The Lord's prayer; seven homilies

Front matter

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Bp Rev. Washington Glaaven, D. D.

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Preface

THE provocation of these homilies was a series of short but incisive letters, written by Mr. John Ruskin to an English clergyman, but published by the writer’s consent in the “* Contemporary Review,” and meant for all the English clergy. I quote some of his questions.

“Can this Gospel of Christ be put into such plain words and short terms that a plain man can understand it? and if so, would it not be, ina quite primal sense, desirable that it should be so?”

And again : —

“ J want only to put this sterner question to your council, how this Gospel is to be preached ‘ everywhere’ or ‘ to all nations,” uf first its preachers have not determined quite clearly what it is. And might not i PREFACE.

such definition, acceptable to the entire body of the Church of Christ, be arrived at by merely explaining in their completeness and life the terms of the Lord’s Prayer — the first words taught to children all over the Christian world ? ”

And again : —

“ My meaning in saying that the Lord’s Prayer might be made a foundation of Gospel-teaching was not that it contained all that Christian ministers have to teach; but that it contains what all Christians are agreed upon as first to be taught ; and that no good parish-working pastor in any part of the world but would be glad to take his vart in making it clear and living to his congregation.”

Though I am not a member of the communion for which these letters of Mr. Ruskin were intended, I could not help feeling the farce of his suggestions, and this small volume is one fruit of them. Whatever value the reader may discover in these studies, the writer has gained by means of them not

PREFACE. Ga only a better understanding of the Lord’s Prayer, but an altogether new sense of the wideness of its range and the fullness of its meaning.

i he Mhupekee yay of bisayl) 5 me: AeA hy pe our ik 7 ae , 1 ee ‘o7

THE LORD’S PRAYER.

I. The Eternal Father

Our Father who art in heaven. —MArr. vi. 9.

Iv is an old path to whose entrance we turn our faces when we begin to study the Lord’s Prayer,— an old path and well-worn by the feet of many incurious worshipers and many devout interpreters. What then? Are there no ways worth walking in but those uncertain trails blazed for us by pioneers through tangled forests on the frontiers of faith? Old roads there are that offer fair prospects and that lead to pleasant places; where the hedgerows every year are sweet with blossoms and musical with birds; from beneath whose sheltering yocks the living water springs as cool and fresh to-day as when our fathers drank thereof.

The prayer that Christ taught his disciples is not a threadbare formula; it is as full as it ever was of fresh and vital truth. And while we dwell upon its familiar phrases, let us trust that his own Spirit, which takes of the things that he has left and makes them plain to us, will abide with us, helping us now to understand, and evermore devoutly and trustfully to use, the petitions that are grouped in this simple form of words.

The first thing to be noted is the brevity of this prayer. This is especially significant when taken in connection with the words which the Saviour had just been speaking. ‘‘ When ye pray use not vain repetitions as the heathen do, for they think that they shall be heard for their much speaking Be ye not therefore like unto them.” In most of the other religions the efficacy of prayer has been supposed to depend on ita length. The notion is that the gods will do nothing for men unless they are teased. And even the Jews themselves had fallen into this error, for our Lord denounces the Pharisees who devour widows’ houses, and for a pretense (or for a mask of their wickedness) make long prayers. We know that long prayers are quite the fashion now among devout Jews; one of the maxims of the Rabbis is, “ Prolix prayer protracts life.” At the sacrament of circumcision the prescribed prayers of orthodox Jews are repeated with great rapidity, for the reason that if they were deliberately read a whole day would be consumed in reading them.

It was not the Gentiles alone, then, but his own people as well, that Jesus was rebuking by his warning against vain repe- - titions and long prayers. This prayer that he has left us is so short that one who utters it very slowly will finish it within one minute. And while many times we cannot tell our Father in heaven within the space of one minute all the things that we want to teli him, — while we cannot always relieve our own burdened spirits without a longer season of communion with him than that, — yet it is true beyond a doubt that we often err as the Jews and the Gentiles did in supposing that we are heard for our much speaking. No doubt many of our public prayers, especially in pulpit and prayer-meeting, would be far more effectual if they followed more nearly the pattern set for us in the brevity of the Lord’s Prayer.

Two or three more questions ought to be answered before we proceed with our study.

How was this prayer to be used? Was it to be used exclusively? So some persons have supposed. In Luke’s version of the prayer he reports the Master as prefacing it with the words, “ When ye pray, say, Our Father who art in heaven,” etc. Therefore it has been inferred that he meant to give them a form of words which they were always to use, and that they were never to use any other words of prayer. But it is plain that this cannot be his meaning, because we have a record in the Acts of the Apostles of several prayers which did not follow this form of words, and which were answered abundantly. To confine his disciples to a single form of prayer would have been exactly contrary to the whole spirit of his teaching.

But if we are at liberty to use other words when we pray, ought we always when we pray to use these words — to include this prayer in all our supplications ? No; I do not think that our Lord means to require that. We shall often wish to pray in these words; but he means that our desires shall be free to utter themselves in their own way. In Matthew’s report of the prayer, our Lord begins by saying: After this manner, therefore, pray ye.” The prayer is a model, in its simplicity, its brevity, its directness ; but it is not a prescribed form ; it is a staff and not a fetter for the praying soul.

Was it the design of the Master that this prayer, or indeed that any prayer, should be used publicly? Some things that are said in this Sermon on the Mount would seem to answer this question in the negative. ‘¢ When thou prayest thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they maybe seen of men. Verily I say unto you, they have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.” Does this forbid all public prayer? Certainly it does if we are always to take the Bible just as it reads — to interpret all its sayings literally. No command could be more express than this of our Lord, not to pray in the synagogues, but when we pray to enter into the closet and shut the door. Yet we know that our Lord himself sometimes prayed inthe presence of others. He prayed at the tomb of Lazarus; he prayed in the upper room with his disciples on the night of the Last Supper — that prayer of triumphant faith and deathless love which John has recorded in the seventeenth chapter of his Gospel. We know, too, that the prayers of his disciples, when they were all with one accord in one place, and there lifted up their supplications, were richly answered. So, then, we infer that this preface of the Lord’s Prayer is not to be taken literally; that it is only a strong rebuke of ostentatious praying,— of the hypocrisy which prays to be heard and seen of men. Indeed, all true prayer in public is a kind of secret prayer; for, though the one who prays stands or kneels among his fellow-men, he is as much alone with God as if he were in his closet. He may think of those who listen; he may seek to put himself in their places and to be the voice of their desires and their confessions; but the moment he begins to think of what they are thinking about his prayer, that moment he ceases to pray. Prayer in the assembly, as well as in the solitude, is “ the flight of one alone to the only One.”

Let us turn now to the first sentence of the Lord’s Prayer, which shall be our theme for a little while this morning.

Our Father who art in heaven. Did the people to whom this Sermon on the Mount was spoken know before this that God was their Father? It is confessed that they had clearer ideas about God than any other people in the world; was this thought that he is our Father among their common thoughts of him?

No, it was not. I believe that the word Father is applied to God seven times in the Old Testament; among the innumerable references to the Supreme Being which crowd almost every chapter of all the books of the Old Testament but one, he is mentioned just seven times as a Father, — five times as the Father of the Hebrew people, twice as sustaining that relation to indi:

viduals. Of these two intimations that God is the Father of individual men, one is a promise to David that God will be a father to his son, Solomon; the other is a prediction that by and by men will pray to God calling him Father, — a prediction fulfilled in this prayer. For there is no record of any prayer in the Old Testament in which God is addressed as Father. We have the words of several prayers in which the holy men of God called upon him by the names that they best knew him by, but there is not one in which they address him as their Father. ‘In the vocative case, as an address to God in prayer,”’ says Dean Mansel, the name of Father ‘does not occur in the Old Testament.”

It was, then, practically a new thought about God which our Saviour gave his disciples when he taught them about God. They had always known him as the Eternal, the Creator, the Self-existent One, the Supreme Ruler, the Judge, the Lord of

Hosts or of Battles, the Captain of the 2 armies of heaven; but this thought of him as the Father in heaven was one that was very far from all their common thoughts of him. When a prayer was given them in which this name, and this name only, was applied to him, — when they were taught to think of him as their Father, and to come to him with the freedom and the confidence that a little child feels in coming to its father, it is certain that a wonderful change must have taken place in all their religious ideas and feelings. This word took them into a new world. I do not think that any of us can begin to imagine the revolution that was made in the religious life of the disciples of Christ when they began to say, ‘ Our Father in Heaven,” and began, though dimly, to understand that in all its tender and winning suggestions the word was not only true, but that it was far within the truth. It was to them as if they had been standing for a long time before the grim outer walls of some old castle which they had been summoned to enter, — stand ing there and looking doubtfully at the forbidding granite battlements, with cannon and sentries on the ramparts, with suggestions of gloomy passages and dungeons and chains within, —when all at once a little door opened, and they saw within the wall a pleasant garden, with flowers and fountains and cool retreats, and caught a breath of the sweetest odors, and heard a burst of melody from singing birds and happy children playing in the sun. Such an opening into the very heart of God did this word Father make for all who had stood for long in the cold shadow of the old monarchical conception of his character. There was meaning in the word of the Master when he said, “I am the Door.”

One thing, however, these disciples did not need to learn about God, and that was his personality. If they had not known that God was a Person, this word would have taught it to them; but they did know it. Whatever else their special training had failed to do for the Jews, it had not failed to convey to them the truth that God is a conscious Person; that he has intelligence in some respects like ours, yet infinitely transcending ours; that he has affection, and free will, so that he can love his children and choose their welfare. Mr. Matthew Arnold tries to make out that the earlier Hebrews did not believe in a personal Deity (which is a monstrous inversion of the facts of the Biblical history), but even he asserts that in the later days of the nation this belief was universal among them.

The word Father did not help them in forming the idea of the Divine Personality ; they had believed God to be a Person; only it was, as we have said, a different kind of person that they had thought of when they had thought of him, — it was a King, or a Judge, or a Warrior, and not a loving Father.

To us, however, this word may be precious, not so much in giving us the idea of the personality of God, as in helping us to hold on to it. For although this doctrine

THE ETERNAL FATHER. wi may be abused, and often is; though men who speak of God as a Person often mean by that that he is altogether such an one as themselves, thus degrading his character and limiting his power; nevertheless it is essential to all true worship and to all fruitful religious thought that we keep hold of this idea, —that he is something more than a law or a system of laws, something better than a force or a universe of forces, something diviner than the order of nature or “the stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the laws of their being,” — that he is a conscious Person, a living, loving Father.

Just at this time there is special need of reaffirming this truth. For the study of physical science, which is simply a study of the laws of physical nature, has come to occupy so large a place in the interest of men that many of them have been inclined to insist upon the hasty and foolish conclusion that there is no God but nature and its forces, that the All is God, and that yi THE LORD'S PRAYER.

there is no other. This is Pantheism — and there are many forms of it. Some Pantheists seem to think that God is simply the sum of all things that are; others teach, with Spinoza, that God is the universal substance — the substance out of which all the worlds and all their works were made; (who made them I wonder?) others that the forces which act and react in nature, — gravitation, cohesion, chemical affinity, heat, light, electricity and the rest, — that these are God ; others say, with Fichte, that God is the universal moral order. But all these theories agree in this, that they identify God with the universe ; they strip him of all individuality ; they make of him only an immense aggregation of things or a group of forces or a principle of morality or something else abstract or impersonal.

I will not stop to show how unphilosophical this notion is, though that is not a hard thing to do; I only wish to point out that this word, by which our Lord teaches us to pray to his and our Father, is the very antithesis of Pantheism. It affirms exactly what Pantheism denies. If God is our Father he is surely a conscious Person. No Pantheist can use the words of the Lord’s Prayer in their obvious and natural meaning. None of them except Renan, I think, has ever attempted it. He seems to belong to a class of Pantheists whose views are concisely expressed by Eckhart, one of the old mystics: ‘‘ God is nothing and God is something ; that which is something is also nothing ; what God is he is altogether.” I should like to see anybody go to work to disprove that statement. Hegel also appears to take the same view. He says that “pure being is pure nothing,” which comes near to being pure nonsense. Renan belongs to this school, apparently, and in a book which he wrote a good while ago he made use of this expression, “ Our Father, the Abyss!”” Our Father, the Abyss! Orphaned indeed must he be who can find aeither in the universe nor above it any Father but an abyss, bottomless, boundless, sightless, thoughtless.

94 HE LORD'S PRAYER.

Now right over against these mystical absurdities, this system which confounds God and nature, is the blessed truth of the text told in this word Father, — one word that is worth as much more than all the scholastic arguments of Pantheism as bread is worth more than stones to a hungry man.

O you who are tired out with the work and the battle of this laborious life, and are longing for rest and home and love; you who are saddened by losses and bereavements here, and are pining for consolation and sympathy that men cannot give you; you who have found that sin is too strong for you, and are crying out for help to overcome it, — are you satisfied when men point you to the forces of nature or the laws of the moral universe, or worse than all, to an abyss of non-existence, and tel] you to find there the help that you are look ing for? This is all that Pantheism has to offer you. Is it enough? It is like offering to a man who is famishing with thirst a Report of the Water Commissioners of some foreign city, printed in an unknown tongue.

I have only time left to touch in the most hasty and superficial way half a dozen inferences from this short phrase, each of which demands a full hour for its adequate consideration.

And first, the truth contained in this new name of God is the true constructive idea in all theological science. Build all your theologies on this foundation. Hold fast to the idea of uniform law, of a nature of things which God has established, under which sin is punished; but when you speak of the personal character and government of God, of his direct interference in the affairs of men, of what he does supernaturally, in the order of history, remember that he is our Father. The theologies of the past have been built mainly upon the monarchical rather than the paternal idea vf God. In their religious life, all Chris.

tians have kept hold of the truth that God is their Father; in their theological speculations they have chosen rather to emphasize the representation that he is a Moral Governor; and all their reasonings about his administration have been based upon this idea; all their statements and inferences of what he can do and cannot do, what he must do and must not do, have been drawn from the analogies of human governments ; from the rules of policy and expediency that human rulers have found it necessary for them to adopt. This is a very unsafe method of reasoning. The highest conception of God that the Bible gives us is the one that should rule in all our theological speculations, and that is the conception which Christ gives us in the word Father. The word suggests to us also the dignity of human nature. It is a reaffirmation of that primal truth that we find in the first book of the Bible, that man is made in the image and likeness of God. ‘ Behold what manner of love the Father has bestowed

THE ETERNAL FATHER. OT upon us that we should be called the sons of God.” He who was before all worlds, he whose will is the source of all laws, he who is the life of all that live, the Omnipotent, the Allwise, the Eternal God, is our Father.

** Our Father.” The word not only lifts up and glorifies every humblest human creature, it binds together in one brotherhood, in one family, all that dwell upon the face of the earth. It is the grand leveler of ranks and hierarchies; it is the charter of fraternity ; it is the prophecy of peace and good-will among men. When you say ‘‘Our Father,” whom do you include in that word “our?” Nay, whom do you dare to exclude? It sweeps us all in; it gathers into one waiting company the king and the beggar, the philosopher and the hind, the Hellene and the Hottentot, the saint and the sinner; it confesses the parentage and the dignity and the worth of every human soul, and cries, in the simple words of Tiny Tim, “ God bless us every one.” What a prayer this is that reaches up so high and-down so low and forth se far ; the breadth and length and depth and height of whose simplest petitions we often so feebly utter !

Again, what help and inspiration there is for us in the thought of the relationship here pointed out! ‘Take it home to yourself, my brother. Try to make out something of what it means when you say that God is your Father. Doubtless it means a great deal. Doubtless there is more of comfort and strength in it than you have ever got out of it.

Mayhap you are despised and trodden under foot of men, having almost lost your self-respect. Lift yourself up; let no man despise you! God is your Father! You are the heir of his love; you ought to be a sharer in his glory.

You may be in poverty and wretchedness; hunger is pinching you and toil is wearing you out; but do not lose heart “od is your Father ; do not doubt that you are just as dear to him as those are who have more of this world’s goods than you, and that the time will come when they as well as you will see that it isso. Never give way to repining; never suffer yourself to fall into that state of shamefacedness and abjectness in which so many of the poor are found; never accept the world’s false estimates of worth. If other men seem to think that because you are poor you are therefore of little account, do not you believe it. Remember that God is your Father. Respect yourself for your Father’s sake.

It may be that you are lamenting the passing of those who were very dear, and that your path lies through a shadow of darkness that can be felt; forget not in your sorrow that “like as a father pitieth his children so the Lord pitieth them that fear him.” He loves you far more tenderly than you loved those that are gone ; he would not have taken them from you but for wise and good reasons.

30 THE LIRD'S PRAYER.

It may be that you have slipped and sunk into the mire of some great wickedness but though men may have turned their backs on you God has not forsaken you. If there is in your heart the faintest desire to be reclaimed from your iniquities, he knows it and delights to see it; he will not leave you to perish in your degradation, but will lift you up and succor you if you will only let him.

Whoever you are, whatever your needs and your griefs may be, whatever your sins may have been, this truth, that God is your Father, ought to be to you a truth full of encouragement and inspiration.

“ The new charity,” as one of its wisest apostles said in Boston the other day, “seeks to provide every needy family with a friend.” If we could only make every needy family — those needy ones that live in the palaces, as well as those that live in the cellars — see that they have one Friend already, could make him known to them, could get them to trust in him, what a blessed light would sh'ne into many desolate homes!

Here is a young man just setting out in life. He has his own way to make, and he finds that the currents of human selfishness and greed are sometimes hard to stem. He sees that others about him have influential friends who often help them over hard places, and he says to himself sometimes : “‘T wish I had a friend, some one with experience and influence, to whom I could go now and then; not that I want material aid, but I would like to know some wise and strong man who would believe in me, and be glad when I went right, and say so; and give me moral rather than financial backing in my endeavor to do an honorable and successful business.” Such a friend a young business man sometimes finds, and such a friendship is often invaluable. _ This is only an allegory by which the

inner history of every human soul is visibly set forth. Every one who seeks the true riches finds the needs of a friend whose

BY4 THE LORD'S PRAYER.

counsel he may trust, on whose strength he may lean. You have such a Friend, my brother ; one whose wisdom is infinite and whose resources are unfailing; one who believes in you, who never loses his hold on any human soul so long as there is a spark of good left in it; one who is glad when you do well, and wants to do nothing so much as to help you to do better; one who stoops to lift you up when you fall, and to lead you out of the ways of peril into the ways of safety ; one in whose presence ten thousand mighty angels, who look always on his face and behold its joy, strike their golden harps with sympathetic gladness whenever one sinner forsakes his sin.

“ Our Father in heaven!” Where it is I know not; what it is no man fully knows. But it is where Our Father is. And whoever is with him is not far from heaven. Something of the melody of its music, something of the fragrance and the beauty of its sweet fields, steal into his heart even while he walks along the dusty ways of this lower world. Do you fancy that there was much difference with Enoch, say, between the before and the after? God took him — how I do not know; but though it may be a little less grand, it is no less sweet to walk with God along the humble paths of daily duty than to ride forth with him sc royally “ on cherub and on cherubim.” The track of that chariot I will not try to trace ; I only care to know that if I am changed into his image through faith in him, I shall awake in his likeness and be satisfied. F)

Il THE SACRED NAME.

Hallowed be thy name. — Marr. vi. 9.

THE fact that great things have small beginnings is as true in morals as it is in biology. The deepest and most universal moral sentiments show traces of a humble origin. The love of moral purity was nourished by habits of physical purity. Cleanliness is next to godliness, — next before it, indeed, in the order of time. The washings and purifications of the Jews were a ritual drill, out of which the sentiment of moral purity was developed.

Likewise, the great sentiment of reverence was planted in a sterile and unfriendly soil, and kept alive by many merely formal observances. ‘To imagine that men in the earliest ages had the same kind of reverence for God that good men have in the present day would be a great error. ‘They were afraid of the various manifestations of force that they saw in nature; but of genuine reverence they knew but little. Here and there a religious genius, like Abraham or Melchisedek, gained some insight into divine things; but the great majority had but a dim apprehension of the real character of God, and could not therefore have felt any true reverence for him. It was possible, however, for these ignorant and unspiritual people to be trained in certain outward observances which would lead them toward reverence. To this end they were instructed to hold the name Jehovah in serupulous regard. It was not freely spoken ; even in reading the Scriptures it was passed over in silence; some other name of God less sacred was substituted for it. Aftera time the true pronunciation of this name was lost by the Jewish people themselves, and it has never been regained. It passed from the lips of the people; the sound of it was forgotten ; and scholars who have studied the documents and the monuments of antiquity are at a loss to determine what the original pronunciation was. Probably, however, it was more nearly like Yahveh than like Jehovah.