The Lord and His Prayer

Tom Wright

First published in Great Britain 1996

Triangle

Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge

Holy Trinity Church, Marylebone Road

London NW1 4DU

Copyright © Tom Wright 1996

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-281-05024-4

for Julian, Rosamund, Harriet and Oliver

Contents

Prologue

1. Our Father in Heaven

2. Thy Kingdom Come

3. Give Us This Day

4. Forgive Us Our Trespasses

5. Deliver Us From Evil

6. The Power and the Glory

PROLOGUE

(i)

This book began life as a series of sermons preached in Lichfield Cathedral in Advent 1995. That explains some of its particular emphases, though I hope it will be found equally relevant wherever and whenever it is read. A few more words about its origin may help.

I have been wanting for some time to share with a different audience some of the fruits from my last ten years of academic study, working on the historical life of Jesus. I didn’t want just to write another series of lectures; if my conclusions are correct, it is actually more appropriate that such thoughts should come together within the worshipping and witnessing life of the church.

Jesus’ message summons us to focus our thoughts on the coming of the Kingdom of God. Because that is a huge and difficult idea, I here focus that thought, too, on one small point: namely, the prayer that Jesus taught, the so-called ‘Lord’s Prayer’. We live, as Jesus lived, in a world all too full of injustice, hunger, malice and evil. This prayer cries out for justice, bread, forgiveness and deliverance. If anyone thinks those are irrelevant in today’s world, let them read the newspaper and think again.

The more I have studied Jesus in his historical setting, the more it has become clear to me that this prayer sums up fully and accurately, albeit in a very condensed fashion, the way in which he read and responded to the signs of the times, the way in which he understood his own vocation and mission and invited his followers to share it. This prayer, then, serves as a lens through which to see Jesus himself, and to discover something of what he was about.

When Jesus gave his disciples this prayer, he was giving them part of his own breath, his own life, his own prayer. The prayer is actually a distillation of his own sense of vocation, his own understanding of his Father’s purposes. If we are truly to enter into it and make it our own, it can only be if we first understand how he set about living the Kingdom himself.

A further reason for my taking of the Lord’s Prayer as my theme in the sermons from which this book developed has to do with our stated aim in the Lichfield Cathedral Strategic Plan, ...