious treasure.

Let me just make two quick points about this perfect prayer: one is “apologetic” but not in the sense of an apology. An “apologia” comes from Greek and means a defense, so this is a defense of the Catholic versus the Protestant versions of this prayer. The second comment concerns the hardest part of the prayer, forgiveness of others.

First, the apologia or defense of the Catholic version of the Lord’s Prayer. You may notice when we pray the Lord’s Prayer at a wedding or a funeral Mass, our Protestant brothers and sister add a conclusion to the Our Father called the “doxology,” namely, “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever. Amen.” Why do Catholics exclude that and Protestants include that in the perfect prayer? Put differently, which version is more “perfect”? The debate boils down to different versions of the bible and an argument over which manuscripts of the bible are the oldest and therefore most authentic. Incidentally, there are no original books of the bible in existence, only copies of copies of copies, called “manuscripts.”

There would be no need for debate if Jesus and his apostles were walking around Galilee with a copy of the King James Bible. As one Protestant friend joked: “If the King James Version was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me.” The KJV didn’t get published until 1611 under King James VI and I of England and Scotland. The earliest and most authentic manuscripts, called the Codex Vaticanus and Codex Sinaiticus, do not include the doxology in the Lord’s Prayer. So, Catholics stand on solid scriptural grounds when we exclude it from our translations of the Bible. But just to cover our bets, we make sure to include the doxology at the Mass, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. If you’d like to learn more about the origin and evolution of the bible – critical for every Catholic – please attend the study on the Gospel of Mark I’m facilitating where we will go into greater detail. Don’t worry, we will finish before Monday night Bingo. Bible and Bingo, what could be more Catholic than that?

Secondly, a more spiritual point. The Lord’s Prayer contains seven petitions or things we ask for from God. But I believe by far the hardest petition concerns forgiveness of others. We pray: “Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” And here’s the hard part: sometimes it’s easy to forgive, and sometimes it’s not only hard, but superhuman to forgive. It’s easy to forgive when a child who’s playing baseball in his backyard accidentally hits the ball through my window. He apologies and I forgive him. That’s irritating but not impossible.

Once a month, however, I travel to Little Rock to work at the marriage tribunal with annulments for people who are divorced and remarried. If you think forgiveness is easy, I would love to introduce you to hundreds of ex-spouses who find forgiveness not just hard but impossible, superhuman, beyond human. Their testimonies come from hurting hearts, and they are trying to find peace by casting blame and derision on their former spouse. And in a sense, I don’t blame them; the hurt must go unimaginably deep. But the only hope for finding real and lasting peace is the path of forgiveness.

Where do we find the grace to do what is beyond our human capacity? We pray, we pray the perfect prayer Jesus taught us so we can be a little more perfect ourselves. We say: “Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” The Our Father, in other words, is the perfect prayer because it helps us to be little more perfect and forgive like Jesus forgave those Roman soldiers who crucified him.

As we pray the Lord’s Prayer today at Mass, let us pray for our Protestant brothers and sisters, and for greater Christian unity. Let us pray also for those who struggle to forgive, especially those working on annulments, and of course, ourselves.

Praised be Jesus Christ!