A World Famous Prayer Opposes Superpowers, Urges Jubilee Living
If you’ve ever said the words of the “Our Father” or “Lord’s Prayer,” you’ve prayed for Jubilee—possibly without knowing you were doing it. It’s the prayer that Jesus taught those aspiring to his Way. “How shall we pray?” they asked. “This way,” he said.
Our Father who is in heaven— This opening gives the prayer a troublesome beginning for all who hear it as favoring the masculine gender for God. But gender was not on Jesus’ mind; resisting the Roman empire was. What he resisted was how Rome’s citizens appealed to emperors for benefits, treating him like the country’s patriarch. Praying, Jesus taught, was an act of standing against empire and in favor of alternatives that threatened the emperor. Praying in the manner of Jesus embraces a different world. In this prayer, Jesus calls that world “heaven,” not the pearly gates kind, but a way of life that contrasts to “earth,” especially empires on earth. In many writings from Jesus’ era, “heaven” was used by resisters to empire to speak of God’s perspective on empire. “Heaven” represents a larger view of things than empires offered, a longer-term view, a more trustworthy view. To see things from “heaven” was to see with a whole different consciousness than being “in empire.”
So, to the question, “How shall we pray?” Jesus answered, “Stand against empire’s way of running the world and appeal instead to the Father whose consciousness and actions are shaped by another way of being.” The Father in heaven was far more able than the Father in Rome to be gracious, powerful, and generous toward humans and all of creation.
Hallowed be your name— Given all the respect and deference shown to emperors and their titles of authority and power, Jesus said that from the moment we enter prayer, it is important that the One to whom we pray be in our consciousness as one fully invested with the authority and power to deliver the different way of seeing and living that we long for. Call it the heavenly way.
When I was in a seminar with the late biblical scholar Walter Wink, he emphasized that the action involved in hallowing is an action by both us and God. We call on God to be more than any emperor, to be the God of heaven and earth, to be the God of a different way of seeing, being, and living. By actions, God reveals whether or not One greater than an emperor is available to us. Wink’s paraphrase was something like, “God, be God! Don’t let us down. We’re putting our confidence in you, both for ourselves and for the world. Show the world what you’re like.”
Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as in heaven— Jesus teaches us to pray for the replacement of the political and economic kingdoms of empire and superpowers with another world that lives heaven’s way on earth. When? Here and now. There are places in the Bible that tell us to pray for those in authority, but this isn’t one of them. This is a prayer for Jubilee to be practiced today. “Ask God to replace today’s unjust systems that undermine life and love,” Jesus said, “and get on with doing God’s heavenly will on earth.”
As the prayer develops it crescendoes toward bringing about “the kind of year (time) the Lord favors” or Jubilee year that Jesus spoke of in the synagogue in Nazareth, Luke 4:18-19. This special year is no longer to be thought of us a longing, Jesus said, not a future beyond us, but a year which we are to live now. As he said in Luke 4:21, “Today this Scripture is fulfilled.” So, when asked how we are to pray, Jesus proceeds to teach us to pray into reality the kind of year that YHWH favors. In prayer we take our stand against the love of money and power that transcend justice and life in the modern world’s “Roman Empire” as seen in the collusion of transnational corporations, megabanks, militaries, and the governments they impose on the countries of the globe. Instead, we implore God to come through on being God by daring to say with Jesus, “Today we live acceptable to YHWH, not empire.”
Give us this day our daily bread— To pray for daily bread is much closer to living in a subsistence economy than an economy of accumulation. In an economy of accumulation, many have far more than a day’s bread; others do not have even one day’s bread. Jesus tells us to pray for an economy in which daily bread happens for all, like it does for creatures of the earth.
No doubt Jesus has in mind also the daily bread gathered in the wilderness by his ancestors after they left the empire of Egypt. “Give us this day our daily bread” captures in one phrase the experience of people learning how to live after they come out of empire. Though bewildered at first, they come to realize that the abundance of Creation is such that they are sustained daily with enough. The excesses of Egypt are not necessary after all; the provision of Creation is fully enough. The daily bread in the wilderness protested the direction of the Neolithic Revolution that was underway across the Mediterranean world. That Revolution was industrializing agriculture and building cities (such as the ones the people of Israel had built in Egypt through slave labor). It was marked by technological progress. But the “daily bread” story rejects the basic premises of growth and domination that arose in the Neolithic Revolution and still reign. “Daily bread” is about living within the provisions of Creation, not dominating nature or civilizing her. Domination and civilization redistribute nature’s abundance so that some can have more than enough while others go with less or without.
“Give us this day our daily bread” is not just about ending hunger in the world through humanitarian redistribution. It is about a new economic order, not dependent on endless growth, that masters redistribution to all. The current growth economics prevailing in the world redistributes “bread” to those at the top, leaving humanitarian agencies and safety networks to take care of the rest. Jesus teaches us a kind of praying that stands against such policies of food and wealth while saying, “Today we commit ourselves to living a year acceptable to YHWH.”
Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors— It is common to hear people claim God’s forgiveness but then continue to live on the basis that all of us are obligated to pay our debts, no matter how those debts have been structured by empire’s systems. If we don’t the money, we can expect to pay other consequences. But to pray what Jesus taught undermines the thought that we can expect God’s forgiveness if we cannot practice forgiving others. God’s forgiveness is not an entitlement; it is contingent on the actions of forgiving others.
Whether the debt is financial or otherwise matters little. It’s paying the cost of forgiving and coming into the benefits of doing so that moves us out of empire and into YHWH’s way. Forgiving undermines imperial patterns that redistribute everything upward. The hierarchies of empire are kept in place through debts owed to those higher up. Money, power, honor, respect, worth—all of it is redistributed from the lesser to the greater in empire’s ways of garnering control and order. But not so in Jesus’ prayer. Jesus prays to undo that hierarchy of financial and social control. Forgiveness disassembles the hierarchy by redistributing money, power, honor, respect, and worth to all.
Every economy that must grow to be strong, like the global economy today, is an economy that makes more money by loaning it, in other words, by making debtors. A debt-based economy inevitably creates many debts beyond the debtors capacities to repay. Today, examples of such large, structural debt can be found where poorer nations are paying tribute to richer, more powerful ones, and continue doing so even though they are incapable of ever repaying the debt even if they adopted the severest of austerity programs. The history of these debts shows repeatedly that they grew out of unjust imperial-colonial structures. Student debt and credit card debt are also examples of unjust debt structures that redistribute money exploitatively from people with less to those with more. For these reasons, debt forgiveness is a vitally relevant prayer.
In a great and apocalyptic irony, today’s powers who level high interest on debts and demand regular payments from debtors are themselves in overwhelming debt of another kind. They have gained their financial sums through theft from Creation. Each day we see more clearly that they owe an incalculable ecological debt to Creation, and therefore to all humanity and species, which they are refusing to pay. In truth, they are unable to pay it. They have taken and taken and taken until what they owe us all and owe all species makes them debtors beyond their resources.
Across the globe today, the salvation of life urgently requires that our Creator forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors. Redistribution, not repayment, is our path to life.
Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil— The powers of empire are outer expressions of very powerful energies and structures at work within our souls (psyches). Often operating unconsciously, these archetypal energies erupt at various times in our lives. They blow past the boundaries of what we’ve been taught is proper, ethical, or moral and take us into baffling, contradictory behaviors. None of us is immune to these archetypal energies, nor can our egos control them. So, for example, all of us have sociopathic tendencies that include dominating other people and species, the yearning for more than enough (greed), and the willingness to favor ideology and systems over life’s needs. When these energies rule our lives we treat loss of life as collateral damage in the pursuit of our goals for wealth and power. We presume these goals to be essentially good. These energies are enormous and often deliver us into evil, the evil of empire’s structures, systems, and thinking.
Jesus knew first hand about these powers. He’d been led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tested. All three temptations he faced there were tests to see whether he would choose the way of empire and its religion or the way of greater creation (also called “heaven” in this prayer) and its inherent spirituality that integrates all things. In his tests, he was delivered from the evil choices that would have taken him on the imperial path. So he teaches us to pray that we can similarly be delivered—even that we would not be led into such tests in the first place.
But do not all of us feel the temptation that says, “I want to tame these imperial powers for good.” Are we not easily prone to seek wealth and greater influence? Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity said that he knew that Jesus said we cannot serve God and Mammon, but he, nonetheless, was intrigued by the challenge. We convince ourselves that we can be an exception and control the psychological-spiritual powers of the archetypes within and tame Mammon in order to do great good in the world.
But the history of civilization shows that this temptation is too great for our resources as humans. We cannot tame the beast. We can, however, discover the power of living within the even greater ecological powers of nature. When do so, we are certain to trigger responses from the imperial persons and systems that rule. In those moments new temptations arrive: temptations to doubt that living alternatives is right, temptations to doubt our ways of thinking, and so many more.
So, what do we do? We pray as Jesus taught. And we persist with an assertiveness that Jesus taught us to use. Walter Wink reminded many audiences of Jesus’ twin parables found in Luke’s Gospel. In one, a person demands food from their neighbor who’s already gone to bed for the night. But the demands continue until the neighbor overcomes their resistance and concedes. In another, a widow, who as a woman is without legal status in court, demands vindication from a judge who grants it to her based on her audacity rather than on legal precedent. The message, Wink says, is clear: be persistent in your demands because our assertiveness empowers God to carry out what God wants to do when fully committed partners are available.
To persist in assertive prayer takes us to the depths of our own souls. Shallow commitments to living Jubilee years acceptable to YHWH cannot break out of empire. Only commitments based in psychological and spiritual consciousness of holy depth. We see such living and praying modeled in Jesus. It’s not surprising then that his prayer for himself is what he teaches us to pray.
In summary, the Lord’s prayer is a prayer to come out of empire, to use alternative thinking aligned with Creation and to use as few of empire’s structures as possible. For all of us living in countries that run on superpower thinking and aspire to domination of others and the control of nations and nature, praying as Jesus taught challenges the core of our life choices.
The emotion and mood of the Lord’s prayer is urgency. The powers of empire constantly transgress against nature’s arrangements for life. They show no ability to stop doing so until nature’s capacities to sustain life are exhausted. This prayer is a great spiritual practice for all who sense the endangerment of life by empire’s aggression. From the opening line, the prayer has an imperative sense to it. Linguists believe the Greek origin of the word for “hallowed” carried a sense of the imperative. In this light, all the phrases that comprise the Lord’s Prayer become a litany of holy imperatives. We persist and urgently call on the powers of heaven and earth to live and create societies acceptable to the ways of heaven.
I suggest, then, that Jubilee partners pray this prayer standing and with a strong voice filled with urgency—the voice similar to one a child uses when they sense danger and call out, “Mommy! Daddy! Come quick! I need your help!”
