DO WE KNOW WHAT WE KNOW?

 

 

Houtōs oun proseuchesthe humeis: pater hèmōn ho en tois ouranois, hagiasthètō to onoma sou; elthetō hè basileia sou; genèthètō to thelèma sou, hōs en ouranōi kai epi tès gès; to arton hèmōn ton epiousion dos hèmin sèmeron; kai aphes hèmin ta opheilèmata hèmōn, hōs kai hèmeis aphèkamen tois opheilètais hèmōn; kai mè eisenegkèis hèmas eis peirasmon, alla hrusai hèmas apo tou ponèrou. Ean gar aphète tois anthrōpois ta paraptōmata autōn, apèsei kai humin ho patèr humōn o ouranios. Ean de mè aphète tois anthropōn ta paraptōmata autōn, oude ho patèr humōn aphèsei ta paraptōmata humōn.

 

⁹ thus therefore pray ye: `Our Father who [art] in the heavens, hallowed be Thy name.

¹⁰ `Thy reign come: Thy will come to pass, as in heaven also on the earth.

¹¹ `Our bread for the day give us to-day.

¹² `And forgive us our debts, as also we forgive our debtors.

¹³ `And do Thou not force us into a testing, but deliver us from the evil, because Thine is the reign, and the power, and the glory -- to the ages. Amen.

¹⁴ `For, if ye forgive men their false steps He also will forgive you -- your Father who [is] in the heavens;

¹⁵ but if ye do not forgive men their false steps, neither will your Father forgive your false steps.

 

What is there to say about this prayer that has not been said a million times or more? That it is useful to remember that basileia reflects a condition (“reign”) more than a place (“kingdom”); that Greek readers would have read “may [what is] thy will come to pass” rather than “be done”; that they would have read epiousion as a very rare word for “for the coming day”; that opheilèmata are debts while paraptomata are false steps or payment errors; that peirasmos is more a test, an assay, than a seductive temptation; that, once again, ponèron is “bad” or “wicked” rather than “evil”, and that the genitive case after apo, “from” may refer to a person or to a thing: “from the wicked one” or “from what is wicked”.

            On the other hand, it is interesting to put it in the context of the Sermon on the Mount so far. In the immediate context, it is the outcome of the discussion on prayer, and may thus be thought of as a blueprint for what we should murmur to the Father behind the closed door of our inmost room. And yet notice that throughout it is placed in the first person plural: even alone, we are part of the Father’s family, and even our singular prayer reflects our siblinghood therein.

            In the context of the Sermon as the new Torah, the completed Torah, the most salient aspects of the prayer are perhaps its inwardness and its polyvalence. Inwardness, because it gladly recognises our weakness and our dependence, for forgiveness and even for simple nourishment (the daily bread reminds us also of the manna that Israel received in the wilderness); polyvalence, because unlike many prayers in the Old Testament, this prayer is not a request for one specific thing but covers every aspect of our relation to our Father: adoration (hallowing), hope (the reign), obedience (His will), dependence (bread), penitence (forgiveness), weakness (do not test us as Thou didst the great ones like Job), protection (the wicked one, wickedness).

            No wonder that it has remained the prayer for Christians. It was very surprising to a number of us to see Pope Francis’s boldness in changing the wording of the penultimate petition to “let us not enter into temptation”, and doing so in a way that neither restored the original nor made the translation any clearer. In the Greek, the act we ask to be spared is an action by God, not merely a permission by God for an act of our own. It is God who might eisenengkein us to a testing, and roots of that verb are those of “forcing” and “into”. It would have been better for His Holiness to have concentrated on the peirasmos rather than on the verb.

            And for those who thrill to the idea of reading, and hearing, the original words Yeshua pronounced, above is the reconstructed written version in Jewish Aramaic of the 1^st century; below is the transliterated Aramaic text; and a reading can be heard here. 

Abbun d'bishmayya

yitqadesh shmakh

titey malkhutakh

tihey re`utakh

heykhma debishmayya

keyn af be’ar`a

lachman deme’ar`a

hab lan yoma deyn umachra

ushbaq lan chobayn

heykhma de’af shebaqnan lechayyabayn

we’al ta`eylan lenisayuna

ela atseylan min bisha

 

NOT SO TEMPTING

Oscar Wilde said “I can resist anything except temptation.”

In composing the universal prayer he would later teach his disciples, Yeshua had dealt with forgiveness; now he came to closure. Should he let the prayer trail away with just one more petition, reinforcing a downward movement from the grandeur of the Name? Or should he let it climb to a final and different height, a second peak? The daily bread petition was about trust; the forgiveness petition created a parallel of responsibility. Where now? What was the line?

He decided not to pursue the “as we forgive” implication but to continue the theme of trust and need. The opening grandly affirms God’s power; the petitions show our corresponding weakness and our dependence on the gifts of his love. We need, and trust him to provide from day to day, the basics of our life; we need forgiveness, as well as the capacity to forgive. What else do we need?

And suddenly, Abraham swam into his mind. Not the one who welcomed angels; not the Friend of God; the Abraham who was told to cut his only son’s throat and obeyed, up to the very end. Yeshua shivered, as always when he thought of that trial. And look at Job: there the Father himself had allowed Shaitan, the eternal Adversary, by way of a test of faith to have his way with a favoured human almost beyond bearing. There were giants in those days, he thought.

Looking at his brothers, at Ya’akov, Yosef, Yehuda and young Shimon, he knew that they could not stand up to such commands; and the next petition wrote itself. “Do not,” he prayed with great intensity, “force us – little ones, no patriarchs or Jobs -- into [such a] trial”, and almost automatically there followed, “but deliver us from the Adversary”. For ever since Job, it had been he, the fallen angel, who subjects men to the unbearable; he it had been who crows and rejoices when they fall, and receives them gleefully with outstretched claws. His dream of revenge is never-ending; his understanding is cosmic and his wiles devastating. Merely obeying God’s commandments and praying does not put men beyond his reach: only the Father himself, by an active intervention, can deliver the wretched human race from that vile intelligence.

Image: Laurent de la Hyre, "Abraham Sacrificing Isaac" (1650)

ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART

The Church year has two moments of dolorous absence: Holy Saturday and the ten days between Ascension Day and Whit Sunday. I heard a brief recorded homily recently by a Carthusian on the former: he enjoined his brothers not to slide over Holy Saturday but to live it to the full: ‘we must be dead with the God who is dead,’ he said. I remember, when I frequented St Mary Magdalen in Toronto, the powerful impact not just of the shrouded statues and the parishioners’ uninterrupted prayer vigil, but especially the empty tabernacle with its door open. It gave me a sense of complete desolation, worse even than a disaffected church being bulldozed.

The time between the Ascension and Whitsun is in some ways similar. The risen Lord was there: he was there in upper rooms, on the beach, at the dinner table of an inn. He wasn’t a ghost: he was flesh and blood and could be touched. (He did walk through walls, though.)  He explained things to the lads: to a couple of them, on the road, he explained the whole of the Scriptures and their pointing to him as the new Scripture, the new Torah, the new Temple. Their joy must have been a little tempered by uncanniness, but so intense. And then he left, whisked off to heaven, not ‘up there’ as we now know, but ‘out there’ (which from a spherical planet always looks like ‘up’, anyway).

Of course, he had explained to them, patiently, that this had to happen: he had to go back to his (and our) Father, and he had to make room for the Third Person of the Trinity to come and join them, for all time (until the End of Time and his return). But the Paraclete did not come until Whitsun, and for those ten days I imagine them feeling desolate in the extreme. No time-scale had been told them. They had little idea what the Holy Spirit would be like. It must all have seemed vague beside the acute and definite loss.

What can we do with this time of in-between, these days of absence? First, realise that the absence is liturgical, and thus both symbolic and recurring: literally, we live in the time of His (the Spirit’s) presence. Secondly, learn from the desolation we feel what a world without God would be like. ‘The fool has said in his heart, There is no God.’ An increasing number of otherwise intelligent people are saying the same thing; which to them means Good riddance:  we can now do as we please. We can at last have world without God. And, as Ratzinger says in Jesus of Nazareth: when we look around us, we are beginning to see what that looks like . . .

Third, we can prepare for Whitsun by pondering the Third Person of the Trinity. What – who – is the Holy Spirit? I’m always surprised by the mentions of him in the book of Acts, for example, where he is shown as a very definite, almost physical, event: he can come in an instant and have very obvious manifestations: speaking in tongues, for one. Nowadays, in mainstream churches, one gets taught about him differently if at all. As I have written before, he is now often defined as the relation of love between the Father and the Son; but can a relation be a Person?

We are told he is the Paraclete, the Defender, the Advocate. He is, in other words, on our side. Against whom? The obvious thought is, He will stick up for us when we stand as little guilty children before the stern-browed, loving but terrifying Father. But we could expand that. Against whom do we need defending, really? Mmmmm, right. Let’s not name him, but we know whom we mean. Several authors say that ‘Lead us not into temptation’ means ‘Do not test us beyond what we can bear’, and the kind of test they have in mind is the one inflicted on Job, with the Father’s agreement. If such testing were contemplated again, the Advocate would speak up for us on the one hand, and help us bear any subsequent test on the other.

He is also the Spirit of the divine love. Not himself a relationship, but perhaps the One who incarnates and thus creates the love that circulates eternally within the Trinity. God the Father, we imagine, may be Love but has other attributes also, such as Creation and Justice. God the Son, we imagine, may be Love but also has the experience of being (having been? being?) human as well as divine, with all that that implies of difficulty and suffering. Perhaps the Third Person is pure Love, with no other attributes: the fons et origo, the wellspring of heavenly love, that overflows, first within the Triune Godhead, and then down to us pauvres pécheurs, to help and sustain us, to defend us and deliver us, to be always within our reach, to never let us go: to give us the joy that begins on Whitsun. Pondering this might be a very good way to live the ten days of strange, uncanny, unheimlich absence.

ANYTHING BUT TEMPTATION

 

In November of last year, I wrote about the expression in the Lord's Prayer that had always worried me, and that clearly worries the committees who keep updating the translations: "Lead us not into temptation". The thought of the Father leading us deliberately into temptation, then punishing us for having given in, is repellent; so the modern French version has "Do not let us enter into temptation." But taking a look at the Greek helps. To put it a little colloquially, "Do not put us to the test, but deliver us from bad stuff" is essentially what Jesus said when he taught the disciples to pray. The link of the "but" makes most sense when one stresses "deliver". Peirasmos is a trial, une épreuve as the French say, as in "the times that try men's souls". The implication, as I said back then, seems to be that we ask not to be put to the really hairy tests, like Abraham with Isaac, or Job, or Jacob who wrestled all night long with an angel. We aren't up to that sort of thing. We pray to the Father to deliver us from the ponèron, bad things, the real horror, the evil: that is not something we can do for ourselves.

It is a kindness in Jesus to propose this sentence in the exemplary Prayer: he recognises that we are ordinary folk, and that perhaps the Father may need to be reminded of this before, as in Job, giving in to the provocation of Shaitan, the Adversary.

It is in any case worth while to forget "temptation", a word that, encouraged by Oscar Wilde, needs a long rest. This is serious stuff: it is not the "temptation" of chocolate, or even of perfumed silks, of the "temptress" or the péché mignon: it is the knife at Isaac's throat, it is Exodus 4:24 "in a lodging-place by the way, the Lord met Moses and sought to kill him", it is the Lord wagering with Lucifer that Job will stand the test. Ouch. Do not, Father, make us go there. Save us from the Horror. Phew. By the skin of our teeth.

 

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TEMPTATION?

A friend asked me what I thought of the new French translation of the Lord’s Prayer that, at the end, reads ‘Ne nous laisse pas entrer en tentation’ (Do not let us enter into temptation) rather than ‘Ne nous soumets pas à la tentation’ (Do not subject us to temptation). The reason for this, I have since read, is to let the text reflect the fact that God cannot be, or be thought of as, a tempter. However, the Greek text reads kai mè eisenengkès hèmas eis peirasmon; the verb is a non-temporal aorist of phero, which when it refers to persons means to lead or to bring along with one; and peirasmos is a test or experiment. So however admirable the new translation’s aim is, I’m not sure it clears up the ancient mystery of this phrase in the prayer. 

St Augustine is not much help here: St Thomas Aquinas a little more. The basic idea seems to be that occasionally God tests a person, or allows a person to be tested: Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is an example of the first, God’s permission to Satan to test Job, of the second. Satan’s temptation of Eve may or may not have been permitted by God. Melanchthon in the Loci Communes said, ‘The hardening of Pharaoh's  heart is a Hebrew figure of speech which signifies permission, not an efficient will; as, Lead us not into  temptation, means, permit us not to be led into  temptation."’
In any case, as someone put it, it seems to be such a scenario that Jesus is thinking of when He includes this petition in the prayer. And the fact that it is there at all may reflect His understanding that most of us would not feel (or, indeed, be) up to the heroic resistance of an Abraham or a Job.

What strikes me most about such an inquiry is the depths and breadths contained in that prayer. Each clause can introduce and sustain hours of meditation, all of them enriching.