If a boyfriend were to recite a love poem every day to his beloved, but no matter how beautiful the poem is, one day his girlfriend will get tired of it, even if it was written by him. More than reciting formulas, prayer is a personal and existential encounter with God. That is why the Our Father “prayer” did not arise originally, in my opinion, to be a prayer that we recite every day or occasionally in a mechanical and repetitive fashion. In fact, the disciples did not ask Jesus to teach them a prayer, but to teach them how to pray.
Since it is composed of several loose utterances unrelated to each other, it can be taken as a list, like a shopping list we make so as not to forget anything we have to get when we go to the grocery store. Understood as a list, it concerns the protocol of our relationship with God, that is, how our prayer should be structured, how we should address God, how we should praise Him, and what we should ask, and when and how we should ask. Therefore more than a prayer, it is fundamentally a practical guide to praying.
Matthew's and Luke's versions
The Lord’s Prayer in the Gospel of St. Matthew is more elaborate, it arises in the context of the great Sermon on the Mount. It was, therefore, pronounced ex cathedra and is part of the treatise on prayer. It is the version that we use liturgically. Luke's version is shorter, although it contains the essentials. In their respective gospels, the two versions appear in different context.
In the Gospel of St. Luke, the prayer arises from a disciple's request: because Jesus was praying, it emerges from the desire of the disciples to imitate the Master and learn how to pray from him. Here too the disciples want something systematic for posterity. St. Luke continues to prove the power of prayer, the fact that God is always listening is what is concluded from the parable of the persistent friend that Luke puts right after the Lord’s Prayer.
Structure of the Lord’s Prayer
It contains an initial preamble or greeting, followed by two parts with each containing three requests; the requests of the first part have to do with the glory of God and the second with the needs of the human being.
Preamble
• Our Father
• Who are in Heaven
First part - About the glory of God
1. Hallowed be your name
2. Your kingdom come
3. Your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven
Second part - About the needs of man
1. Give us this day our daily bread
2. Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us
3. Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
PART ONE - ABOUT THE GLORY OF GOD
Father
When Egerton Young first preached the Gospel to the redskins of Saskatchewan, the idea of God's fatherhood immediately fascinated these people who had hitherto seen God only in thunder, lightning, and the roar of storm.
Upon hearing the missionary invoke God as a father, an old chief exclaimed, "In speaking of the Great Spirit as you have just done, have I heard you say, 'Our Father'?" "Yes," said Egerton Young. "This is too new and sweet for me, " continued the chief. "We Indians have never seen the Great Spirit as a Father. We heard him in thunder or saw him in lightning, storm, and snow, and we were terrified, afraid."
"The notion that the Great Spirit is our Father is new but sublime for us." The old chief paused, seeming to meditate... it was then, that suddenly, in a glimmer of glory, his face lit up like lightning and cried out. "Oh Missionary, did you say that the Great Spirit is your Father?" "Yes, " said Egerton. "And," the chief continued, "do you also claim that He is the Father of the Indians?" "Evidently, " said the missionary. "Then!" exclaimed the elder, as if he had made the greatest discovery, "you and I are brothers!" William Barclay, New Testament Commentary
We too are used to calling God our Father that it no longer resonates in our hearts and minds like it did that first time in the heart and mind of the Indian chief. It is important to be aware that before Jesus came we were not children of God, but only his creatures, created in the image and likeness of God, but nonetheless only creatures, not children. I can shape a lump of clay into a doll, but this doll is not my son because I did not beget him; it is only my creation, for it was created by me.
God has only one son who, as the Creed says, is begotten not created. If the creed were to speak about us, it would say that we were created not begotten. (God) destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will… Ephesians 1:5
And if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ – if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him. Romans 8:17 – According to the Roman law which is basically what is used throughout the world, the adopted son has the same rights to inheritance as the begotten son.
Jesus calls God Father, but only within the circle of apostles and never outside of it. This means that the divine fatherhood is only available to those who accept Jesus as the son of God and a brother, our older brother, because it is only through Christ the only begotten son of God that we are adopted children.
God is our Father, but he is not a patronizing sort of father, because he is also Our Lord. Being our friend does not mean that he "turns a blind eye" to our injustices nor will he be on our side against our enemies when they are the ones who are right. God is not on the side of one against another, for he loves everyone, but he is on the side of justice and truth and against injustice and lies; in this sense, he is against those who practice injustice and lies, but only to the extent that they practice them, not forgetting that ultimately God wants the conversion of sinners, and not that they die and perish.
Our
Polytheism in fact led to division and hatred among men; the rivalries among the gods of Olympus in Greek mythology mirrored the rivalry among men. If there are several gods, mine is superior or inferior to yours and there is no relationship between us. In contrast, one God who is the Father makes us all brothers and sisters.
Even when I am reciting the Lord's Prayer in the intimacy of my room or in my thoughts, I cannot say My Father, but must say Our Father. Even in the intimacy of my room, God can ask me the question he asked Cain, "Where is your brother?" To this question, Cain's answer is not appropriate because, in fact, we are always the keepers of our neighbour, we must always know where he is and how he is doing.
When we say Our Father, we are not excluding anyone from any country, language, people, or nation. We are all brothers and sisters because we all belong to the human race and we all come from a common trunk; all our ancestors lived in Africa 5 million years ago. For Christians, there are no foreigners and therefore we are always called to be good Samaritans whenever and wherever a human being is in need.
Who are in Heaven
Transcendence – Because God is in Heaven, he is transcendent, he lives separate from everything he created, he does not depend on anything he created; in other words, he is not confined within creation. In this sense, it is not possible to know God fully. This is completely logical: if our little mind was taken from his great mind, then the part cannot engulf the whole.
The Creator knows everything about the creature, and knows more about the creature than the creature knows about himself. The creature, however, never knows everything about God or about himself because in his essence there is a bit of the divine essence, that is, we participate in the mystery of God. God is a mystery and we, because we are created by Him, are also a mystery to ourselves, and this means we will never know everything about ourselves.
Immanence – God's transcendence does not make Him a stranger to the things he has created. God is in the heart of each thing, not as if he were another piece of a machine, or another element that makes up nature, but rather he is in the very heart of everything. That is, God, and not the atom, is the most fundamental part of everything he himself has created.
As for ourselves, " Deus interior íntimo meo", that is, God is beyond our inner self, he is also in the very heart of our being, he dwells within us. It is not a matter of pantheism here, to say that God is and remains in the heart of everything does not mean that everything is God.
In pantheism, God loses his transcendence, but God is as immanent as he is transcendent. Beyond each thing there is still God. Each thing can lead us to God according to the spirituality of Francis of Assisi, who saw God in creatures, but none of them nor all of them in their totality was God; there was more God beyond each of them and all of them together. All creatures have the seal, the mark, the stamp of God, but none of them nor all of them in their entirety can contain God.
Against pantheism which encloses God within his creation, we affirm panentheism, that is, God is immanent, he is the soul of everything and of the universe as a whole, but he also grants freedom and autonomy to all that he has created, being therefore transcendent. It is not creation that contains God, it is God who contains creation. As St. Paul says in Acts 17:28, "In him we live, move, and have our being." Therefore, we too are called to transcend ourselves from creation because we are of God, even though we are in the world.
Being (Ser) and being (Estar)
Genesis 2:7 – Then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being. We were created from the same elements that the earth possesses, but life is a direct gift from God. God who lives, transmits his life to us in his breath. Life is always his, he exhales or blows into our nostrils and we begin to live, and at the end of our life he inhales and his divine breath returns to Him, since life is his and has always been his.
We are the only creature created in the image and likeness of the creator; therefore, even though we are in the world, we are from heaven, we have no permanent home here but are journeying to our heavenly homeland where everything originated, where our life originated and has its headquarter. Only in Portuguese and Spanish languages there is a difference between being (ser) and being (estar). We are (estar) in the world, but we are (ser) not of the world, for we are (ser), like God our Father, from Heaven.
Our essence is divine, for we are created directly by God and adopted as children in Christ. That is why we are not from here, we are as extraterrestrial as ET and we must behave like extraterrestrials. Today we are here, tomorrow we are in Heaven; while we live here, we are not from the place we dwell.
Hallowed be your name
"Hear, O Israel. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart." "You cannot serve both God and money." These are two of the many warnings against the temptation to idolize, worship, or venerate other realities or people other than God. This temptation is very common; a French fries that English footballer David Beckham dropped while walking down a street in New Zealand appeared on eBay and there were people offering money for it!
Another temptation is superstition. All superstitions imply that God is not all-powerful, and that there are powers, natural forces, and realities that his omnipotence does not control; in other words, that there are events that escape his foresight and providence. While faith is a belief that is not all rational but is reasonable, superstition is a completely irrational belief. Superstition has been condemned in the Old Testament throughout the history of Israel. The same also happened since the early Church of the new people of Israel, which in the Middle Ages, and because of excessive zeal, committed authentic crimes in burning witches.
Christians offend God whenever they say that this gives good luck or that gives bad luck, or when they wear charms, horseshoes, keys, small horns, etc., to which they confer spiritual powers; a thing, a material reality, precisely because it is material, cannot have powers in the realm of the spirit. Only a spiritual being can have spiritual powers. Superstition is somehow a remnant of the stage of conceptualization of the notion of God called animism. In animism all physical realities have a soul; therefore, as man began to know things, he was robbing them of their souls which were then passed to him, things ceased to have power over man because he came to know them and dominate them.
As the knowledge of nature grew, it lost its dominion over man. There are, however, certain realities that man could not fully know or dominate, and to these realities he called gods and thus was born the polytheism that attributed a god to every reality that man could not fully know or dominate. Thus was born Venus, the goddess of love, Mars, the god of war, Cronos, the god of time and Poseidon, the god of sea.
The relationships we maintain with our dearest beings can be ones of pure idolatry when they become the center of our existence. When a lover says, "Without you my life has no meaning" he is idolizing his beloved; only without God life has no meaning and we must love God above all other creatures. "Whoever loves father and mother, son or daughter, brother or sister more than Me is not worthy of Me."
Of course we do not bow down before repulsive idols, but we all have a tendency to deify realities, people or things closest to us and make them special objects of our affection. The Portuguese people use the expression "I love" with God as much as with any other reality; to love means to submit oneself to: we do not submit ourselves to chocolate, codfish, etc., but only to God.
Your kingdom come
Preaching the Good News of the kingdom was the main reason for his coming into the world, and an obligation for Jesus. “I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose.” Luke 4:43.
Jesus did not come only to save men singly, to take them to Heaven after their life on this earth; Jesus does not have only one plan for man as an individual, but he also has a plan for man as a social being; he well knows that the social structure makes the person and that persons make the social structure; an unjust and cruel society makes men unjust and cruel and vice versa.
The Kingdom of God, that is, a society where justice and peace reign and where God governs, is already present among us, it is already a reality in the present, visible and palpable. But if it is by the finger of God that I cast out the demons, then the kingdom of God has come to you, (Luke 11:20). It is a fact that our world is far more ethical than at any other time in the past and this is largely due to the widespread of the gospel that has become the measure of the human being.
Being already a reality here and now, the Kingdom of God is not yet present in its fullness. Hence the inclusion of the request "your kingdom come" in the Lord’s Prayer. We are the continuation of Jesus' work, and it now depends on us that the kingdom extends to the whole world until Christ is all in all.
Kingdom of God - Mission - Church
The word Church, that is, Eklesia from the verb Kaleo or to convoke the assembly of the faithful, appears only twice in the gospels and 110 times in the rest of the New Testament. By contrast, the expression Kingdom of God appears 127 times in the gospels, and only 27 times in the rest of the New Testament. If the mouth speaks from the abundance of the heart, that is, if we tend to speak much of what is most important to us, and little of what is not, we can conclude that the concept of the Church was not important to Jesus, for he only spoke of it twice or perhaps only once in Matthew 16:18, when he said to Peter "you are Peter and on this rock I will build my Church". Contrary to the concept of Church, the Kingdom of God was of great importance to Jesus.
The Church gave itself more importance than its Master and founder gave it. By giving itself too much importance, it took away the importance of the Kingdom of God which was the project that Jesus had for this society and this world. Somewhere along the course of history, it came to proclaim itself as the Kingdom of God on earth.
Since Jesus has other sheep that are not of this fold (John 10:16), that is, from the fold of the Church, it is necessary to affirm and reaffirm that the concept of the Kingdom of God is more comprehensive than the concept of the Church, that the Church is within the Kingdom of God, and that the Kingdom of God is not contained by the Church. We are saved to the extent that we are citizens of the Kingdom of God and not to the extent that we are citizens of the Church, because the Church has to do with who we are, the Kingdom of God has to do with what we do; according to Matthew 25, we are not judged by who we are, but by what we do.
By placing the concepts of Kingdom of God, Church and Mission in the right order and perspective, we must say that the Mission of the Church is to evangelize, to proclaim the Kingdom. The Church exists for the Mission of taking the gospel everywhere; the purpose of this Mission is not to implant the Church, but the Kingdom of God, to establish the Kingdom of God here and there, that is, to fight for justice and peace, for a better world.
Jesus and Adam Smith
Jesus said, "Seek the Kingdom of God first, and the rest will be given to you as well." It is the same as to say seek first the common good, and the personal good will be given to you as well; or in terms more related to Economics, seek first in a disinterested way the common good, and a mysterious hand will take care of your personal good.
By contrast, Adam Smith, the father of modern capitalism, said "Let each one selfishly seek his own interests and a mysterious hand will take care of the common interest"; this would be true if men were all equal, if everyone had the same purchasing power, the same education, the same intelligence, etc. which is not true.
This is the law of the fittest, the law of the jungle. In truth, the gap between the rich and the poor is widening. Altruism, the common good, can never be the sum of all selfishness. The good, in this case the common good, can only be achieved by seeking it directly; what is natural to man, what is achieved without effort, is the evil; the good requires effort and in the case of the common good, it oftentimes requires the sacrifice of the personal good.
Your will be done on earth as in it is Heaven.
‘Not everyone who says to me, “Lord, Lord”, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only one who does the will of my Father in heaven.’ Matthew 7:21
The Jews liked to say the same thing twice with different words so that it is better understood. For example, The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want/ He make me lie down in green pastures (Psalm 23:1-2). The second statement explains, amplifies, defines and interprets the first. We therefore have in the second affirmation of the Lord’s Prayer a perfect definition of the Kingdom of God, which is a society on earth in which God's will is done as it is in Heaven.
That is why the Kingdom of God is of the past, the present and the future. Anyone who at any time does the will of God is a citizen of the Kingdom of God. As the world is far from being the Kingdom of God, this is a reality for which we must pray and work towards, continuing the work of Jesus of Nazareth when he walked on this world.
We must do God's will and not ours because God knows us better than we know ourselves; He knows everything about our past, present and future; furthermore, he loves us much more than we love ourselves.
In addition, God is the architect of our life, it was He who created us for a reason, for a purpose. In this sense, He is the one who has the plans of our makeup. Every good engineer consults the architect and the blueprint so that the building is as it was designed.
When this does not take place, the City Hall requires modifications so that the construction respects the plan or else it does not give the authorization to be inhabited. How tragic it would be if after our death we were to present ourselves before God with a construction that does not respect what He had designed for us. It is in prayer that we know the will of God.
PART TWO – ABOUT THE NEEDS OF MAN
After doing justice to the glory of God and his plan for our world, now is the time to ask for our own personal needs. In this regard, in this second part of the Lord’s Prayer, the totality of God encounters the totality of Man. God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit; man is pure indigence, "without me you can do nothing" (John 15:1-8), says the Lord. Man's needs refer to the three times in which his life takes place: the present, the past and the future. The second part of the Lord’s Prayer refers to these needs, one for each time.
First, we ask for bread that is needed to sustain our life on earth, thus bringing to God's presence our needs of the present time.
Second, we ask God for forgiveness for the evil we have done, thereby bringing to God's presence our past to be redeemed.
Third, we ask for strength and help in temptation, thus trusting in divine providence as we place our future in God's hands.
In these three brief requests we learn to place our past, present and future in God's hands. But this is not only a prayer that brings our whole life – present, past and future – to God's presence, it is also a prayer that brings the totality of God into our life.
When we ask for bread to sustain our earthly life, we are addressing our prayer to God the Father, the Creator and sustainer of life. When we ask for forgiveness, our attention is directed directly to God the Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer. Finally, when we ask for help in future temptations, this request leads us to think immediately of God the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the guide, the guardian, who gives strength and encouragement.
Admirably, the second part of the Lord’s Prayer presents the totality of man in his past, present and future to the totality of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus teaches us to bring our whole life to God's presence and to take the totality of God into our lives.
MAN |
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Needs |
Time |
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GOD |
Father |
Bread |
Present |
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Son |
Forgiveness |
Past |
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Holy Spirit |
Help |
Future |
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Give us this day our daily bread
"Primum vivere, deinde philosophari" – First, we ask for the bread that is necessary to sustain our life on earth, thus bringing to God's presence our needs of the present time. As it was God the Father who created us and brought us to life, it is to Him that we must ask for bread or any other material need. Therefore, when we ask for bread to sustain our earthly life, we are addressing our prayer to God the Father, the Creator and sustainer of our life.
If God is our Father, we are his sons and daughters, we are his children; there is no worse sin than to behave like adults with God, with the presumption that we are already emancipated and self-sufficient. Only those who are like children enter the Kingdom of Heaven. We must reacquire the virtues we had as children in a natural way:
A child is humble – He looks from bottom up, since all adults are bigger than him; he accepts his condition without any inferiority complex; he is naturally obedient without any intention to outdo anyone.
He lives occupied but not preoccupied – He doesn't worry about tomorrow, about what to eat or what to wear. These worries do not concern him, he leaves them to his parents. He plays, runs, laughs, lives life to the fullest and leaves the worries to his parents. The occupation of children is to play, that of adults is to work. God feeds the birds of the sky, but he does not throw food into their nests.
He is aware of his indigence – He never tires of asking and knows that "he who does not cry does not suckle". A child who goes to the grocery store with his parents and does not ask for anything is not a normal child. The child knows that he cannot take care of himself on his own; he knows very well that without his parents he can't do anything. That is how we should be with God.
He trusts his Father completely – Again, if we take a child by the hand in a supermarket and that child doesn't ask us for anything, he is not a normal child. When we have nothing to ask from God, it is not because we don’t need anything, but perhaps because we have become adults and are only relying on our own strength to satisfy our needs. We have stopped being children to God, we have emancipated ourselves from God.
Everything that the child sees, he asks; however, he knows intuitively that not everything that he asks for the Father will grant him, but he also knows that the Father will not leave him lacking for anything that is essential. Paraphrasing the gospel in an opposite sense, not knowing well what suits us, like children, we ask for snakes instead of fish, stones instead of bread, and scorpions instead of eggs (Luke 11:11-13). The no's are just as educational as the yeses: when a child receives everything he asks for, he ends up not knowing what he wants.
Forgive our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us
We ask for God’s forgiveness for the evil we have done, thereby bringing our past into God's presence to be redeemed. When we ask for forgiveness, our attention is directed directly on God the Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer, who came into the world to save us, that is, to bring us health from the diseases we have contracted in the past and which still afflict us in the present, psychologically, spiritually and physically.
Before God we are never righteous - The day we stop being sinners, we will be lost. St. Francis of Assisi is perhaps the one person who came the closest to full imitation of Christ, to the point of being called by many theologians as the alter Christ. He did not see himself as a saint, but as a sinner; in fact, he used to walk through the streets of Assisi shouting "I am a great sinner". The day we look at ourselves in the mirror of our moral conscience and find no sins, it will not be because we do not have them, but because we are no longer aware of the evil we have done; it will be because we have stopped growing spiritually and are on our way to spiritual psychosis.
The righteous sins seven times a day, says the Bible, and he is just; many of us, not being righteous, how many times do we sin a day? Without self-criticism there is no spiritual growth. The day we find no sins in ourselves, we stop growing because there is no spiritual progress without an exercise in self-criticism.
Our moral conscience is like a sieve through which the flour passes out of the mill; if the sieve has a fine mesh it will remove from the flour all impurities, resulting in a white flour. If the mesh is course, it will let all impurities pass through; when we end up having a permissive conscience, a course mesh, we will turn a blind eye to the evil we have done.
God loves unconditionally, but does not forgive unconditionally – God's love is unconditional, He makes rain fall on the righteous as well as the unrighteous. God loved both Francis of Assisi and Hitler. As the parable of the sower says, it is not the fault of the sower or the seed, but of the field whether the seed grows or does not grow.
To love is one thing, to forgive is another, the sine qua non condition for obtaining or not obtaining God’s forgiveness is whether or not we forgive or not forgive those who offended us, as the Lord’s Prayer says. God does not forgive if we do not forgive. In the parable of the forgiveness of a great debt, God took back his forgiveness already granted because the one he forgave, in his turn, did not forgive those who owed him a debt.
In all of the Our Father prayer, Jesus only comments on this part. In Matthew's version, he says clearly after the prayer, “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14)
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we are literally asking God to forgive our offenses to the same extent that we forgive those who offended us. So when we say or think "I will never forgive you, I will never forget the evil you have done to me" and then pray "forgive our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us," we are literally telling God "Never forgive me, never forget the evil I have done to You as I do not forgive or forget the evil they have done to me." We better not pray the Lord's Prayer until we decide to first forgive.
The charismatic Brazilian priest Marcelo Rossi skirted this issue with an "Our Father" prayer of his own making in which he said to this regard: "forgive us to a greater extent than we forgive those who have offended us". This Our Father would be much easier to pray, but this is not the prayer that Christ taught us, so it must be scrapped.
The forgiven servant who did not forgive
... his lord summoned him and said to him, “You wicked slave! I forgave you all that debt because you pleaded with me. Should you not have had mercy on your fellow-slave, as I had mercy on you?” And in anger his lord handed him over to be tortured until he should pay his entire debt. So my heavenly Father will also do to every one of you, if you do not forgive your brother or sister from your heart.’ Matthew 18:23-35
If there are still any doubt that God's forgiveness is not unconditional, but is conditional to the forgiveness we grant, here is the parable with the conclusion that Jesus himself draws of it: "Forgive, and you will be forgiven (…) for the measure you give will be the measure you get back." (Luke 6:27-38). We cannot want God for ourselves and the devil for others. We cannot love God without loving our neighbor.
And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil
We are asking for strength and help in temptation, so we trust in divine providence and put our future in God’s hands. When we ask for help in future temptations, this request leads us to immediately think of God the Holy Spirit, the comforter, the guide, the guardian, which gives strength and encouragement.
Temptation is positive – We are used to seeing temptation as something negative, that is, as the prologue to sin. We forget that Jesus was tempted throughout his life, like us, and did not fall into temptation, that is, he did not sin.
Just like "the situation makes the thief", great men and great villains are not born as such, they are made in response to great challenges. Temptation in Hebrew is "fataná" as it is in Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia. "Fataná" not only means temptation, but it also means examination, testing. How do we distinguish bad students from good ones without tests? How do we distinguish good politicians from bad politicians without situations that function like tests, where some may become corrupt and others not?
Just as a piece of steel is tested at a pressure greater than that it will be subjected to in use, God will also test us before using us in the construction of his Kingdom. Temptation is a test or an examination that shows us the exact position in which we find ourselves on the path of spiritual progress. Overcoming this test is a step forward that makes us stronger and prepares us for future trials; failing the test makes us weaker and more likely to fail next time.
The Lord’s Prayer in various languages – It is only the Portuguese and Spanish versions of the Lord’s Prayer that are in accordance with this theology. The Italian version says, "Non ci indurre in tentazione", that is, we are asking God not to lead us into temptation. In the French version, it says, "Ne nous soumets pas a la tentation", that is, do not submit us to temptation; in English it is said, "Lead us not into temptation" i.e. do not lead us into temptation; in Amharic "weda fatana atágban", do not place us into temptation.
God cannot deliver us from temptation because he did not deliver his own son from it; what he can do is to help us overcome it. Temptation is part of human nature, it is with temptation and by temptation that we exercise our freedom, because it presents us with an alternative. What we can ask for, and in fact the Portuguese and Spanish versions do that, is for God to help us to overcome temptation; "no nos dejes caer en la tentación", that he supports us in temptation.
Conclusion: As a Trinitarian prayer, the Lord’s Prayer is the encounter between divine grace and human indigence. We ask the Father for the bread that sustains us in the present moment; the Son for the forgiveness that heals our past; the Holy Spirit for help to face the future.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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