This is a brief follow up to some notes I put up last week on the Lord’s Prayer as found in Luke 11. You can read that here.
Israel was a nation of pray-ers.
They prayed the Shema,
Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. 5 Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” (Deut 6:4–5)
They prayed the psalms on a regular basis, they prayed in the synagogues and when they visited the temple, etc.
And Jesus’ disciples grew up in this context.
So, their request in Luke 11:1, ‘Teach us to pray’, is curious because they are by nurture, regular pray-ers. And they are pray-ers who, as students of Jesus, want to be shown how to pray in the manner of Jesus.
And Jesus begins with: ‘Father’.
This is simple, significant, surprising.
God is addressed as Father only 21 times overall in the OT (see Garland’s ZECNT commentary on the passage).
Take the Psalms, for example. Israel’s prayer manual. Here, God is addressed as:
Yahweh, 635 times
Elohim, 325 times
God addressed as Father, 1 time (Ps 89:26)
He will call out to me, “You are my Father, my God, the Rock my Savior.” (Ps 89:26)
In a handful of texts, God is also referred to as a Father to the fatherless! (Psalm 10:14–18; 27:10; 68:5; 82:3; 103:13; 146:9)
This presents a significant contrast to the “To Whom It May Concern” approach of the Romans!1
So, what’s going on with this Father language?
It’s covenantal language that goes back to Exodus and continues in relation to the Israel’s kings, and the prophesied remnant:
Moses is to tell Pharaoh, “This is what the Lord says: Israel is my firstborn son.” (Exod 4:22)
Re. David: “I will be his father, and he will be my son.” (2 Sam 7:14)
Re. Israel’s faithful remnant, “you, Lord, are our Father, our Redeemer from of old is your name.” (Isa 63:16)
Jesus is teaching the disciples to pray in essentially covenantal language. For Luke’s audience—perhaps largely gentile audience—it is an invitation into the covenantal narrative of Israel.
That they, as members of renewed Israel thru the Spirit (so, v. 13), may also now call upon God as their Father and view themselves as his children. They may approach with child-like confidence, knowing he’s a good Dad who loves his kids.
How your prayer begins says a lot about the larger narrative or story you think you’re a part of.
For example, Romans tended to hedge their bets when they prayed, not wanting to unnecessarily offend a god by calling them the wrong name. Hence you get a prayer like this
to “the blessed Queen of Heaven whether Thou be the Dame Ceres . . . whether Thou be the celestial Venus . . . or whether Thou be the sister of the god Phoebus, etc…”2
Such an opening to a prayer suggests that life is a bit of a lucky dip; that you’re at the mercy of whichever god’s whims; and you’re constantly looking to proactively appease. There’s no assurance, no love, a lot of ambivalence, and you’re always watching your back. Such prayer is like throwing a dart blind-folded hoping it hits a bullseye.
By contrast, Jesus teaches his disciples to begin by their prayers with…
Father
Addressing God as Father immediately places the pray-er into a narrative that has at its heart, God as a redeemer: a God who rescues a people from slavery, provides for his people as they enter the wilderness, and ultimately, will bring them to the Promised Land. That is the story of the Exodus.
Similarly, God’s people in Christ have been rescued from slavery to sin; in Christ, God provides for his people in this ‘wilderness-like’ life; and he will bring his people into the New Creation at Jesus’ return. That’s the New Covenant narrative of which these people are now a part.
Imagine, for a moment, what that means for Luke’s primarily gentile audience! Having come to the faith, many would have been rendered “fatherless”; kicked out of their families for having chosen to follow the crucified Messiah.
They were de-familiarised and de-storied; erased and exiled from their family and it’s history. Fatherless.
But now, in Christ the Son, Luke’s recipients/readers/auditors are part of a new people, with a new family history, and a new future because they now know the God of Jesus, the God of Israel, as Father, the one who rescues-, provides for-, and leads his people through the wilderness to their true Home.
As such, they are able to call upon their Father to make the world as it ought to be: a place where the Father’s name is hallowed and his kingdom extended; where daily bread is provided; where forgiveness and mercy are extended; where people are found humble before God; and for others to be granted sonship in Christ (see v. 13).
David E. Aune, “Religion, Greco-Roman,” Dictionary of New Testament Background: A Compendium of Contemporary Biblical Scholarship (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 922–923.
Again, Aune, “Religion, Greco-Roman,” 922–923.
Thanks for this!