Most Christians know the Lord’s Prayer. Some have read it in Scripture and have heard it recited once or twice a year. Others pray it multiple times daily, so often that they can recite it without thinking. Neither of these ways gives the Lord’s Prayer its due. Neither helps us recognize its radical power.
The fifth-century Christian bishop John Chrysostom recognized it. In his homilies on the Gospel of St. Matthew, Chrysostom preached to the Christians of Constantinople about the radical power of the Lord’s Prayer, found just in the first verse: “Our Father who is in heaven, hallowed be Your Name.”
First, he explains to us what we had to receive in order to call God “Father”:
For he who calls God Father, by him both remission of sins, and taking away of punishment, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, and adoption, and inheritance, and brotherhood with the Only-Begotten, and the supply of the Spirit, are acknowledged in this single title. For one cannot call God Father, without having attained to all those blessings.
We attain all these blessings through our baptism. “Or do you not know that as many of us as were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into His death?” Paul says in Romans 6:3. Christ’s death brought about the remission of our sins and the taking away of our punishment. Not only that, but when we are baptized unto His death, we receive righteousness, sanctification, adoption, inheritance, brotherhood with Christ, and the gift of the Holy Spirit. Everyone who is baptized receives all this. Everyone.
Chrysostom then points out that Christ does not tell us to pray “my Father” but “our Father.”
And by this He at once takes away hatred, and quells pride, and casts out envy, and brings in the mother of all good things, even charity, and exterminates the inequality of human things, and shows how far the equality reaches between the king and the poor man, if at least in those things which are greatest and most indispensable, we are all of us fellows. For what harm comes of our kindred below, when in that which is on high we are all of us knit together, and no one has anything more than another; neither the rich more than the poor, nor the master than the servant, neither the ruler than the subject, nor the king than the common soldier, nor the philosopher than the barbarian, nor the skillful than the unlearned? For to all has He given one nobility, having vouchsafed to be called the Father of all alike.
According to Chrysostom, these two first words of the Lord’s Prayer not only equalize all believers but make all believers “one nobility.” For all of us who are baptized have been adopted as heirs and receivers of an inheritance. As the Father of “all alike,” all belong to the same high rank, regardless of socio-economic status, position in society, position in the household, nationality, physical ability, or intellectual ability. “No one has anything more than another,” but not in a worldly communist sense. We all have an equality of abundance, not scarcity, because we all belong to the same high rank. We are “all of us fellows.” We belong to each other, we are “kindred,” “knit together” by having the same Heavenly Father.
Chrysostom lived in fifth-century Constantinople, a society even more stratified than the one we live in today, with little social mobility. At the center of the Roman Empire, an emperor and empress ruled, surrounded by senators and other aristocrats. They had their servants and slaves, and so did some landowners and merchants. Underneath them survived the peasants, laborers, and beggars. And on Sunday, members of all of these classes and groups gathered together to hear a bishop tell them that when they pray the words “Our Father,” they “exterminate the inequality of all human things.” It had to have changed them.
How could they all, no matter what their positions or circumstances, call God “Our Father?” They could through their baptism. The early Christians did not allow catechumens to pray the Lord’s Prayer until they were baptized, because it was through baptism that they would become “sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:26).
The radical equality of all humans through baptism and joining of the church attracted the African slaves who were sold across the Atlantic over one thousand years later. It also made slave owners initially refuse baptism for their slaves, fearing rebellion. The equality of believers through baptism created a contradiction in the lives of the Africans and their Christian enslavers, prompting the 17th-century colonial administration in Virginia to issue a law “declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage.” They feared the power of baptism. They feared the power that each of us has when we all pray the words “Our Father who is in heaven.”
In my new book, Hunger for Righteousness: A Lenten Journey Towards Intimacy with God and Loving our Neighbor, I write about how Lent has historically been a period of preparation for baptism, with new Christians joining the church during the last two weeks of the fast through baptism. In the Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt, this happened the weekend before Palm Sunday. To this day, that Sunday is called “the Sunday of Becoming Christian” (hadd el tanaseer), and many families still choose to baptize their babies on this day. In other church traditions, the baptisms happen on Bright Saturday.
At the beginning of Lent, the Coptic Orthodox Lent lectionary starts with Matthew 6, with the Lord’s Prayer. In Hunger for Righteousness, I write that “what happens to us during Lent when we read those same Scriptures with open hearts like catechumens is a renewal of our own baptism, our first repentance.” For those of us who belong to the church already, Lent is the opportunity for us to remember our baptism, and in so doing, remember what we have already received, and remember what we have become through it, not just as individuals, but as a family in Christ.
Chrysostom does not end his words there. With this great gift comes a great responsibility: to live worthy of the nobility we have received, to “exhibit a diligence proportionate to the gift.” In this way he explains the second part of the verse, “Hallowed be Your Name.” Because of our adoption, we carry His name, and thus, we must live a holy life, a praiseworthy life, a righteous life. Chrysostom says, “He commands him who prays to seek that He may be glorified also by our life.”
A life that glorifies God is a life lived loving our neighbors. In the words of Chrysostom, the one who prays “Our Father” should offer “up his supplications for the body in common, and nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere to his neighbor’s good.” Our prayers should be for our neighbors, our actions towards our neighbors filled with so much love that those who see us see God. “Let your light so shine before men,” Christ tells us in Matthew 5:16, “that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”
I once heard a story about a Christian monk in the desert who learns about a group of three friends living on the other side of a lake. There are different versions of this story, but in this version that I know, the monk takes a boat across the lake to visit the friends and discovers they are Christians. They ask him to teach them to pray, so he starts to teach them the Lord’s Prayer. The day starts to wane, so the monk finishes his lesson and leaves the three friends, finds his boat, and starts rowing across the lake to return to his cell. When he is more than halfway to the other side, he hears the three friends shouting, “Wait! We forgot what to pray after the words “Our Father!” The monk sees them walking on water, trying to catch up to him. So he shouts back, “Our Father is enough.”
