Lord's Prayer

The Lord's Prayer is the prayer that Jesus Christ taught his disciples, preserved in the Gospels in two forms: a longer form in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:9–13), and a shorter form (Luke 11:2–4), given when a disciple asked him to teach them to pray. Because Christ himself gave it, the Church has treated it as the pattern and summary of all prayer, and in the Anglican tradition it is learned by heart in childhood, said daily in public worship, and expounded in the Church Catechism.

The traditional text

Anglican worship uses the Matthean form of the prayer, as printed in the Book of Common Prayer:

Our Father, which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, in earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, As we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, But deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, The power, and the glory, For ever and ever. Amen.

The prayer is traditionally analysed as an address followed by seven petitions. The first three petitions concern God — the hallowing of his name, the coming of his kingdom, the doing of his will; the remaining four concern human need — daily bread, forgiveness of sins, preservation in temptation, and deliverance from evil.

The concluding doxology, "For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory", is absent from the earliest surviving manuscripts of Matthew's Gospel, and scholars generally regard it as a liturgical addition made in the Church's worship rather than part of the original text. The Prayer Book nevertheless prints it as part of the prayer: the 1662 book includes it at Morning and Evening Prayer and after Communion, but omits it at the head of the Communion service.

Use in the Book of Common Prayer

In the 1662 Book of Common Prayer the Lord's Prayer stands at the heart of the daily round: it is said every day at Morning and Evening Prayer and in the Litany, and children learned it as part of the Catechism before Confirmation. In the office of Holy Communion it is said twice: briefly at the head of the service, and again after all have communicated, where the rubric directs, "Then shall the Priest say the Lord's Prayer, the people repeating after him every petition." The prayer's place in daily worship is ancient: the early Christian manual known as the Didache directed that it be prayed three times a day.

The Catechism's exposition

The Catechism, printed in the Prayer Book for the instruction of children, requires the child to say the prayer by heart, and then asks, "What desirest thou of God in this Prayer?" The answer gathers the whole prayer into a summary: the child asks God, the giver of all goodness, for grace to worship, serve and obey him as he ought; for all things needful for soul and body; for mercy and forgiveness of sins; for protection in all dangers, ghostly and bodily; and for keeping from sin and wickedness, from the spiritual enemy, and from everlasting death — trusting that God will grant these things of his mercy and goodness through Jesus Christ.

Scholarship

The scholar Joachim Jeremias, in The Prayers of Jesus (1967), argued that Jesus's habitual address to God as "Abba" — an Aramaic word of intimate and trustful address — was distinctive of his own prayer, and that the Lord's Prayer, like the rest of his teaching about prayer, grew out of that relation to God as Father.

References

• The Book of Common Prayer, 1662.
• Joachim Jeremias, The Prayers of Jesus, SCM Press, 1967.