The Prayer That Jesus Taught

 

Hoo boy! There’s a lot (Lot?) in today’s readings. (Genesis 18-19 & Matthew 6:1-18)

The Old Testament reading is the story of Lot and his daughters (and his backward looking wife) and I got a whole new take on the story due to the length of the assigned passage of the day in Genesis.

We all know the story of the three strangers coming to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre and telling him  that Adonai would destroy Sodom, and then playing a game of “did so!—did not!” with Sarah over whether or not she laughed at the idea that her dried-up womb would “know pleasure again.”

What I’d never noticed before (although the passage is very ambiguous about whether Adonai is actually embodied in all three of the strangers) is that two of the angels leave Mamre to go straight to Sodom in order to destroy it, while Abraham “remains standing before Adonai,” and then this singular presence of Adonai begins to waffle over the question of whether to tell Abraham what they are planning to do to Sodom.

The next part is delightful: Abraham starts to haggle with Adonai over the destruction of Sodom, and manages to bring the price of saving Sodom down from 50 righteous people down to just 10 righteous people:

‘What if there are 5 less than 50?— 5 less than 45?— what about 30?— 20?—10?  Okay, okay! For 10, I won’t destroy it!’

Sadly, it did no good, because only Lot escaped with his daughters—presumably because Lot was counted as just one righteous person.

The Prayer That Jesus Taught

I’ve written about this before, but I want to re-visit it. There’s a Greek word in the prayer that doesn’t appear anywhere else in contemporary Greek literature, much less the in the Greek of the bible: epiousios. It has come to be translated as “daily” but that is a pretty darn dubious translation. Early translations stuck closer to the literal meaning, which is “super-substantial” or “super-essential.” One author I found on the internet noted that there is no word in Aramaic or Hebrew that translates as ‘epiousios,’ which implies that the word may have been invented specifically to be included in this particular prayer.  

I was particularly moved by this quote, which appears after the author mentions his exasperation over his ignorance of this marvelous interpretation:

“What bliss there is in learning when not looking for it, especially with things too familiar to be questioned.”  (I’ll include a link to the article at the end.)

I came up with a version of the prayer that Jesus taught, in which I try to use ungendered language, and also phrase it in such a way that it circumvents the ‘too-familiar-to-be-questioned’ phenomenon. I based it on my reading of the prayer as it’s found in the Mounce Greek Interlinear New Testament.

I offer it here in hopes that it will enrich my readers’ prayers:

 

Our Source Beyond—

 

Holy is your Name,

your domain entering,

your will fulfilling,

below as above.

 

Entrust us today with The Bread of Life,

and pass over our faults

as we also pass over other’s faults—

 

and do not put us to the proof,

but drag us out of the danger of evil.

 

 

(Link to article:  https://thinkingwest.com/2020/04/17/epiousios-greek-our-father/)