Prayer of the Saints - Lesson 3

Dr. James Houston

Prayer of the Saints

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Jesus, New Testament Jews and the Early Church Fathers

Lesson Transcript

Our third lecture on the prayer lives of saints and scholars of the Church is very complex because we’re going to study both the prayer life of the Jews that surrounded Jesus, his own prayer life, as well as the later commentaries that were made in the second century and later by the Early Church Fathers on the Lord’s Prayer. So you’ll have to bear with me because of the complexity of this subject matter—it’s very ambitious. But as we prepare our hearts to listen together, our appropriate hymn is, of course, the Lord’s Prayer. It’s lovely that this hymn has been given to us in a modern rendering.

One of the exercises that really shaped my life 20 or 30 years ago, was I began to meditate on the Lord’s Prayer. I began to read all the commentaries I could on the Lord’s Prayer and, literally, for four years I recited the Lord’s Prayer every day in the privacy of my own prayer life and reading voraciously all the commentaries I could, which meant that if I was ever jumped upon to preach a sermon, I could immediately respond with a sermon on the Lord’s Prayer. But I think that’s the kind of thing that we mean that Jeremiah did when symbolically he ate the scroll: that you so masticate the scripture that each word, each phrase, that you begin to incorporate literally within your whole life. And so that has been one of the most formative phases of my own spiritual growth in the Lord. So try it out and do it for more than a year. Just as later I thought well, I don’t know enough about meditation and so I read Psalm 119 for a whole year and kept repeating and I got into the rhythm of being meditative about Psalm 119.

What we have to argue first of all is that in spite of what you may think, the Lord’s Prayer was not formative for the early Christian communities as far as we know. It was only later, in retrospect, that the Lord’s Prayer became much more significant from the 2nd into the 3rd and 4th centuries, where it became central to the life of the Church. For now prayer was becoming a real test to conversion. And unlike our contemporary understanding of the Lord’s Prayer that it’s mouthed by everybody in such nominal Christendom, whether Christian or not, that they really don’t realise that this religious act is totally alien to what was going on in the process of the Lord’s Prayer in the Early Church. There the Lord’s Prayer was not public; it was a secret. It was confined to those who were candidates for baptism. And, literally, what they were doing was closing the door. As Jesus exhorts in Matthew 5, you go into your closet and there is where you commune the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not a public ceremony at all. And, of course, these candidates were being prepared for the supreme act of surrendering not only their old ways of life and dying to it in a spiritual sense, but they were also knowing that the secret of the Lord’s Prayer might lead to their death when they were identified, by their baptism, as Christians. So perhaps there’s something that we can reflect upon that needs to be recovered in the life of the Church that the Lord’s Prayer was never intended for conventional Christendom. The Lord’s Prayer is for the devoutly committed, radical disciples of Jesus Christ.

[00:04:49]

Also, I would recommend that as part of your own general theological education that in this period a book that will profoundly enrich you to read the Lord’s Prayer is Origen’s whole Treatise on Prayer. It’s almost, in some ways, contemporary the way he writes; it’s so remarkably fresh. To think that he was writing this at the beginning of the 3rd century and yet it’s so clear in the practical and incisive way in which he communicates. And so in the classics of Western Spirituality, you can read in the volume on Origen—which is perhaps the most convenient way to do—the other texts that are published that are earlier about this significant prayer.

Origen divides the Treatise into two parts. The first half—it’s really the first third—is on just general principles about prayers. It’s a very practical, pastoral guide as to how you enter into a life of prayer and of the practical perceptions of it. It’s then in the latter three-quarters of the Treatise that is his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer. So there you have the two together and it’s just where he’s switching in his text from his general observations about prayer to the commentary that he gives us this wonderful statement that we start with here. He says the discussion of prayer is so great a task that it requires the Father to reveal it, His firstborn Son to teach it and His Holy Spirit to enable us to think and speak rightly of so great a subject. So there you have it: the Trinity is necessary for us to say the Lord’s Prayer. Have you ever thought of that? So he’s uniting the ministry of the Triune God of Grace as the one God to whom we can come and who provides the resource for us in a threefold way for us to enter into prayer.

[00:07:24]

Many of us, when we first started our study of the mystery of the Trinity, perhaps got confused. First of all, our denominations suggested a dysfunctional divine family that some are focusing on the fatherhood of God and others are in their Christology as evangelicals focus on Christ and those in the more Pentecostal tradition are focusing on the Holy Sprit. God cannot so be divided. And so the iconic relationship that there is within the Godhead means that each is always referring to the other. It’s what the Early Fathers in the 4th century called the doctrine of perichoresis. What they meant by the word perichoresis is a kind of divine dance. It’s the kind of thing that’s going on that each is dependent upon the other, reflecting upon the other, relating with the other and yet independent in their unity and their uniqueness. And of course, this creates a kind of divine drama that is so profoundly mysterious.

Perhaps one of the ways which you can think of perichoresis within the Godhead is to watch modern ice dancers skating on the ice. It’s a mark of the skill of a couple doing the dance on the ice that they’re never more than a yard from each other. They’ll be disqualified if they were. Each is not doing his own dance. It’s one dance. So the floor and the synchronisation of their bodies is as one body with two parts. In a sense, this is illustrative of the divine dance that we find in the Godhead. So, as Origen puts it, yes, the Father is the source of this revelation; yes, it’s the firstborn Son who embodies the prayer that He teaches us to pray; but it’s also the Holy Spirit who enables us to have this consciousness that we’re open to His presence in our lives as we cry out Holy Spirit engage us in this mysterious and marvellous reality of the life that we have in God as his Triune life.

So yes, Origen is profoundly Trinitarian. He’s probably one of the first to be so profoundly aware of this Trinitarian life long before the early Church councils began to focus upon the deity of Christ, on the reality that truly Christ is the Son of God. And, of course, the Council of Nicea is the climax to that kind of summation of understanding.

[00:10:49]

But even throughout the 4th century, the Church was still questioning the deity of Christ—as we’ve already mentioned in other lectures—and especially in the Eastern Mediterranean where the understanding of the Son of God was most parlous, most profoundly mis-taught by the Arians. You could say that the clash today between Christian and Jew has arisen because the Arian controversy was never resolved. Yet it’s out of that Arian controversy that Islam took root in the Middle East. So then, as we look, we find that later the focus of the Cappadocian Fathers, now understanding more profoundly the Trinity, was that the awareness of the Holy Sprit too is not just simply an emanation of God, but is one of the persons of the Godhead. And it’s an issue that today perhaps, as Christians, we’re still confused about. Do we think of the Holy Spirit as a power? Do we think of the Holy Spirit as a person within the divine community that is the Triune God? Because we tend to think that the evidence of the Holy Spirit in our lives is that He empowers us.

This perhaps is more reflective of our technological society. It was not the view of the Early Fathers at all. It’s a view that in our culture we want power. We want to be fixing things. And so I drive our audiences crazy sometimes when they ask me these ‘how to’ questions. How do you do this? How do you do that? They don’t realise that they are victims of the technological society. It’s a mindset that is not relational. And so this empowering is a questionable pursuit though we might innocently and genuinely want to be empowered by the Holy Spirit.

Another thing that, too, is often misunderstood, is that it’s not just Christians who pray. We find in Korea that the prayer life of Korean Christians it’s difficult to decide whether it’s Christian or whether it’s Shamanistic. You spend all night in a mountain as a special act of piety as a Christian? No. You do that in Shamanism. And so it’s so subtle that we don’t realise how culture so profoundly distorts us in our understanding of prayer and of the importance of prayer.

But the Lord’s Prayer, as we know, goes back to Jesus as he recited and taught it to his disciple. And as we well know, there are two texts: in Matthew 5 and in Luke 11. And we sometimes talk about the Prayer of the Mount and the Prayer of the Plain because it’s within one that we have the Sermon on the Mount and in the other we have the Sermon on the Plain. Not that these are geographically distinct, but they are contextual to the distinction of the way that Matthew is setting the Lord’s Prayer to a Jewish audience to claim a greater righteousness that comes through knowing the Son of God and therefore it’s a quality of intimacy that belongs to a greater faith. And it’s the disciples who are six times indicted in Matthew’s Gospel because they lack this greater faith. Matthew is constantly saying, ‘O ye, of little faith.’ It’s not the quantity of faith that was making them little in their faith; it was the quality of their faith that was making it so belittled. That is to say, it’s a faith that lacked intimacy. But through Jesus Christ we are so near to God, we could not nearer be.

[00:15:34]

One of the favourite hymns or phrases that my father used to quote to me as a child was, ‘So near, so very near to God, I could not nearer be. For in the person of the Son I am as near as He. So dear, so very dear to God, I could not dearer be. For the love wherewith He loves his Son, such is His love to me.’ It’s in that context that we cry out, ‘Abba! Father!’ It’s an acclamation that reminds us we’re little children. And yet the Kingdom belongs to little children. That’s the theme of Matthew 18 and again in Matthew 19 that except you become a little child, you can’t enter into that Kingdom. That’s why, ‘Abba! Father!’ is a diminutive of really saying our Divine Daddy. It’s as our Divine Daddy that we associate prayer. This is why I’m making this emphasis that theology is child theology.

[00:16:59]

In Luke’s Gospel, the context is rather different. There Luke is universalising the Gospel that goes into all the world. It’s a Gospel that therefore provides a new form of discipleship. So when the disciples with John have a prayer that John had taught them—that is to say, John the Baptist—the disciples of Jesus are really saying logically, ‘How come that we’re your disciples and you haven’t taught us to pray?’ Whereas, John with his disciples, he’s teaching them a prayer. In other words, we all want to belong to an inner club. So what club do we belong to if we don’t have a signature tune? The kind of keynote relationship that you as master should give to us. And so again we say, the Lord’s Prayer is not a signature tune. It’s not a badge of membership. And so it’s in that kind of context that Luke is telling us a much more abbreviated version of the same prayer. Perhaps he’s abbreviating it deliberately to indicate that the actual words are not really what matter; it’s the spirit with which we use the words.

[00:18:34]

And when we look to see what the Lord’s Prayer is about, it’s a prayer that connects hesed with saddiq. These two Hebrew words are referring to the act of righteousness, but it’s also the act of covenant relationship. There is a right-relatedness and that’s why we call Him Abba. But there’s also a right expression of hesed love and that is to love our neighbour as ourself. Love of God and love of neighbour are bound together in the Lord’s Prayer, as we’ll see.

So the context of zeal of God, for his Word, for the Law of the Lord that is perfect means that we’re to know God appropriately and properly. We must know who God is. But the Lord’s Prayer is divided into two parts. It’s like the Ten Commandments. First of all, let God be God. Learn to know who God is. Then let man be man. Learn to know who is our neighbour. And so the petitions are divided. The first three are claiming who God is and the last four petitions are claiming who our neighbour is and what our obligations are in hesed covenant to the neighbour. It’s exactly the same with the Ten Commandments. The first four Commandments are saying let God be God. And the other six Commandments are saying let man be man. And the hinge between them is the Prayer for the Sabbath Day; in other words, that we have a Sabbatical identity by which we love our neighbour; not this identity of circumcision, but the Sabbatical identity of resting in our relationship to our neighbour. In other words, this focus is so profound that later it’s echoed in the cry of Augustine: ‘Let me know Thee, O God.’ That’s the first three petitions. ‘Let me know myself.’ And to know myself is to know myself as being for the other. It’s profound, but that’s its significance. And so the petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are divided appropriately in this way. We have to have a zeal for God, for His righteousness, and we have a zeal for the neighbour that’s our hesed covenant. And that’s why we don’t pray, ‘My Father, who art in Heaven.’ We share it. It’s ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven.’

[00:22:11]

Well, Jewish prayer in the time of our Lord was happening in one of the most formative periods of its history. The period from about 200 BC to 200 AD was when, in this 400 year period, Rabbinism was a new Judaic system that was taking shape and explains why Saul of Taurus was so zealous as a Pharisee of the Pharisees for the reform of Rabbinism. And it’s in this crucial, transitional period after the destruction of the temple in 70 AD that the Shema emerged as a primary ritual of the scribal profession. There was this rediscovery of what was found in the Book of Deuteronomy 6: our God is one God and we are to serve and to love the Lord our God with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our might. This is the primal pulse beat of the prayer life that is the centrality of the Shema.

God used the abolition of the temple to cleanse Judaism from animal sacrifice. And so it was in God’s purposes that this reform movement of Rabbinism was possible because now the worshipper is not putting all the onus on the animal sacrifice; he has to have a sacrificed life. And so powerful was this destruction of sacrificial animals that it affected even the pagans in the 2nd century. And that’s why we get the rise of Stoicism and other of these virtuous philosophers who realised, again, the responsibility for who we are in our behaviour is not going to be put on animal sacrifice. We face it ourselves. So there was an awareness throughout the whole world, whether it was pagan or Jewish or Christian, that we have responsibility for our own deeds.

And it’s as this scribal culture is emerging that Jesus himself encounters these scribes. And Jesus himself therefore is versed and immersed in this renewal of prayer life among the Jews themselves. And so in Mark 12:29–30, Jesus recites the two verses of the Shema in his debate with a group of scribes. And we find that the significance then of this is very much part of the culture that Jesus himself was brought up in. The Tefillah, which is the other tradition from the Shema, belongs much more not to the scribal, which belonged to the synagogal tradition, but much more to the priestly and aristocratic tradition of the temple cult. It’s much more associated then with the inheritance of wealthy families that rule the land. And it’s in that tradition that we have these 18 blessings of the Tefillah. Many of these blessings are, of course, national blessings. They’re the blessings that belong to the political theme of a nation state. Other blessings are associated with the blessings of the land, of prosperity and material blessings. It’s no different from the Prosperity Gospel movement that we have, that became so strong in Brazil, but it’s spreading in other parts of the world today. I give my tithes and God blesses me. That’s not Christian. And it’s so corrupt.

[00:26:48]

So Jesus then has in this background so much to be polemic about. Jesus is clearly using all this background to indicate a unique contrast that his own person now represents. For it’s Jesus who is claiming to be the presence of God. No wonder he was crucified. It’s no longer the Shekinah glory of the temple. It’s that he himself is the embodiment of all the aspirations of Israel. And even today, there are generous-hearted Christians who are wanting to support the return of Jews to Palestine. They’re wanting to see the reestablishment of the Sacred Sites. They want to actually make sure that Israel prospers all because of their interpretation of this Tefillah. It’s too materialistic. The Promised Land is not a territory; the Promised Land is a changed ethic of behaviour. Yes, it’s a shock to some fundamentalist Christians that the Promised Land is not a territory; it’s Jesus Christ.

The first thing that we note about Jesus and his Jewish roots was that Jesus did spend his ministry in the synagogues. It’s clear that certainly in his Galilean ministry, he was constantly teaching in the synagogues of Capernaum and, indeed, of his own home village of Nazareth. And the significance, of course, of synagogal worship was that it was simple—far simpler than the temple worship. It certainly had become a devout feature of Jewish life. It was no longer associated with the wealth associated with the economic aristocracy of the temple. And it was also, essentially, apocalyptic. It was future orientated in its worship. It was kindling hope for the despair and the poverty of human peasants. And Jesus responds within that synagogal environment to give a new hope for the people of Israel. And so that’s why Jesus starts by saying, ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit.’ And why Jesus starts his ministry by proclaiming from the Book of Isaiah 61, ‘The spirit of the Lord is upon me’ to do this anointing for the poor, for the outcast, for the prisoner, for the liberation of the captive. It’s a messianic ministry that he now embraces as his own. He is the Messiah.

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And it’s significant that, especially in John’s Gospel, we find that John collates the miracles of Jesus in such a way that Jesus is re-enacting the whole history of Israel. The miracle of the loaves that was set in the Passover spring season is what he repeats in the feeding of the 5,000. His walking on the water reinterprets the crossing of the Red Sea. The celebrations at the synagogue would worship and chant from Exodus 14: 21 when the waters were parted was what he himself manifested to his startled disciples. It’s ironic in the narrative to see that the disciples were not frightened at the waves. They were frightened at the one who stilled the waves. They should have been scared of the physical phenomenon. They were much more scared about the majesty of Christ’s glory that he should still the storm.

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And so when the Jews asked what miracle you show us that we should believe in you as our fathers ate manna in the desert as the scripture says he gave them bread from Heaven to eat, Jesus replies in John 6:31 your fathers, they ate that manna in the wilderness, but they’re dead. I’m the living bread which has come down from Heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever. Or again, at the feast of dedication that commemorates the purification of the temple, especially in the time of the Maccabees after it had been defiled we find that Jesus cleanses the temple. In fact, the whole drama of the incarnation pivots around the cleansing of the temple. And in John’s Gospel, unlike the Synoptics that put it at the end of his ministry, John deliberately puts it at the beginning of his ministry to say that all the opposition against Jesus was because a greater than the temple was here. This then was a challenge to the very core of Jewish practices, of Jewish religious life. Nothing could be so threatening. And as we know from all the accounts that because of Jesus’ act of cleansing the temple then the leaders sought to know how they might kill him. Clearly, the cleansing of the whole Jewish system is really what we have in the cross of Christ. We understand the death of Christ because they didn’t want this reformer of Israel in their midst.

We also find echoes from the Old Testament that David’s greater son would come as the intrepid shepherd, who would destroy those threats to the flock like wild animals. And so in Ezekiel 34, we find this archetype of David being described as the one shepherd to whom God entrusts him with the covenant of peace for his people. Or the echo of Ezekiel 34 that’s found in John’s Gospel where Jesus presents himself as the good shepherd who, like the intrepid David himself, defends the sheep against the wolf and gives his life for their sake as the good shepherd, indeed the one shepherd. In other words, Jesus is indicating in this statement explicitly he is the Messiah of Israel. Or again, we find that the Rabbinic concept of the Shekinah Glory is taken up by Jesus. Now we find that, of course, the statement that was developed within the synagogue was that wherever ten persons assemble within a synagogue, the Shekinah is with them. So they get together ten good men and you have the assurance that God’s presence will be with you in your exile.

[00:34:48]

Paul takes up this echo and says where two or three are gathered together, or Jesus rather is saying where two or three are gathered together in my name there am I in the midst. This shows us the dynamic mobility of God’s presence to the Diaspora of the Jews. What a wonderful affirmation it is. We find Malachi saying in his Book 3:16 that they discovered when they feared the Lord and spoke one to another—not just classed as ten, but just one with another—then there too was the promise that His Shekinah would be with them. And so it is in Matthew 18:20, as I’ve just quoted, ‘Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I—the Shekinah—in your midst.’

Now there have been some daring Rabbis, like Rabbi Akiva, who states that when husband and wife are worthy, that’s to say that they’re righteous ones, the Shekinah will abide with them. So even the Jews were prepared to see that in the state of marriage there was the presence of the Shekinah. But they were still questioning and exploring how many it takes for God’s presence to be with us. And the answer was if you’re in the household where there’s a good man and his spouse, that’s enough for the Shekinah to abide. But now, of course, the indescribability as to what is the presence of God is clarified and now it’s personified for its focus in Jesus Christ when he makes this extraordinary statement that we quoted in Matthew 18:20. Likewise, in the upper room, in the discourses that Jesus is giving he says that whatever you ask in my name that too will be fulfilled. So the issue is no longer questioning whether his presence is there, rather the thing we should question is whether our behaviour in his presence is appropriate to asking things in his name. In other words, it’s the ethical qualities of relatedness that either make us worthy or unworthy. So Jesus makes prayer possible because Jesus is the Shekinah: his presence is with us.

[00:37:54]

Jesus is doing all this in preaching in the synagogue and so as to climax of this that he’s able to fulfil, as he expresses in Luke 4:18–19 and also Isaiah 61, that the spirit of the Lord has been given me for the Lord has anointed me to be the Messiah. I’m now his anointed one. He has sent me to bring good news to the poor and to bind up the broken-hearted and to proclaim liberties for the captives, give new sight to the blind, to set the downtrodden free, to proclaim the Lord’s year of favour. So when you think of it, when we call upon the Lord’s presence in prayer, we’re asking him to release all these promises in our hearts that all these things are what will enable us to have the good news. He does bind up our hearts. He does give us freedom from our inhibitions or our addictions or our passions. In our blindness and tunnel vision, he gives us sight. And indeed, he proclaims that this is the Lord’s year of favour in our lives. So what a wonderful release there is when we pray in his name—we’re celebrating his presence.

Again, Jesus in the upper room is reiterating so much of this Jewish background. It’s a celebration of the Seder: the meal that every Jew celebrates for liberation to be the people of God. But now it’s no longer a liberation from Egypt, no longer a liberation from the exile. It’s a liberation from the idolatry of religious worship. And so both in Deuteronomy 26:5 and Joshua 24:2 onwards we are recording a liberation of Israel, not from Egypt, but from its idolatry. And so, we ourselves when we take the bread and the wine together in the communion service are celebrating our freedom from our idols. We never think of freedom from idols. We never think it’s freedom from being possessed with money, or being possessed by sex, or being possessed by all sorts of habits that we become addicted to and enslaving of our lives. But this is what it is. And in the celebration of the Hallel in Psalms 113–118, we find it’s the celebration of giving thanks, of praise, of glorifying, of exalting, honouring, blessing, extolling, adoring him who performs these wonderful acts of salvation. We are singing a new song, Hallelujah indeed.

[00:41:33]

And then as the meal begins with a second cup having been blessed, then another cup is blessed and a fourth cup is blessed, declaring that David alone is worthy to bless this cup, as Christ alone is worthy to do it. Now we don’t need four cups. There’s only one. It’s Christ. And so we have the recitation of Psalm 115: not by us O Lord, not by us, but by you alone is the glory reserved. And so iconically we worship him, uniquely as our deliverer, as our God. At the start of the meal it was customary for the Jews to wash their hands, or certainly for the master of the Seder to wash his hands in view of what he was about to do and share among those who were at the banquet. But as we know, Jesus broke with that custom by washing their feet instead. And so this now is the act of his humiliation that we think of in terms of Philippians 2 of the one who humiliates himself more profoundly than we can ever experience in our lives. This is where I love to sing, ‘He who was rich beyond all splendour, yet for loves sake becamest poor.’ He exchanged the mansions of glory for a stable floor. Blessed be the Lord.

We mentioned at the beginning of this address, and this is brought out in the Epistle of James, that the mark of a Godly Israelite had a twofold trait. One was to live in zedek, in righteousness; the other was to practice hesed, piety; but as a zedek that was towards God and a piety that was also towards men. So this double awareness is again the love of God and the love of the neighbour. It’s what is symbolic of all that our Lord was. And both Jerome and other later writers make a lot about the significance of our prayer life having these two qualities. It demands a right-relatedness with God and it demands a right-relatedness with each other. And as we said in a previous address, an unforgiving spirit or a spirit of resentfulness and anger inhibit our prayer life because communion with God means uninterrupted fellowship with each other. We can never pray narcissistically. We can’t say that I pray in my small corner and you in yours. There’s no place for that kind of privacy. And that’s why when we pray we pray, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven.’

[00:45:02]

What we’re seeing in this wide sweep of what Jesus was doing was to transform the whole religious piety of the Rabbinical world, even though it was being reformed, of the synagogical world that was being so willingly reformed, to say it’s not enough. It’s a lead. It’s a move. The temple had resisted reform, so the synagogue was certainly better. The synagogue had belonged to the prophetic tradition. It belongs to a tradition of exile. It belongs to a tradition of the dispossessed and the poor in spirit. So it’s a worthy world in which the Early Church was to preach. As it were, God had prepared for Christianity by a previous reform of Judaism. Have you ever thought about that? So when Paul says when the fullness of the times was come, part of the fulfilment of that times was that Israel was in the process of reform. Of course, the world of the temple was cast in self-interest, political motivation and commercial corruption. That’s why it was destroyed. Judgement was upon it in total destruction for there’s no longer any hearing of the voice of the Lord.

[00:46:46]

When we come then to the Acts of the Apostles as we find recorded in Acts 1:14 after the ascension of Jesus, the disciples with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and with his brothers were persevering with one accord in prayer. And this notion of persevering in prayer is repeated again in Acts 2:42. They were persevering in the Apostles’ teaching, in fellowship, in the breaking of bread and the prayers. What we don’t know is how these prayers that they were engaged in were just simply a continuation of their practices that they had had in the synagogue. Clearly, it’s a transitional period in the life of the Church. Christians too were gathering in private houses as well as in synagogues. They were in both places. And therefore the pattern of their prayer life would be in a strange and complex transition, one from the other. How Jewish was it? How radically different was it? That was one of the controversies that the Apostle Paul, especially, has to face. And so we’ve already referred to the fact that James in his Epistle, who is still perhaps one of the conservatives of the Jerusalem church and perhaps, therefore, with a different mindset from the Apostle Paul himself. It’s Paul within that Jewish tradition that is realising that there’s tension there. This is why we ourselves sometimes have to have tolerance with each other, that some of us are more mature, some of us are not so mature, and we have to bear with one another in the reality of this situation.

Again, we have evidence that there were Christians who stood in prayer. Well, those who stood in prayer probably came from a Jewish tradition. And there were Christians who kneeled in prayer and they probably came from a Gentile tradition. And if you go to an Eastern Orthodox Church in Moscow today, you’ll stand all through the sermon. So we realise that ethnically and culturally and historically, we do have to have a bit of flexibility and fluidity in our practices. The problem is that so obsessed do we get with these that we forget what we’re supposed to be doing, which is to pray.

[00:49:55]

So even Jesus, you see, is himself using in the Tefillah, the first of the 18 benedictions when, in Matthew 11:25, he says, ‘I thank you, Lord of heaven and earth.’ He’s using the phraseology of a Jewish prayer. What of course is new, utterly new, is that prayer is now claimed in the name of Jesus, just as the miracles that Peter performs recorded in the early Acts of the Apostles are in the name of Jesus, that they’re performed. Now, to call upon the Lord Jesus doesn’t mean necessarily to address him directly, but it’s to confess his name in baptism and in prayer. And so to persevere in prayer is for Paul synonymous with persevering in the epistolic doctrine. So now perseverance is a theme of continued struggle, continued effort, that we need. And this was very obvious in the Early Church.

And it was also with a new focus that was eschatological, as there had been in the Rabbinical prayer, but a very different eschatological vigilance now. It’s waiting for the Lord’s coming again. And so we’re reminded that the Lord is at hand in Philippians 4:5–6 and 1 Peter 47. And so, of course, the problem is which coming of the Lord do we talk about? Is his presence in my life now, the coming of the Lord, or is it the ultimate, you see? And here we have the kind of tension that we were lecturing about before about immanence and transcendence. There’s a continuity between them. So this prayerful consciousness is that we are in that tension between the now and the future.

When we come then, as we’ve already referred, to Origen, to his Treatise on Prayer, what Origen is now saying: the Christian’s whole life is one long prayer. It’s not, ‘When do I pray? When do I have my quiet time?’ It’s my whole disposition is being prayerful all the time. It is prayer without ceasing. And so Origen says the man who links together his prayer with his deeds of duty and fitting actions with his prayer is the man who’s praying without ceasing. There was a period in the Syriac Church among the Messalanians that we quoted before that used to count how many times were they saying the Prayer of Bartimaeus: Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy upon me. Of course, some could boast it was 10,000 times, even 15,000 times, a day. No, prayer is not mechanical. It’s not mathematical. Prayer’s the attitude of living.

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So Clement of Rome is the first one—and his prayer is recorded in 1 Clement 59, section 3—to give us a unique glimpse of early Christian prayer. It’s a prayer that was written, probably, at the end of the 1st century. It’s steeped in Roman tradition and yet it’s expressing in a liturgy for a Roman community, perhaps an aristocratic community of imperial slaves and of freedmen and their slaves. And this is the prayer: O God, we hope in your name, the source of all creation, you open the eyes of our hearts and know that you alone are the highest and in the highest who remains holy among the holy you humble the pride of the arrogant. You destroy the reckoning of the nations. You put the humble on high. You make the poor rich. You kill and you bestow life. You alone are the benefactor of spirits and the God of all flesh. You look into the depths and you see the human endeavours. You are the help of the endangered, the saviour of those with no hope, the creator and watcher over every spirit. You multiply the nations upon earth and from them all you have chosen those who love you through our Lord Jesus Christ, your beloved servant, through whom you have taught us and sanctified us and given us honour.

It’s a kind of imperial adulation that would be given to a Caesar, but now it’s addressed to the King of Kings. And so now on his knees he beseeches: We beseech you, Master, to be our helper and defender, save those in distress among us, have mercy on the lowly, raise up the fallen, show yourself to those in need, heal the sick, turn back those of your people who have strayed, feed the hungry, ransom our prisoners, revive the weak, comfort the vain-hearted, let all the nations know that you are God alone, that Jesus Christ is your servant, that we are your people and hear the echo of the Psalmist on the sheep of your pasture. You Lord, direct their will according to what is good and pleasing before you that they administer in peace and gentleness with piety the power given to them by you and may find mercy with you.

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And so he concludes: O you, who alone are able to do these things for us and more abundant things for us—an echo, of course, of Ephesians 2. We praise you through the high priest and protector of our souls, Jesus Christ. Here you have the echo almost of the whole of the Epistle to the Hebrews—of our great high priest, of our mediator, through whom to you be glory and majesty, both now and forever, Amen.

It’s a profound prayer. One of the things that we are already beginning to recognise then is that prayer in the 2nd century was far more cosmic than it is today. And what I’m finding, as an old man, is the more I see things globally, the younger I get, that you’re given an inspiration, an élan vital, to see things far more broadly and with far more dynamism because of it. And actually, I was speaking to a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, who’s done some research, that the bigger your view, the more vitality you have. There’s a great vitality in global prayer. In other words, the emperor is the king of the universe. He truly is our one Lord and Saviour.

Following on Clement of Rome in his prayer, which we associate with the Didache, is another interesting source of information, which is of Syrian origin and is believed to be something that was probably written at the end of the 1st century or the beginning of the 2nd century. And it’s the first evidence that we have now of the early Christian community reciting the Lord’s Prayer. They do it three times a day. And it’s noteworthy that it’s also indicating that it’s making a commentary on the prayer. So it’s one of the first primitive commentaries that we have on the Lord’s Prayer. Obviously, this is developing throughout the century, but we have a gap in the evidence until we come to the Prayer of Tertullian. And his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer is now about 200 AD. And, like Origen’s prayer later, it’s really all about the Lord’s Prayer.

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And so what it’s indicating is that there’s an intensification that’s now taking place under persecution of the Church that they’re now addressing the Lord’s Prayer for a particular purpose and that is for those who are being catechumens, being prepared for baptism. And in being prepared for baptism, it’s a secret prayer. It’s their private badge, you might say, that they’re Christians. But they’re knowing that if this is disclosed to Caesar, they can be destroyed, so they enter the waters of baptism as a daily dying prepared that tomorrow might be the ultimate dying. A very different view of baptism from what we have in our generation today.

By the time we get to Ambrose, who is the mentor of Augustine, he is now deliberately teaching the Lord’s Prayer publicly and catechetically from the pulpit. So now, instead of being commentators on the Lord’s Prayer, these later writers are becoming catechists. They’re teaching how one prepared for baptism should interpret the Lord’s Prayer. And they begin to say, in a sense, that the Lord’s Prayer is the creed of the Church. But what they were also teaching is that these are not words of Jesus. This is the life of Jesus. So that the Lord’s Prayer is a profile of who Jesus is. It’s Christ who is the pray-er. It’s Christ who embodies the prayer. So we’re looking at the whole life of Christ when we are saying the words of the petition. He’s celebrating in the coming of the Kingdom, his own embodiment and his own incarnation. And so, ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven,’ is the prayer of the incarnate Christ. It is the incarnation. He has come; he is fulfilling; he has fulfilled the whole of the Lord’s Prayer.

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Well, I think we may have to stop. But there’s a lot more we could say about what carries on in the prayer life of Cyprian John Chrysostom, who are all teaching about the Lord’s Prayer. But perhaps one of the most climactic approaches is that which we find in Gregory of Nyssa, as well, that was to be developed later by John of the Cross, and that is that the more you deeply enter into prayer, you find yourself being decentred from your natural self. You’re being disorientated from your natural inclinations. You are, in saying the Lord’s Prayer, entering into the dark night of the soul. This sublime way of praying, says Gregory, does not mean that you start with parrhesia, with a boldness to enter into his presence. That’s true. There’s a place for that, but what you’re doing now is being stripped of everything you are. It’s entering into the dark night of the soul. And Gregory sees three steps. First, it’s because we have parrhesia, we have boldness or parrhesia, that we can now expose ourselves to purgation. So there’s a purgative way of being cleansed of the senses. And then he sees that following that we are entering the illumination of truth, which provides how our senses are now being reclarified. It’s reciting 2 Corinthians 3 that now, with open gaze, we see the glory of God and are being transformed from glory to glory. This illumination, which he associates with apatheia, that is to say, a stillness that’s not our action. The stillness is God’s action within us. So in our disorientation, we’re being truly and profoundly reorientated. Of course, this is an echo of the Psalms, but it’s also the echo that later John of the Cross was to take up.

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So now, as we close, what are the questions that you might consider after a time of prayer together? Discuss how the Lord’s Prayer and the Ten Commandments have the same continuum and how both of them describe our identity as the self for the other in the name of God. Secondly, as Origen has shown us, and others later, our whole life is a prayer. How can we interpret that, knowing our narrative? And the third question is how do we see that our life of prayer is simply our transition into eternal glory? How we bless the Fathers of the Church for such magnificence of understanding. It’s not teaching that we have today. So we could say the reform of the Church is the recovery of the Fathers.