praying forgiveness

Within the span of a week I've had two opportunities to share some insights on the Lord's Prayer (Mt 6:9-13). Here's what I've found:

The prayer defines its addressee in the first line, "Our Father, the one who is in the heavens".  While it may seem obvious to some Christians that we would address God in prayer, the fact that Jesus specifies only God as the recipient of our prayers cuts against the grain of some traditions in which other spiritual authorities are also invoked.  Within the Lord's Prayer there is no mention of the saints or ancestors of human religion/culture.

The prayer features seven verbs.  The first three verbs are pleas for the Father to do something for the Father's own sake.  These accompany nouns with possessive pronouns in the second person singular.  I call this "a pattern of possession or belonging to the second person" who is, in this case, God.    The three verb-noun combinations then are:

May it be kept holy/sanctified--your name
May it come--your kingdom
May it be done--your will

All are pleas pertaining to God.  Disciples pray, as Jesus taught us, for God to guard/protect/keep God's own prerogatives as the creator of the world.  While human beings can participate in the glorifying of God's name, the coming of God's kingdom, and the doing of God's will, all are ultimately the work of the Father himself.  Only the Father can protect his name, kingdom, and will from the humans who inevitably fail to honor God.  Our shortcomings simply expose the need to pray to the Creator, and reveal why we should begin in prayer with pleas that pertain to God for God's sake.  It is upon God's heavenly name, kingdom, and will that the same might be established on earth, and so we address the only One who can bring about these realities.  We plea to God not to give up on the establishment of God's name, kingdom, and will upon the earth in the face of our sin.

After we have put first things first, the things upon which everything else is founded, then we begin to pray to God about the things that belong uniquely to us as frail human beings.  Here come the next four verb-noun combinations.

Give us today--our daily bread
Forgive us--our debts
Do not bring--us into temptation
Deliver--us from the evil one

If in the "pattern of possession or belonging to the second person", that is, "to God", the pronoun was "your", the final four verbs pertain to "our" or "us".  In other words, the second set of verb-noun combinations forms a "pattern of possession or belonging to the first person plural", "to us".  After we have asked God to do some things for God's own sake, upon which our own survival also depends, now we begin to plea for God to do some things for us.  Give us daily bread.  Forgive us our debts.  Do not bring us into temptation.  Deliver us from the evil one.  All four pleas refer to situations unique to the human condition.  We are the ones in need of bread--not God.  We are the ones who have debts (or sins or trespasses)--God has none.  We are tempted--God is not.  We must be delivered--Satan poses no threat to God.  All of these predicaments are truly ours.  And thus, as before, we speak to the only One who can help us.

Now, regardless of whether the pattern is "your" (to God) or "our" (to us), each verb is a plea for God to do something.  God is the subject of doing, whether it be for God's own sake or for ours.  That is the case--with one exception.  Only one verb of the seven appears twice--to "forgive."  If we have prayed for God to forgive us our sins, we must also pray that "we forgive those who sin against us".  If we have prayed for God to forgive our debts, we also pray that "we forgive our debtors".  The two, in fact, are dependent one upon the other.  It is in the act of forgiveness alone that our agency and God's overlap.  God forgives us as we forgive one another.  We express our "godliness", our "god-likeness", through forgiveness.  We "are perfect as our heavenly father is perfect" (Mt 5:48) in no other way but as we extend love without condition to our fellow human beings.  We "complete" the love of an already "complete" God as "we love one another" (1 Jn 4:12).

If therefore we do, as Jesus commanded, "pray then in this way", forgiveness will be the spirituality of our lives; reconciliation its fruit; and peace the kingdom come--"on earth as it is in heaven".

-Joe

the way of grace

As I prepared to teach on the Psalms—150 “psalms” in five “books”--at Bethany Bible School earlier this month, I found a unifying thread in the subject of “enemies”. The Psalms seem obsessed with “enemies”—how shall one deal with one’s enemies?

Different psalms seem to recommend different courses of action. There is, for example, the violent approach toward enemies in Psalm 18; “David” seems to boast: “I pursued my enemies and overtook them; and did not turn back until they were consumed. I struck them down, so that they were not able to rise; they fell under my feet . . ..I beat them fine, like dust before the wind; I cast them out like the mire of the streets” (18:37-38, 42). In Psalm 58, again “of David”, there is—if not a boast of violence inflicted—delight in the painful demise of “the wicked” (58:3): “Let them be like the snail that dissolves into slime; like the untimely birth that never sees the sun” (58:8). And then, most emphatically: “The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done; they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked” (58:10).

If Psalms 18 and 58 represent, on one side of a spectrum, a recommendation of violence against one’s enemies (Are the righteous bathing in blood that they have spilled?), others recommend more clearly a path of leaving the course of vengeance to God. For example, Psalm 37:

“Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices. Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret—it leads only to evil. For the wicked shall be cut off, but those who wait for the Lord shall inherit the land” (37:7-9).

Perhaps between the violence of Psalm 18 and the “stillness” of Psalm 37 is what we might call the “confession” of Psalm 139. Without any mention of vengeance taken by his own hands, “David” nonetheless erupts with his mouth against the wicked:

“O that you would kill the wicked, O God, and that the bloodthirsty would depart from me—those who speak of you maliciously, and lift themselves up against you for evil! Do I not hate those who hate you, O Lord? And do I not loathe those who rise up against you? I hate them with perfect hatred; I count them my enemies” (139:19-22).

Even this verbal tirade, however, this eruption against “the wicked” is not directed at them—it is direct address to God: “O Lord”, the Psalm begins, “you have searched me and known me” (139:1). And, after all malice has been said—but not yet done—the Psalm ends where it began—with the Psalmist’s need for God to “search [him] and know [his] heart, with the Psalmist’s need for God “to see if there is any wicked way in me” (139:23-24). Before giving physical expression to his anger, before even any direct expression of his anger against his enemies, the Psalmist gives it to God. And giving it so, “David” finds himself again, after pondering all thoughts far and wide, only with his God (see v. 18). The grace of God, it would seem, is sufficient for him (see also 2 Cor 12:9). It also seems, therefore, that confession—that speaking truth in the presence of God about one’s own condition conditioned by others—is the means of that grace given to us.

So Psalm 32:3-5:

“While I kept silence, my body wasted away through my groaning all day long. For day and night your hand was heavy upon me; my strength was dried up as by the heat of summer. Then I acknowledged my sin to you, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the Lord,’ and you forgave the guilt of my sin.”

-Joe

Peter, not James

During the Sunday school time before the worship service this week, Pastor Ntapo was leading the people in a reading of Acts 12, the account of Peter’s rescue from prison and perhaps imminent death at the hands of King Herod. Indeed, the story begins with the report that Herod had “laid violent hands upon some who belonged to the church”, even having “James, the brother of John, killed with the sword” (vv. 1-2). During this time, the text states, “while Peter was kept in prison, the church prayed fervently to God for him” (v. 5). From this basic introduction to the story, Pastor Ntapo deduced what was for me another unexpected gem of biblical interpretation within the context of South African Christianity and the spiritual realities a vast majority of its adherents encounter. No doubt responding to the perspective of African “traditional religion” that the ancestors of the home (sometimes called in the scholarly literature “the living dead”) exert an active influence over and maintain a “real presence” with their living descendants, Pastor Ntapo pointed out that the church in Acts “prayed fervently for Peter,” which is to say, and not for “James” whom Herod had already killed. “It does no good to pray for a dead person,” he said. “We can do nothing for them,” and by implication, apart from the will of God (known to us in scripture) they can do nothing for us. On the other hand, we can and should pray and intercede to God on behalf of those still alive—and expect, just as Peter was delivered, for the only living God to shower us with his grace.

-Joe