A Shared Christian Life by Ben Witherington III

Author:Ben Witherington III
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Abingdon Press
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

PRAYER IN THE NEW TESTAMENT

The place we must necessarily start the discussion of prayer in the New Testament is with the prayer that Jesus taught his disciples. This, of course, is the most widely prayed prayer in human history; and still today it unites the body of Christ worldwide. On any given Sunday, millions of Christians around the world pray this prayer. But what exactly are we praying? Are we just mindlessly reciting a familiar formula like when we daydream driving down an all-too-familiar road? Or is there something crucial about this prayer, which came as a response to a request that Jesus teach his followers how to pray?

The first thing to note about this prayer is that in one sense it can be called the Lord’s Prayer, since he originated it, but in another sense it might better be called the Disciples’ Prayer, for it was given for us to use. It is interesting, however, that it appears Jesus himself prayed in this fashion. For one thing, Jesus certainly prayed to God as Abba, the Aramaic word meaning “Father dearest.” It is a term of intimacy, and interestingly a term that children used of their fathers; but it is also a term the disciples used of their Jewish teachers. It is not, however, slang or colloquial speech, so the translation “Daddy” is not appropriate, being too familiar and informal. Disciples never called their master teachers “Dad” or “Daddy,” much less addressed their deity in this fashion.

Notice in Mark 14:36 Jesus is depicted as calling God “Abba,” which Mark renders in Greek with the more formal “Father,” not with “Daddy.” Nevertheless, those who know about the prayer language of early Judaism, know that Jews would in fact use roundabout ways of talking to and about God to avoid mispronouncing the names for God. (For example, they would say, “Blessed be He,” rather than, “Blessed be Yahweh,” or they would talk about the kingdom of heaven instead of the kingdom of God, so sacred was the name of God and its right pronunciation.) So Jesus is initiating his disciples into a new level of intimacy in the way they address and relate to God, when he teaches them to pray saying “Abba.” It is interesting that in Luke’s form of the Lord’s Prayer we simply have “Abba”/“Father” as the first clause, but in Matthew we have “our Father” because the prayer is being adopted for communal use, for use as a prayer we all pray together (cf. Luke 11:2 to Matt 6:9). This prayer was meant to be prayed both in an individual form and as part of the body of believers, and over the course of Church history it was the wisdom of the Church to emphasize the collective form of this paradigmatic prayer found in Matthew, rather than the individual form of the prayer. In fact, most Christians don’t even realize there is any form of this prayer other than the collective form found in Matthew 6.

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