Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time- C
In our Gospel reading for this weekend, St. Luke recalls when Jesus’s disciples asked him to teach them to pray, as St. John the Baptist taught his followers. In response, Jesus taught them the “Our Father”.
The Our Father, also known as the Lord’s Prayer, is the perfect prayer because it was given to us by the Son of God. It encompasses all that is necessary when praying and covers all that Christians need to have a loving relationship with God. The prayer is a beautiful combination of praise, petition, and penitence.
Jesus begins by saying, “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.” The beginning of the Lord’s Prayer is a statement of belief. The name of the Father is to be hallowed to show that only God is all holy and all that is sacred comes from Him. Jesus wants us to focus on God alone, who invites us into his holy presence through prayer. There is no greater praise and worship we can give God than to know and believe He is the source of all that is good. Jesus then includes himself in the first line of the prayer by having his disciples pray for the Kingdom to come.
The coming of the Kingdom of God is Christocentric because Jesus’ mission was to inaugurate the Kingdom on earth, which was first destroyed by sin entering the world at the beginning of time. Salvation offered by Jesus opened up the Kingdom of God again, where we were no longer cut off from heaven. Although the restoration of the Kingdom has come, it hasn’t come to its fullest, and we are to pray when all will be all in Jesus. This means believing that God and his saving grace are present and will come to fullness when Jesus comes again. “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth. I also saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.”
Once the preeminence of praise of God is addressed, Jesus urges us to petition the Father for our daily needs. “Give us each day our daily bread.” The phrase daily bread is meant to mean much more than food sustenance; it is implied to help us with all of our needs. By petitioning God about our daily bread, the individual is cognizant that all we have is a gift, and the prayer asks that it continue.
Our daily bread petition asks God for all the other things we need while navigating life. We may pray for health, peaceful relationships, ways to make a living, or other things we need. It presupposes, or should presuppose, trust in God’s providence for our lives, knowing God wills what is best for us even when his goodness is not as evident as we would like.
Next comes the penitence section of the prayer. We are to ask God to forgive our sins. Within the short phrase, there is a recognition that all people are sinful. To be sinful and acknowledge it are two different things. Realizing we have sinned against God and our neighbor can only be known by examining our consciences, which reveal the truth of our transgressions to ourselves. It is not automatic because repeated sin or recalcitrance can turn the conscience off. If this happens, the individual does not accuse himself and thinks he may be without sin. The Lord’s prayer urges us not to go down this road but to be truthful with ourselves and petition God, who always forgives our sins if we are contrite.
Having the courage to live up to our failures and asking God for his forgiveness leads to another essential aspect of the Christian life—forgiveness to those who have sinned against us. A Christian who God has forgiven must extend grace to those who have harmed us. We can’t be duplicitous because if we refuse to forgive others, we enter again into a sinful state by vengeance, spite, or other reasons. Part of the Christian life is to forgive, lest we be subjected to a greater judgment.
Finally, Jesus tells us to pray that we will not be subject to the final test. How often do we breeze through this part of the prayer without concentrating on its implications? It asks God to grace us through our lives so we will persevere in our faith until the end of our earthly journey. We must not lose our faith, no matter what obstacles tempt us to break our relationship with God. In this country, where there is a presumption of religious freedom, martyrdom is not so prevalent. However, that is not the case in places around the world.
The Lord’s Prayer is indeed the perfect prayer. It contains everything necessary for a person to lead a good Christian life. This is a good week for us to contemplate its wisdom and say it slowly and with great reverence, knowing it is how our Lord asked us to pray.