Canter Bridge

When Jesus’ disciples ask him for training in prayer, he has just finished praying. Presumably they are moved to pray because the sight of Jesus in conversation with his Father stimulates them to desire the same.

It would seem, then, that the thing Jesus instructs his disciples to ask for is what he himself has been requesting.

One day Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said to him, ‘Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.’He said to them, ‘When you pray, say: “Father, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come.”‘

We are told to ask the Father that his reputation might be set apart as untouchable and untarnished. As well, we learn to desire that his rule might be realized in our space and time as it is known to prevail even now in heaven.

The rhetoric itself trips us up if we are paying attention. Prayer challenges us on any number of philosophical planes. Space and time, heaven and earth, up there and down here. What do these things mean when one desires an incursion of an already existing governance into a region where its authority and goodness are held in doubt?

We are not told. Any philosophical conundra—real or imagined—are left relatively unattended.

Yet the thing remains, for Jesus has indeed responded to his followers’ request: we are to ask.

Leaving aside the salutation, the first two lines of the Lord’s prayer possess world-shaping potency even if one begins in the small, psychological space where the pray-er first learns to form these words in his mind, as an expression of his will, on his sometimes unmindful lips.

Father, may your name be hallowed.

May your government assume its rightful place.

Jesus’ prayer—now his disciples’ and eventually ours—begins neither with introspection nor duty.

Even as we begin to pray we are lifted outside of our densely packed but ultimately minute preoccupations. They will soon be brought into the sphere of spoken conversation with Jesus’ Father.

But not just yet. They are not, it seems, the main thing.

Reputation and rule loom larger. Not ours, but his.