Sermon on the Mount - prayer
the fact remains that prayer is part of human existence.
Prayer was and is both a spontaneous act and a recitative act
How does one say anything fresh about the Lord’s Prayer? The first thing to say is this: Don’t try to say something new because you’ll be wrong.
Jesus’ intent is not to discourage his followers from petitioning the Father but from thinking they can manipulate or cajole God.
With the Jesus Creed, the Lord took the Jewish Shema, rooted in Deuteronomy 6:4–8, and added Leviticus 19:18. Thus, his fundamental creed is to love God and to love others as ourselves. Jesus hereby adds a horizontal dimension to the Shema to supplement the vertical.
“On earth as it is in heaven” is fundamental to the entire Lord’s Prayer as well as all of early Christian eschatology
We begin with the obvious: what Jesus says strikes the Christian as backward and conditional
Forgiveness from God and our forgiving others are tied together by Jesus. This jars our Christian sensibilities, but that is precisely why Jesus says it as he does: we need to hear how connected our forgiveness and God’s forgiveness are—not so we will go about trying to earn our forgiveness by forgiving others but so we will see the utter importance of being people who forgive.
1. God has graciously forgiven us (of much greater sin/s).
2. Therefore, we are to forgive others to extend God’s grace.
3. If we don’t forgive others, we show we are not forgiven.
4. Forgiven people forgive others.
5. But our forgiveness does not earn God’s forgiveness.
We’ve already mentioned this, but it needs to be said again. In the world of Judaism there were two major ways to express the implications of sins and trespasses: burdens and debts. If sin incurred a burden, a person wanted it lifted. Forgiveness in that world is the removal of a burden. The second way to express what incurred from sin was a debt
The Didache, a Jewish Christian document, informs us that the Christians were instructed to pray the Lord’s Prayer “three times a day”
This is, in fact, a prayer for the kingdom of God to become fully present: not for God’s people to be snatched away from earth to heaven, but for the glory and beauty of heaven to be turned into earthly reality as well.
The most noticeable characteristic of the Lord’s Prayer is its Jewishness
Despite the parody, Barth’s point remains valid. We cannot build the kingdom of God on earth, because even our best efforts toward peace, justice, and community are compromised by sin. Only God can bring the ultimate transformation that includes the radical annulment of sin.