On Easter Sunday, when 2 billion Christians around the world celebrate the resurrection of Jesus, many will read, recite and sing the Lord’s Prayer in hundreds of languages in houses of worship both modest and grand.
They may be Catholics or Protestants or Eastern Orthodox, theologically conservative or liberal or in between, but in this short prayer, Christians come together.
“The Lord’s Prayer really is the ‘creed’ that most connects the world’s Christians,” said theologian Frederick Dale Bruner, author of an acclaimed two-volume commentary on the Gospel of Matthew and an expert on the Lord’s Prayer.
“There is a sense of solidarity in knowing that Christians around the globe are praying together the prayer that was taught us by Christ himself,” said the Rev. Clayton Schmit, a professor of preaching at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., who has worshiped in many places around the world. “Even when Protestants and Catholics worship together, though much divides us theologically, these words always unite us.”
Also called the “Pater Noster” in Latin, or the “Our Father,” the Lord’s Prayer is found in two Gospels: Matthew 6: 9-13 and Luke 11: 2-4.
In Luke, one disciple, citing John the Baptist, entreats Jesus to “teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.” The commonly accepted version of the prayer comes from Matthew, translated from Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, into Greek and later Latin. One of the most widely used English translations is from the King James Version.
In his 20-page analysis of every word in the Lord’s Prayer in his Matthew commentary, Bruner says a major problem with prayer in general is uncertainty – the worshiper may be unsure what to say. By teaching the Lord’s Prayer, he said, Jesus gave his disciples clear instructions, while also showing that a short prayer can be as powerful as a long one.
Bruner says Jesus’ “greatest gift” to humans in the Lord’s Prayer “is giving them the right to call his Father by the address ‘our Father.’ ” The “our” conveys other meanings as well.
“When I say, ‘Our Father,’ it’s for me a real reconciling prayer,” said the Rev. Guillermo Garcia, a professor at Mount Saint Mary’s College in Los Angeles. “It’s also my prayer for my own Catholic church, that we will become more inclusive and less exclusive, that we will learn from our brothers and sisters, both within the Christian faith and outside the Christian faith.”
Schmit observed that some Protestant churches that used to include the Lord’s Prayer regularly in Sunday worship have taken to omitting it.
