Sometimes I marvel at the sheer power of common, ordinary human language. It can pack an enormous amount of meaning, emotion, and information into relatively few words. Newton’s three laws of motion, Euclid’s axioms, Shakespeare’s sonnets, William Blake’s poetry are all examples and there are many others. The Tao Te Ching is a remarkably brief work of language for a universal belief system. But sometimes the meaning of a text can become obscured by over-familiarity and formality or may simply be so far ahead of its time that it has never been well interpreted or understood. Holy texts are often victims of the former. I consider the Lord’s Prayer to be the latter. What follows is an ordinary language inquiry into this millennia-old meditation, which I consider to be the crown jewel of Christianity.
I was taught the Lord’s Prayer by my great aunt Earna Banner, when I was about five years old. I’ve contemplated it throughout my life, intrigued by the sense that its text contained a meaning of some considerable value, but only if I could see it, understand it, and interpret it. I also wagered that Jesus was a pretty smart guy, who hid his treasure in plain sight. As I began to work on my own value system, Poemworld, and inquired into other philosophies, ideologies, worldviews, value and belief systems and practices for insight and critique, I began to develop that understanding. This is a personal appreciation of a text and is not intended to stand as an academic theological or philosophical treatise, simply my position vis-à-vis this prayer. Regardless, I would like to express that understanding now, for what it’s worth. Wikipedia has an interesting piece on the Lord’s Prayer, which I will take as representative of the standard interpretation, including both scholarly and religious components. There is much that I agree with and think is doubtless close to the mark. I just don’t believe this interpretation registers everything that is there. Hence, I want to address all of the prayer, but focus on certain parts for what I see as their undervalued roles in the text.
“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I don’t have much to say here. The text encodes language from Judaism containing tropes of family/patriarchy, tribute, royalty, command/intent and astrology. This language humanizes the divine by relating to it, locating it, honoring it, submitting to it, and obeying it. This is basically an encomium.
“Give us this day our daily bread…” This is a fascinating and revealing lead-off for this single sentence, which forms the core of the Prayer that I want to examine. It is described as a petition but reads as a demand. Jesus isn’t asking God, he’s telling God to provide the material sustenance of life, to make real the right to live. Without “this day our daily bread”, humanity is at war with itself, as parents compete against each other to feed children and families, friends and communities try to feed each other. It is the very foundation rendering possible what follows in the Prayer. There is much symbolic wrangling about what else this means, but Occam’s razor suggests the simplest explanation is the best. Take the man at his word. Further, this line is a refreshingly substantial break from much spirituality, which is more concerned with souls than bodies, more oriented towards the ephemeral than the corporeal. With the amount of needless hunger and starvation in the world, it is a command that is honored mostly in the breach.
“…and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us…” This line is where the concept of justice enters into the prayer. There are basically two pieces at work here. The first is a variation on the Golden Rule, i.e. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.” In this phrasing, the Golden Rule is acting somewhat like an algebraic equation with the word “do” acting as the variable. In fact, the structure of this line in the prayer is a little different from the standard Golden Rule’s anticipatory reciprocity. It’s more of a “do to us as we do to them.” This is “tit-for-tat”, or natural reciprocity. Robert Axelrod's "The Evolution of Cooperation" explores this idea extensively. Jesus is basically telling God to forgive us just as we have, or have not, forgiven others. It also sets up a three-way relationship between God, self and others, soliciting forgiveness from God in equal measure to the forgiveness shown to others. This formulation permits the forgiving person to have some hope of good coming from their forgiveness, for resolving grievances, and for doing the hard, often thankless work of initiating and catalyzing justice in a world quite short of the stuff. This can be difficult when one has been the victim of real injustice. Having the Lord on your side might make it a little easier to do.
Then there is the second part: forgiveness itself. I take forgiveness to be a fundamental form of contributive justice. It can be usefully contrasted with two other more commonly known forms of justice, namely, retribution and distribution respectively, or the justice of punishments and the justice of rewards. Now, forgiveness is almost a pun for contributive justice (a contribution is “for giving”, get it?). I believe it is perfectly ethical to forgive the trespasser and to forgive the trespass. What I don’t think is appropriate is forgiving the trespasser’s responsibility for their trespass. The trespasser’s responsibility is not for the aggrieved to forgive. That is where the trespasser’s redemption, or redemptive contribution to justice, comes in. Justice, in this sense, can thus be started by either side of the injustice, a feature that assists its use and spread. The trespasser can offer redemption (an apology is a common example as well as various modes of restitution, penance or other ways of giving to do justice) and the trespassed-upon can offer forgiveness and the cooperative, non-vindictive, reparative spirit it originates from.
[Aside: Forgiveness, along with what I recognize as its complement, redemption, is not a blanket “get out of hell free” card. I’ve noticed that Christians setting out to practice Jesus’ words often overshoot the mark in this respect and forgive too much, which in the end tends to have them forgiving too little. Also, many Christians seem to believe that their acceptance of Christ as their personal savior forgives them absolutely for all wrongs past, present and future. This seems to me a blanket invitation to further wrongdoing, this time with a clear conscience! Rather, it should be an invitation and inspiration to begin the more challenging work of redeeming themselves and each other in this world.]
This highlights another feature of contributive justice, namely its harmony with equality. Equals can perform acts of forgiveness and redemption, whereas retributive and distributive justice both require and demand an inequality in power between the punisher/rewarder and the one being punished or rewarded. If I’m more powerful than you, I’m not likely to let you punish me; if you’re more powerful then me, then you can just take, or not even need, any reward I may wish to offer. Equals can punish and reward each other, but they can also ignore, forgo or repudiate such actions. Further, this shows how retribution and distribution, punishment and reward, can be seen as flipsides to the same coin of inequality, control and domination. The withholding of a punishment is often experienced as a reward while the withholding of a reward can be felt as a punishment. Alfie Kohn has written powerfully about this in his magnum opus “Punished by Rewards”. One cannot help but notice the close fit between retributive/distributive justice and classical behaviorism, operant conditioning, reinforcements, etc. There exists a sharp power distinction between the one providing the conditioning and the one receiving it. Those characteristics make these, the most traditional approaches to justice, instruments of something other than freedom, which, in turn, is the somewhat surprising subject of the next part of the Lord’s Prayer. Regardless, this affinity for egalitarianism demonstrates one of Christianity’s genealogical linkages to Islam, where equality makes a manifest religious appearance.
In sum, combining the modified Golden Rule context with the forgiveness/contributive justice content, one arrives at a sophisticated theory of justice, that is, reciprocal contributive justice (RCJ). I believe RCJ to be a singularly robust conception of justice for reasons already offered. It finds theological justification and support for forgiving (and, I submit, redeeming) actions between individuals and among people; it creates, or at least hypothesizes a bridged reciprocity of forgiveness between self and others mediated by God; and it comports well with equality if not actually amplifying it and being amplified by it. By its example, it also throws into sharp relief the intrinsic and pragmatic flaws in traditional retributive/distributive justice schemes, especially how they tend to corrupt into tools of coercion, manipulation and social control in the hands of dominators, whether individual or institutional. I believe that justice itself should aim for higher than the peace of a locked-down prison or the security of well-fed domesticated animals. Such is the style of justice we have now. I think Jesus was recommending a significantly higher quality version of the same idea with much better fruit to show for itself. That is, the result when forgiveness and redemption bridge the chasm of injustice, restoring justice itself and creating what can best be called atonement, because grievant and respondent stand together as one again, at one, their just relationship reborn. This is the true meaning of atonement, being “at one.” What injustice rends, justice mends. Finally, this is a much more activist, assertive form of justice that recognizes that it is something made by human intention and action. It is definitely not the passive acceptance and complacency of “what goes around comes around,” “que sera, sera” or a swinging pendulum moving from one side to the other. That is my understanding at least.
“…and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.” The close to this miraculous sentence of the Lord’s Prayer is simply pregnant with meaning awaiting interpretation. I believe that this is where Jesus introduced his concept of freedom in the form of its natural boundaries and necessary constraints. There are two parts to address distinctly, then how they complement each other, and finally how they interact with RCJ.
First, “and lead us not into temptation.” Much is written about the status of the word “temptation” and who exactly is in the “lead.” I want to examine the gist of this phrase and ask the question, seemingly obvious, of not being led into temptation to do what? What possible candidates for temptation avoidance does Jesus have in mind? I think one can safely rule out ideas like good, right, duty, etc. Conversely, it is quite credible in my opinion that he’s referring to avoiding being seduced to do harm, wrong, injustice, sin or evil. In fact, the second phrase gives us that clue. It is directing God to turn us away from actively doing or causing wrong or evil or passively permitting it to occur. Since RCJ is concerned with the state of relationships between and amongst individuals and people, I think we can also safely generalize all of these moral and ethical negatives under a general category, namely domination. Further justification of this interpretation comes from the fact that Roman domination was in all likelihood a signal concern for Jesus. This in turn leads to my interpretation of this part of the Prayer as speaking to a negative conception of freedom, which I take as non-domination. Domination can also usefully be thought of as the causing or experience of unnecessary, certainly unjust, constraints, as well as a describing a set of human relationships that intrinsically exclude freedom. I take freedom itself as that set of human relationships that necessarily exclude domination. I will clarify these forms of relationship as we proceed. Let’s just recap by saying that “lead us not into temptation” can be well-interpreted as “lead us to not dominate others.” I tend to further interpret this statement as an affirmation of autonomy, of being autonomous, of not being heteronomous, of ruling one’s self and not ruling others, of self-control. Thus, in its fullness, the phrase “lead us not into temptation” is the negative lower bound of a call for moral and ethical autonomy.
Second, “but deliver us from evil.” This phrase, in addition to cluing us in on the “temptation” phrase’s target, also provides us with the natural complement to its predecessor. Borrowing the same interpretive scheme as before, we can transform “deliver us from evil” into “help us to not be dominated by others.” My tendency is to characterize this style of relationship non-negatively as independence, of not being subject to another, dependent upon another, or dispossessed by another. Independence is a priority because it represents the greater demand upon others, namely “Do not dominate me.” Autonomy is a way of preserving that independence by acting such that you clearly demonstrate, “I will not dominate you.” This suggests a reciprocity, “Do not dominate others so as to not be dominated by others,” or “be autonomous so as to be independent.”
If things were only that simple. We currently live in a dog-eat-dog, dominate or be dominated, kill or be killed world. This is clear and represents the practical reality that Jesus confronted in the military occupation of his homeland by the Roman empire with all of its attendant consequences, for himself and his people. I believe this was the genesis of his ministry and what he was struggling to displace and replace. The condition he was confronting is still very much with us, even more refined and exponentially more lethal. Thus, the struggle for a humanity that possesses any instinct for freedom is to establish our independence from our animal instinct to dominate. I believe our survival as a species depends upon it.
We now possess a quite powerful complementary moral and ethical duality: Autonomy and Independence; not dominating others and not being dominated by others; mutual non-domination; letting others be free so as to be free ourselves. I suggest that what Jesus has roughly sketched out here are the natural boundaries and necessary constraints of human freedom. If freedom and domination are actually antonymic, then this seems to follow inescapably. There may be quibbles about pairing up the active/passive voice details with independence and autonomy, but given the interpretation I’m offering, I can’t think of better single word descriptors. These ideas, independence and autonomy, thus comprise the city limits of the kingdom of heaven. If one complies with these constraints, is within the envelope of freedom described by these boundaries, then one is literally home free. Because we are all fallible (fallen), when we inevitably screw up, violate the constraints, fall beyond the boundary of freedom, we have a way to restore the good and the right, to restore ourselves mutually to freedom, but most importantly, by freedom. That is, by justice of the RCJ type. This doesn’t require the police or the courts, but can always use the assistance of the wise and the strong. The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t require moral saints to implement it. To the contrary, it seems Jesus designed it with the fallibility of humanity in mind, in fact as a corrective for our unavoidable catastrophes. This is something that reasonable and caring people can begin doing anytime. But what motive could persuade people to begin, authentically and genuinely, the project of liberating humanity from the cycles of violence spurred ever onward by fear, vengeance, avarice, hatred and jealousy? This is truly an almost thankless task, except for the thanks that will be garnered from the generations who may get to exist if we try and succeed.
But what could motivate humanity to take this Prayer seriously and try to live up to it? This is where the Great Commandment comes in: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment . And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” — Matthew 22:35-40. Love is a necessary and sufficient condition for justice of the kind found in the Lord’s Prayer. Thus the shocking absence of justice in the world (and manifest vindictiveness and possessiveness masquerading as justice) is a sign of the shocking absence of love in the world. As the literary theorist and critic Terry Eagleton has pointed out, we know that the whole world depends on love, but it seems to be in exceptionally short supply. How this state of affairs came to pass is a fascinating, frustrating question all its own.
So, to summarize, the Lord’s Prayer demands the right to live and provides a theory of justice able to restore and sustain the conception of freedom that it spells out. This, in my opinion, is a stunning achievement in philosophy, ethics, and political theory. Christ’s divinity seems to be entirely beside the point here (and almost like an advertisement) if we take the man at his word. And to hark back to what was said at the beginning, it is truly astounding how much meaning can be packed into so few words. I find it intriguing, no, actually bewildering, that I’ve never heard this preached before. Why not? Some interpretations of the Lord’s Prayer characterize it as simply a way to pray, not for its words or meanings in themselves. Once, at a UT Austin campus crusade of evangelical Christians, I practically had to beg the male leader of the group to close their service with the Lord’s Prayer. He was willing to make his own prayer, and to go on and on about it, but seemed dismissive, if not actually contemptuous, of the Prayer itself. This is why I sometimes ask self-professed Christians if they think they really understand what Jesus was trying to say and do. But, as Jesus said, “by their fruits you shall know them.” We can look at the fruits of contemporary Christianity, as well as historically, and see vast orchards of poison, but also pockets of ripened nourishment. Again, there are reasons for this that implicate the Lord’s Prayer but go beyond the scope of this analysis.
We now close with the doxology. “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever and ever. Amen.” Again, not much to say here. Like the encomium to God that opens the Prayer, the doxology, added later, closes it in praise to the Lord. I do like the meaning of “amen” though, “so be it.” Indeed, so be it.
[Disclaimer: The author is not a Christian. Rather, I would describe myself as an axiontologist who happens to be a Jesus fan, as well as a Muhammad fan, a Lao Tzu fan, a Marx fan, etc. My analysis is derived from my own value system, Poemworld, which may be described as an axiontology, or theory of value being.]