Open Reflections

The Lord’s Prayer

A meditation in eight parts of the Lord’s Prayer

για Ελληνικά πατήστε εδώ

Part 1

Our Father who art in heaven

Jesus himself gave this prayer to his Apostles and it is safe to say there is no Christian under the sun who does not know it.

We direct our thought and words to God addressing him as a Father, our Father. Time and long usage, so to speak, take away the newness and radical teaching contained in this prayer.

Saying that God is our Father reveals too many very significant truths about our relationship to God, the absolute principle and Creator of “all things visible and invisible’ (Nicene Creed, 4th c)

We are God’s sons and daughters, we belong to His household, we are of His family; this awareness gives us the right of a direct and familiar relationship with Him. This sonship is granted to us not by natural right but through a spiritual birth. Saint Paul calls it becoming sons and daughters of God by adoption. How so? Faith tells us that Jesus Christ is the Only Begotten Son of God. He is God by nature, eternally begotten of the Father. We, on our part, become children of God through Baptism, through participation in the Mystical Body of Christ, that is the Church.

By participating in the life of the Church we participate in the divine nature (2 Pet. 1,4). Christ through His Passion and Resurrection opened the way for us to have access to the Father in Heaven. Jesus willingly payed for the sins of the world in order to drag sinful humanity out of the ‘mud’ and into a vital and close existential relationship with Him. This bond of spiritual adoption is at the same time a promise and a fulfilment. The Church is not limited to the “visible” Church defined by the number of the Baptised, but she extends to include all the people of good will who know and love Christ and who have no access to Baptism because of various social, geographical or cultural restrains.

This God who is our Father, we say, He is “in heaven”; what does that mean? We have to think of the word “heaven” in a symbolic manner. In certain languages, by-the-way, “heaven” and “sky” are denoted by the same word. (In Greek, for example, OURANOS= Sky and Heaven).

Heaven is this great vast vault which covers the earth and which in its immensity and beauty inspires us with awe and stirs within us deep desires, be it by its bright blue colour by day or by its starry tapestry by night. This firmament contais unfathomable secrets which science labours to pierce.

God is in heaven, i.e. He is far and at the same time close to us; we perceive Him and desire Him, but we cannot reach Him….He is higher and above everything and anything there is. He dwells in “inaccessible light”.

We, however, know that the unique God, the Creator of the universe chose to gradually reveal Himself in history and in this way to call us to a deep, familiar and unbroken relationship with Him through His Son Jesus Christ.

It cannot be clearer, our destiny is with our Father in Heaven.

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