49. The Lord's Prayer

There is much more that could be said about the Eucharistic Prayers in the Roman Missal and in general, but we’ll move on to the next part of Holy Mass, which is the Lord’s Prayer. There are a few interesting points to make about the Lord’s Prayer and the surrounding text, including a surprise statement that many believe to have Protestant origins but really comes from the prayers of the early Church.

 

The introduction to the Lord’s Prayer during Mass states: “At the Savior’s command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say…” The Lord’s Prayer (often called the Our Father) is the only prayer specifically commanded by Jesus in the Gospels. It is found in two places: Matthew 6:9-13 and Luke 11:1-4. In Luke’s version, Jesus finished praying and his disciples requested that he teach them how to pray. He then instructed them to pray this prayer, which is why we call it the “Lord’s Prayer” and why we place such an emphasis on praying it daily. In the early Church, it was an expectation that each Christian would pray the Lord’s Prayer on a daily basis. Then in Mass we run into the strange line, “...we dare to say…” What does that mean? Why do we dare to say the Lord’s Prayer if Jesus instructed us to pray it? Again, the early Church Fathers repeatedly called it a daring and bold prayer, acknowledging that it is a prayer of sonship. We are only children of God because of our baptism, but that acknowledgement also implies that we are on a level of relationship to God that Jesus is on. We are acknowledging that baptism causes us to participate so fully in the life of Christ that we share in his divine nature. I don’t know what you think about that, but I certainly see that it is a bold statement! We are unworthy sinners and yet Jesus causes us to be raised to his level of relationship with God. Incredible!

 

Of course, the heart of this part of Mass is the Lord’s Prayer itself. We could speak for hours about each line of the Prayer, but I will give here just a brief note that there are seven petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. The first three are focused solely on God being glorified and the final four are focused on our need for God’s grace. This is a good preparation for Holy Communion: acknowledge God’s supreme goodness, desire that all would know Him as He ought to be known, and then ask Him for what only He can provide.

 

The final part of the prayer includes a brief prayer called the Embolism (a little stoppage in the communal prayer for the prayer of the priest) followed by the famous doxology that many people associate with the Protestant community because they insert it at the end of the Lord’s Prayer each time they pray it (while Catholics only say it during Mass). This is longer than we have space for, but there is a document called the Didache, which included the teaching of the Apostles from the earliest days of the Church. In the Didache is found an instruction to insert the line, “For to you is the power and the glory forever.” It became so familiar to the Christian community that most copyists of the Gospels wrote it into the Gospel. When the Scriptures began to be translated into other languages, especially into the King James Version, they assumed the line had always been in the Gospels. Interestingly enough, the Protestants who love the Bible have a line in their biblical prayer that comes from Catholic Tradition.