Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Our Father found there in Luke's Gospel is much shorter than the one we use in our daily prayers and our Masses. The writer brings together stories and sayings from the life of Jesus. The one thing they all have in common is the subject of prayer. And right in the middle of this collection is Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer. But, despite its brevity, it retains the broad pattern to be found in the other versions. It is a pattern of prayer given on request. The disciples specifically asked the Master to teach them how to pray: "Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples."
We can take a couple of obvious points from this little piece of information. First of all, prayer is not the natural response of the human being to his or her immediate environment. Prayer is something that must be learned by every follower of Jesus. The second point worth noting is that the disciples, despite having spent over two years in the presence of the Lord, still found themselves at a loss when it came to prayer. This must give some heart to those of us who, two thousand years later, still struggle to maintain some semblance of prayer in our over-crowded lives.
The Lord's Prayer remains model and pattern for all Christian prayer. It has a double focus: praise and petition. The first half of the Our Father is focused upon God in himself; the second half is focused upon our need for God. We are urged to thank God for this goodness. Unless we count our blessings, they pass us by. We tend to take things for granted. The first part of the Our Father serves as a corrective to this lack of thoughtfulness. We are urged to thank him for his gift of creation, but above all his creation of the human race. At its very foundations then, Christianity is an optimistic religion. Its view of this world is both positive and uplifting. But this is not a naive, blind optimism. This optimism can only be sustained if we treat each other with respect and with responsibility.
The second half of the Our Father is an acknowledgement of this reality. Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. We do not always treat each other as God would have us treat them. Therefore, we stand in need of both the forgiveness of God and the forgiveness of each other. At this point the Our Father expresses a profound insight into humanity: only those who are able to forgive can themselves accept forgiveness. Forgiveness and acceptance are essential ingredients of mature humanity. Perhaps we have all learned the hard way that harbouring bitterness is intensely self-destructive.
God is not a divine egomaniac, like a tyrannical parent demanding our attention and affection. On the contrary, he invites us to walk with him so that we may be liberated from our own individual prisons. Just as God forbids us to sin for our own sakes rather than for his, so he commands us to pray, again for our own benefit rather than for his. One of the Prefaces to the Mass puts it very well when it addr4esses God the Father on our behalf: "Lord, you have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift." Prayer is pleasing to God precisely because it enhances and heals humanity.