Transcript for How Does Jesus Teach Us to Pray? (The Lord’s Prayer Pt. 1)

of the Sermon on the Mount. Yes. Yes, we are the epicenter. The epicenter. Yeah, it's been a long journey to get here.

The nine blessings are the Beatitudes. What the good life is. Salt and light. Salt and light in a city. The upside down or truly right side up. Yeah. Nature. We've got to kingdom.

from this point forward, it's kind of spelling out the practical implications in our lives of those big ideas.

There's like a modern city that's grown up around the core of this old medieval city that itself is around what was the ancient version of the city, which was even more compact.

Tiny alleyways, narrow cobblestone, this kind of thing.

We spent a lot of time there.

We were going down this little narrow street.

And I remember the first time we saw it was St. Marks, Syrian Orthodox Church. Built into the lower floor of what is now like three or four stories of stone buildings going up.

It's really our Nate beautiful door with the sign on it.

And we saw people when we heard chanting inside like prayers. We went in and it's a tiny little chapel and it's been there for a long time. There's actually a long history. Many, many, many centuries of history.

And so there was this amazing Syrian nun there, who grew up in the country of Syria, but then emigrated when she was a young woman.

When we were talking with her, I was asking, like, oh, I heard you singing when we first walked in. That's part of why we came in. And she spoke English. She said that she was chanting the Lord's prayer in Syriac, which is a developed form of air-mic. And even though it may not be the precise style of air-mic, that Jesus would have spoke, it's certainly closer than English.

Yeah, so this is a branch of followers of Jesus that has ancient roots and their liturgy and their history is all in Aramaic, the dialect of Aramaic called Syria. So she chanted the Lord's prayer for us in Aramaic and I recorded it. This was 2006, like my Sony digital camera, but I would take out the chip and like download it under my computer at the end of each day. I don't know what to say other than it was a moment in my memory where the division between heaven and earth were really thin. And I just felt like there is more to this poem than meets the eye, and it kind of inspired a whole journey of reading more about this prayer. It's context in early Judaism, but also the way Christians have adopted this prayer for themselves throughout history.

I don't remember her name, which is really unfortunate, but maybe that's okay. Because she's my sister in the design.

So we reached the center of the center, which is the famous prayer called the Lord's Prayer, or the patternaster in Latin Christian traditions, uttered by followers of Jesus throughout history for the last 2000 years. This is one of those poems, because that's what it is. It's a little poem that's exercised in enormous influence over the history of human imagination and culture.

Yeah, by the communication design. Yeah. If you're thinking in terms of how a speech works, rhetoric, rhetoric has to do with how you order a sequence of ideas so that they're most powerful and persuasive to the listener. In this section, Jesus, mediated to us through Matthew, and I think both of them had their own creative contributions to the shaping of the speech ordered in really amazing sequence. So we've explored it in past episodes in detail, but just quick reminder here to emphasize why this prayer being at the center of the center of the center is significant. The sermon on that opened with opening movement that had three parts. It was the nine blessings of the Beatitudes that announced the surprising arrival of God's kingdom on the least likely people. Secondly, he called them the Salt of the Land and then thirdly he called them the Light and the City on the Hill. It began with this announcement. I'm bringing the kingdom of God, bringing heaven to earth, and you all are the van. They're unexpected way. Starting with an unexpected group of people, y'all are like the van guard, pioneers of the new arrival of the kingdom. So that's the opening. and it goes from chapter five, verse three through five, verse 16. Then what you get is like the body. That forms the introduction as it were, which itself comes in three big parts. Each of those has three parts. And then each of those parts has little triads buried in them too. But the first third of the body was all about a deeper level of covenant faithfulness. What he says is, even our most devout leaders in their way of being faithful to the Torah is just scratching the surface. And I'm here to take us all the way. To fill it full. Fill full, the Torah and the prophets. In the center panel, it's about how we express our devotion to God. And what he explores is generosity to the poor. Even though you think, wait, that's towards your neighbor, but in the biblical imagination, how you treat the poor is how you treat God. Then he moves on to prayer, and then he moves on to fasting. Prayer is the center. So it's the center of the center, of the middle body of the sermon, and then right sandwiched in the middle of this three-part section on prayer in the center. is Jesus offering a model prayer, which we call the Lord's prayer. So it's the center of the center of the center of the center.

Yeah, I hope so. I hope so. By an author creating a large section of literature that's formed symmetrically, you compare matching parts across the symmetry, but also to emphasize certain things, often the things that come first and last, often to emphasize the thing in the middle. There's no coincidence that the Lord's Prayer is at the epicenter of the sermon on the Mount. So we can explore all the reasons why, but that's kind of the big picture here.

Yeah, in context, the introduction to it is, hey, listen, when you go to the pagan temples down the street, what you'll notice is the priests when they try to get Zeus's attention. Or not from the 90s. They utter long prayers, elaborate, elaborate prayers. And Jesus says, don't go on and on thinking that God will listen to you just because you have a lot to say. So the brevity, the shortness and brevity of this prayer is very much on purpose. That's a cool thing just to whip that tip. God invites us to communicate, but we don't have to go on and on, like we can get to the point. Nothing we don't want to verbally process and be real, verbal processing takes a while. He's thinking in terms of rhetorical persuasion doesn't work on God. He's not like he'll respond to you more. You butter him up first, just something like that.

Mm-hmm, right? I don't think so. No. If anything, what we'll see when we compare it to the other version, when Jesus teaches His disciples to pray in Luke, they come up to them and ask Him, and He gives them a model prayer that's similar to this one in Matthew, but also different. So it seems like for Jesus, This model prayer could actually take a few different verbal forms. But the core importance was the sequence of ideas that could be expressed in a few different sets of words. And it's the template as it were that Jesus wants to pass on. But the shortness is part of its meaning. So be good to dive into some of the background on this prayer. Some of the first century Jewish cultural background because there's some awesome stuff. The themes of the prayer are dripping with Hebrew Bible, language, and imagery as one must expect for Jewish Rabbi. But also, I have learned a lot by understanding the history of the impact of this prayer throughout church history. And the way Jesus followers have received it and what they've done with it over time is really a magnificent story to tell too. So this is kind of three aspects we could dive into.

Actually, you know what? I realized this in our first conversation, this version of the prayer I'm reading doesn't include what has been the traditional form of this prayer in English for about 400 years.

Yeah, if you read this in any of the King James versions, new or older original, Yeah, it has a little doxology at the end. For yours is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever, never. Amen. So it's a fascinating history to that part of the prayer. It's not in the earliest manuscripts of Matthew, or of Luke's version of the prayer. However, that little addition is present in the earliest known recording of the prayer outside the New Testament. which is the late 1st century, or more like the early 2nd century, Christian handbook for discipleship and liturgy. It's called the Diddacke. It's one of the early Christian works outside the New Testament and has all section of prayer. And it talks about how when somebody becomes a disciple of Jesus, you pray the Lord's prayer three times a day. Oh yeah. Yeah, totally. And then when it has a low version of the Lord's prayer, it has that addition on the end. Okay. So the early edition. It's an early edition and it actually makes sense. Jesus taught his disciples to pray this way. It makes sense that over time through ritual use and reading and church that there would develop a doxology ending. that would fit it more into a like a worship gathering at a house church. But what's fascinating is that added little worship ending found its way in the later manuscripts of the gospel of Matthew into the prayer in the gospel that Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew. And the King James was based off of manuscripts that had that addition to the prayer, but it's not original to the prayer.

Yeah, the oldest manuscripts of Matthew and Luke don't have that. Actually, when there were lots of new ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament being discovered in the mid-1800s and these manuscripts of the Gospels with the version of the Lord's Prayer that doesn't have the thine as the kingdom, the power and the glory. This was huge controversy. Yeah. Because there were updated translations being created. Yeah. The RSV was one of them. And hugely scandalous. You can't take something out of the Bible. Yeah. And so on, and if people didn't understand the manuscript dynamics going on, that it was actually an addition. That part was an addition to the prayer. If people didn't know that, all they knew was there was versions of the Bible coming out. And they are like shortening the Lord's Prayer. Like how blasphemous. Huge controversy about this. And in our English translations have tended to stick close to the King James when it comes to translating the Lord's Prayer. Because it's not just a part of the Bible, it's woven into people's memories in a certain form of words. And so you mess with the Lord's Prayer, you're poking the bear. Anyway, you can put together a very compelling explanation for why it would have been added. It's very difficult to see why someone would take it away. And then put it back later. And then put it back later. Yeah. So anyhow, that's why we don't have for Zion as the king to power in the glory. And what we're talking about Let's talk to it slowly. So the prayer itself, without the little forgiveness expansion commentary at the end, we'll talk about that later. But the prayer itself has made up of 12 lines, divided into six pairs. And each of those six pairs is divided into two. So it's two triads, a set of six lines, the make up one-eyed part, set of six lines, the second part. So that's two halves, each of six lines. The first six lines are all addressed to you, which begins with our Father, and then we address you. God, as you. Yep, their Father oriented, and there are three requests in the six lines. So we have our Father, we address the one whom we're speaking, our Father, who's in the skies, and then three requests that all kind of overlap. May your name be recognized as holy, may your kingdom come, and may your will be done. They all are meant like biblical poetry to illuminate each other. They are different ways of wording something that actually at the core is one core thing being asked for here, which will explore. So you address the father who's in the skies, you have the three requests, name recognizes holy, kingdom calm, will be done. And then you talk about the venue where you want those prayer requests to be realized. And it mentions the skies again. So it opens with our father in the skies. Three requests. And then we'll be done as it is in the skies.

Also here on the land. The skies are opening and closing frame to this first half of the prayer. Father, you are in the skies. That's the place where your name is recognized as holy and your kingdom reigns and your will is done. But what we want is for those things to be true here. Those things that are true in the skies to come on the land. It's the first movement. Yeah. That's actually not complicated to understand. It's rich, but it's not complicated. The second six lines are also broken into a triad. And these are about us. So the key word here is us and we, which also was the first word. The first word in the first half was our, our father. But then it's all you, you, you, you yours. The second half begins with the same word hour. But then it's about us, we, us, us, us.

That's true. The Lord's prayer. Wow. Okay. Good one. And there's three requests here too. There's a request for a daily provision of bread. Give us enough bread to eat today. There's a request for forgiveness. And then there's a request for what I'm going to call deliverance from or through the test. Don't lead us to the time of testing. That's it. Also not that complicated. But rich. Each one of these is a little world of a biblical theme to explore. So that's the prayer. Let's pause and let's think about the significance of this prayer in its context, just within the New Testament. The prayer appears two times in the New Testament. The other time it appears is when the disciples come to Jesus in Luke chapter 11, and they say, Lord, you just pray. And actually, if you just copy and paste them from a digital Bible and set them aside by side, it immediately becomes clear. They're the same prayer uttered in slightly different word. Luke's version goes, Father. May your name be recognized as holy. May your kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread. Forgive us our sins as we also forgive everyone who sins against us. Don't lead us into the test. Yeah, even more brevity. It's not always super short. Yeah. And I think that's significant. You can have a conversation about historically, it's interesting to think about how these two different versions of the prayer arose. One conclusion could be Matthew expanded the prayer. For literary reasons. For literary reasons. Another explanation could be that Jesus uttered this prayer regularly, which seems to us as intent, because he said, when you pray and pray this way, and prayer in Judaism is about habit and repetition and ritual in the best senses of all those terms. Prayer is something you do morning day and evening and you weave into the fabric of your life, reciting ancient prayers and making them your own. So it certainly makes sense that Jesus would have uttered this prayer hundreds, thousands of times throughout his life and his time with the disciples and that he would adapt the wording based off of whatever the mood needs of the day, I don't know. To me, it's just cool that there are two versions of this prayer that are clearly the same ideas, but slightly different wording, which I think should be a launching pad for us.

Correct. About the sequence of ideas. Like with the Shima, right? You say morning, day and night. Here, O Israel, Yahweh, it's our Elohim, Yahweh, alone.

That's true. But my point is just to repetition, there's something about those ideas. One God to whom all my loyalty, my existence, it all comes from that one. Can I listen? I devote myself to love and to listen today. There's something I need to hear there every day, apparently. And so the same here, there's something about these sequence of six ideas. that the God of Jesus is my Father, that I am anticipating and waiting, yearning for some arrival of His kingdom and His will, so that His reputation is restored. I'm asking for just enough for each day. I'm recognizing and naming that I fail to live up to Jesus' ideals even my own, and also that every day is going to present me with choices that will test my faithfulness to God and others. There's something about that sequence that I need to remind myself of every day multiple times a day to live in this story.

Uh, no. No. Forms of liturgical prayer developed all throughout Israel's history alongside the Shaman. The book of Psalms, a huge resource of that. Right. The more prayer the better.

Yeah, totally. And in fact, here's a good example. Jesus himself is not innovating here with the idea of introducing him. new prayer. If you're forming a crew of disciples and you want to teach them, you know, what you've learned about how to be faithful to the covenant and to love God and love neighbor, teaching memorable prayers that would be memorized and recited by your students, totally a thing. And history of Jewish liturgy and prayer, there's actually one particular prayer that's still recited today. We go very ancient, like back to second temple period times. It's called the Kadeesh. You heard of this before? Kadeesh? No. It's good. I mean, for holy. Yeah, it's a prayer of making holy. It's a prayer by which one sets one's own life and heart aside as holy to Yahweh in the process of praying it. But in certain Jewish traditions, the Kadeesh is recited, you know, every Sabbath at the Sabbath gatherings and synagogues and it's special occasions and so on. In an ancient form of the Kadeesh, this is the conclusion. Right here, I'm quoting from it here. There's this Jewish scholar last name, Elbowgen, who's kind of written this definitive history of Jewish liturgy. So that's where I got this from. And this is the conclusion to the Kadeesh. May God's great name be exalted and hallowed, or recognizes holy, in the world, which he created according to his will. May He establish His kingdom in your lifetime, and in your days, and in the lifetime of the house of Israel, speedily, and soon, and we say, Amen. And this predates Jesus. It is a prayer that we know was prayed and circulated by faith virtues in the second temple period. You can see the particular choice of certain words and ideas are not original to Jesus in the Lord's prayer. He's putting His own stamp on things. as we'll see. But to pray for God's name and reputation to be recognized, to pray for God's kingdom and will to come. This is died in the will for century, devout Jewish prayer. Jesus' prayer fits like right in the center of that. How does that strike you? I thought this is cool when I learned about it.

Or that Jesus is not just reflecting his own learnings and impressions from the Hebrew scriptures himself, but that he himself is a part of a tradition of Judaism in the time he grew up, that he was formed by. And so when he teaches a prayer, it's his own unique stamp, but also combining things that all of his neighbors were praying as he was growing up, too.

Yeah, there's little clues in the Hebrew Bible itself, especially from the literature from the latest stages of it. There's a story about Daniel praying, facing the temple that doesn't exist in his day, but he's facing it anyway. And he prays at fixed times of day. There's multiple Psalms that talk about time of prayer in the morning. My prayer rises to you in the evening. that many observant Jews still follow today and in Islam, most forms of Islam, the iconic image of Muslims spreading out their prayer rugs on the sidewalk wherever they are. They've got it in their backpack and They pray.

And all of the earliest forms of Christianity and many still exist today, the same. Fixed times of prayer repost and do that. It's only in certain forms of kind of modernized Catholicism and then really widespread and Protestantism. Those practices have been dropped. Okay. When I was writing the bus to school, when I lived in Jerusalem, I was often sitting next to somebody praying on the bus with their little version of Psalms. But there were times when, like, I was coming home, you know, at midday, and I could watch somebody recognize that it was their time. And do something maybe put on a headpiece? Sometimes, if it was Norse Rocks Jew, or it was clear they were creating the moment in the space where they were on the bus. But you would watch people doing it outside on the streets, just pausing, turning aside, and beginning to rock back and forth as kind of a physical movement to begin to focus and meditate beautiful. It's so beautiful. Really, if our habits form us. Right. then this is a tradition that has not forgotten that our physical body movement, postures, rhythms, habits, shape, our view of reality, over the long haul. And that's what this is all about. It's about a way of life that helps you sustain of a certain way of seeing the world and of a certain way of living in the world.

Yeah, what they're not saying is, wow, Jesus, you know, we don't know how to pray. They've grown up steeped in prayer. Yeah. It's more about, give us the Rabbi Jesus prayer.

Okay, yeah, let's start the meeting. Yeah. Eat a meal. Beginning of the day. Yeah. Connected to Bible time.

Yeah. When you're nice prayer there. Finish a sermon.

Man, you know, when I was first re-entered into Christian culture as a young adult, followed by Jesus, it was in to skate church community, the ministry where we met and also at a Christian college where we met and overlapped. I don't remember if it was a chapel or something, I was introduced to the first time to the acronym Act ACTS.

As a validity. For prayer. You begin with Adoration. then you move towards confession, then you express your thanksgiving, and then- That's the only time I had ever heard or probably ever used the word supplications and reciting that acronym, which just means request making your- Supply. Supply me. Yeah. Supply me. Give me this apply. Give me this apply. So anyway, even Protestant traditions that get twitchy about the concept of liturgy have a liturgy, In a way, something like the ACTS liturgy is like unto the structure of the Lord's prayer. It's a skeleton to template. Let this sequence and movement of prayer. get deep inside of you so that you begin to think within its categories. When I pray, it's a form of wisdom literature, shaping your character and shaping your categories for what it even means to relate to God and live in relationship to God and others in the world. Yeah, I think maybe it's just that the Jewish tradition has a higher value Shaping me to teach the categories of what it even means to pray, and then letting that be like a mold into which I begin to pour my own words and experiences over time. The point to make is this formative shaping Experience of prayer is not in competition with other forms of prayer. It's in addition. Prayer is a many faceted jewel in possession of the community of Jesus. And it can do many things. But what we definitely shouldn't ignore is that one of the main ways and functions that prayer had in Jesus' setting and in the prayer he gave to us was the formative prayer that's meant to shape us through repetition over a long period of time. When Jesus says, when you pray, pray this way, what he's assuming is, you pray. And the first audience of that was Jewish people who prayed three times a day. So add this into your daily prayer letter G. This is what he means when he says, when you pray, pray this way. If I wake up every day and I say out loud to myself, what I'm really aiming for in life is X. Oh, dude, I had this great moment. Such a good parenting moment. We were driving in the car just gonna have the boys. Somehow it came up this conversation about like, what's the ultimate good in life? Or like, what do you guys after? What do you guys hope for in life?

Oh, yeah. Okay. Here's what it was. Roman, my 10 year old saw a Tesla. And he's really interested in them because he's seen one go very fast one time and then break really quick and then go really fast again. So he is talking about what he is hoping for is to have a job where he can make enough money to buy a test. And then we talk about, yeah, you know, people make all kinds of goals in life based on what they want out of life. And what they think will make them feel, they're happy. And what are some of your goals, Roman? What about you, August? The Roman was like, well, to have a job to live in a medium-sized house. Like ours. Like a Goldilocks house. To drive a Tesla, to have a security guard.

And to have the Tesla protected by a motion sensitive lasers.

And his brother said, I just want to be happy. And then just guys said, like, oh, that looked like pretty happy. And he said, I just want to be content and happy. And that was the end of the conversation. Then something else came up on we went. But you know, I think about these little humans and they're forming these desires and goals. And so this is the stuff of like, you know, how to be successful in life of like creating slogans for yourself and goals, repeating things to yourself. If you wake up every day and say, my goal is to get a job or enough money by a Tesla. That shows your shape, your view of everything over a long period of time. If you wake up every day and what you say is, are father in the skies? May your name be recognized as holy. We'll shape the human life in a very particular way. That's the main point, I guess here. We're all shaped by our desires, we're all aiming at certain desires, and this prayer is focusing and directing a person's desire in a very particular way. It does raise a legitimate question. Jesus gave His disciples a prayer to shape them. It just stands to reason that among the prayers that I think I should prioritize to let shape my imagination, I think it should be this one. It may seem so self-evident to many people, but for traditions that don't use Lord Prayer on a regular basis or way, or to teach people how to pray, it comes this like a new idea. That's how I experienced this was, again, when I went to St. Mark's theory in Orthodox Church, that was kind of my moment of rediscovering. the power of the Lord's Prayer in a new way.

Jesus composed the prayer. This is Jesus's prayer. But he gave us the prayer that he prayed. He called Godfather. So it's not just like Jesus is being our teacher. He's sharing with us his own heart. It's very personal experience. It's so beautiful to think about this as a way of participating in the experience of Jesus in prayer. In the Garden of Gassemony, where he talks about, you know, Father, it's possible take this cup from me, but not my will, rather your will be done. And that little line may your will be done. Oh, yes, from the fair. So it's in a good example of where, in the moment of crisis, What comes out is his own prayer that has shaped how he prays. And so he submits his will to the Father's will. We participate in the very heart and mind of Jesus when we walk through these words in this prayer. There's nothing else quite like this in the New Testament. There's beautiful prayers that Paul prays or that Moses prays or Ezra in the Hebrew Bible, but to get a prayer from the very heart and mind of Jesus, that he composed, that he prayed himself, the course of his adult life. That's powerful stuff, man. This thing is stick a dynamite if we are willing to embrace it. Yeah, I'm excited. Let's explore this more together.

Yeah, so I think the most important thing I would want to say is mess with the translation. For a couple of reasons, one of them is just historical where the prayer comes from. So Jesus shared this prayer in Aramaic that was most likely for a century Hebrew, but people debate these things. But that's not the form that we have it in the New Testament. It was by the first generation of his disciples translated into Greek. And there's even multiple forms of it in the New Testament. And then in English, because we're speaking English, and you're going to write the song in English. I'm pretty sure. I'm assuming. Now we'll try our best. That, what's going to happen today. But I each of those steps from Aramaic in two forms, Luke Matthews, into Greek, and then from Greek into early English, then into modern English. Like every one of the steps that prayers been transformed, So our translation that we made for Bible Project, there's nothing sacred about it. It's one way, and it's a particularly wordy way, because we're trying to represent in English how it feels in Greek, particularly at the Greek form. But with the Greek, wasn't able to reproduce fully the alliteration and rhyming that's happening in Arabic. Um, and I'm sorry, this is just nerdy, but it's cool. You'll find this cool. So aeromex, Semitic languages are just way more compact. They communicate more meaning with fewer syllables on average. And in the first one, they all end with the same sound. Oh, wow. So the first three sets of lines all rhyme in the ending. They're illiterate in their ending. In their neck.

So easy to memorize in their neck. So I also think that is also something that you could try and capture. So structurally it has two halves, each of three sets of two lines. So line pair line pair line pair line pair line pair line pair line pair line pair line and so it'd be cool to think about it as a one, two, three. 1, 2, 3, in terms of how it feels. So those are my first thoughts. Mess with the translation and it has a pretty compact shape in its original form. It'd be cool if it had a 1, 2, 3, feel and then a 1, 2, 3. Yeah, I love that. Thanks Tim. Yeah of course. Thank you guys. Thank you.

Yeah, why these? What do they mean?