But you know what? No one said a thing to me about it. No one asked, “Did you forget something?” or even just be blunt and say, “Hey, you forgot the Lord’s Prayer.” Perhaps they didn’t notice, although that seems unlikely, because as I said when we started this series, the Lord’s Prayer is a constant in worship. And not just for us, but for all Christians. You could go to any Christian church anywhere in the world, no matter what language they might be speaking, no matter what their worship service or style may be, they are going to be saying the Lord’s Prayer, because it’s part of who we are and what we do. And yet of all those Christians praying this prayer, probably the part that is most confusing or concerning, or perhaps both, is the petition that we look at today which is, “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil…” or from “the evil one,” which we’ll talk about the difference in a little while.
In the Lord’s Prayer, there are six petitions that we say,
three about God, for God’s name to be hallowed, for God’s Kingdom to come and
for God’s will to be done. And then there are three petitions for us,
remembering again this is a plural prayer not an individual prayer. We pray for
daily bread, for forgiveness, just as we have forgiven, and then there is
today’s petition. Now there are some people who claim that instead of six, that
we should instead see seven petitions. That today’s petition should be divided
into two parts. One on temptation, or about trials, and then one about being
delivered. I don’t accept that
differentiation, because I see them as being linked together because of the but
in the middle, although it probably ultimately doesn’t make a difference. I
just wanted to give some clarification of how and why I have approached them
the way I have. But, as I said, of all the petitions in the prayer this is
probably the one that is the hardest to understand. Even in the numerous books
I have been referencing to prepare, the chapters on this petition are the
shortest I think in all of them, because it’s hard to deal with, because if we
read it as it’s presented to us, and as we normally say it on Sunday mornings,
it appears that we are asking God not to lead us into temptation. And that, of
course, leads to the question of whether that is something God would do, and if
so what does that mean for us, our faith and even for the nature of sin.
Of course there is a possibility of scriptural witness to
this especially in the story of Abraham. For those who were here or watched our
series last summer on Genesis, you may remember when we talked about the story
of Abraham’s sacrifice, or attempted sacrifice of Isaac in chapter 22. That
story begins, “After these things God tested Abraham.” But, we should note that
God never says this is a test, or even a temptation, or a trial of Abraham.
That is a remark made by the narrator, not God, so probably not the best one to
argue with. Then there is the story of Job, which is clearly a test of Job to
see how he will react if his family is destroyed and he loses all his
possessions, if he will then curse God. If bad things happening will lead him
to be tempted to turn on God. But, in that story while God allows the testing
to happen, God is not the one who is carrying out the events. And so in the
Hebrew Scriptures we do have some indications that perhaps God does indeed give
tests, or temptations, to people to see how faithful they truly are. But,
again, those stories are not as cut and dry on this topic as we might like them
to be.
And more importantly, these stories represent a different
understanding of God and God’s nature than we get later in scripture. At the
beginning of scripture, for the most part, God is responsible for both good and
evil. And so in this understanding of God, Satan is not evil, he is part of the
heavenly court and serves as a prosecutor, as we see in the story of Job. But
over time, the idea that God was only responsible for good things, and that bad
things, evil things, came from an evil power or powers in the world, begins to
develop. And so Satan begins to take on the understanding with which we are now
more commonly familiar, although nearly everything we think we know about
Satan, or the devil, comes more from Dante’s Divine Comedy and Milton’s Paradise
Lost than it does from scripture. But, with this change in thought comes a
different understanding of times of trial and temptations. After all, who is it
that is said to have tempted Jesus in the wilderness? It’s the devil, and we’ll
come back to that. And so a passage that sort of brings this idea to fruition
is found in particular in the passage we heard from James today, remembering
that James, if it is James the Just who wrote the letter, is the brother of
Jesus, who says “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’;
for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one. But one is
tempted by one’s own desire, being lured and enticed by it”
And what we see in other letters in the New Testament is
that there are three things that can lead us to temptation, or that can give us
temptation. One, as James says is ourselves, and we see this too in the Hebrew
Scriptures. Remembering back to Genesis again, when Cain is angry at his
brother Abel, but before he kills him, God tells Cain that “sin is lurking at
the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Of course he doesn’t
do so and gives into his own desires and kills his brother. That is also the
first time that sin is mentioned in scripture. The second way to be tempted,
which we have also mentioned, is by the devil. And then a third way that Paul
mentions in his letter to the Galatians is to give into temptation from some
identified source.
And so we can talk about translations again, and one of the
biggest points is that because of the concern about saying that God may tempt
us, some translators use the term trial, and there are some accompanying New
Testament scriptures that match that, but for the moment let’s stick with
temptation and see how we might deal with it. The first is a matter of
punctuation, and this was proposed by Adam Hamilton, although I don’t know that
it is original to him. But, there is no punctuation in our Greek manuscripts.
That means that translators have to make guesses on punctuation, including
quotation marks, which has dramatically changed the understanding of some of
Paul’s letters of whether he is quoting others or saying things himself. But,
here it has been proposed that this petition should say, lead us, comma, not
into temptation, implying asking God to lead us so that we will not follow our
own natural inclination to give into the temptations of the world. Asking God
to save us from our brokenness.
Some may recall that in 2017, Pope Francis endorsed a
similar translation that says so not let us fall into temptation, which is how
it now appears for Catholics in the liturgies in both Italy and France. In
commenting on this, Francis said that a father doesn’t push his children into
falling. Instead a father helps his children get back up. “I am the one who
falls,” he said. “It’s not [God] pushing me into temptation to then see how I
have fallen.” And while I can see those arguments and even agree with them, I
think there is something deeper going on, and something that will definitely
come into play when we discuss the doxology to the prayer next week, because we
do have a temptation story in the New Testament, and it involves Jesus himself.
After his baptism, Jesus goes into the wilderness to fats
for forty days. During these 40 days, he is also tempted by the devil, and we
should pay special attention to what the temptations are as compared against
the Lord’s Prayer and our petitions. The order of the temptations is different
between Matthew and Luke, but we’re going with Matthew’s version. The first
temptation, which Matthew says is given to Jesus by “the tempter” possibly
giving another indication that it is not God who tempts us, asks Jesus to turn
stones into what? Bread. One of the petitions that we lift up to God. The
second temptation has the tempter lead Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple and
tells him to jump off so the angels will save him, and Jesus responds “Do not
put the Lord your God to the test.” Indicating that we are not to tempt God. Then
the final temptation in Matthew is Jesus being shown all the kingdoms of the
world and the devil says that he will give Jesus all the power, glory and
authority of these kingdoms if Jesus will fall down and worship him. Jesus
rejects this by saying “it is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God and serve
only him.” In our first week I said that the Lord’s Prayer is a thoroughly
Jewish prayer, but it also follows Jesus’ own life, and we definitely need to
remember that last temptation as we talk about the doxology to the prayer next
week.
And so Jesus is led into temptation, not by God, but by the
tempter or by the devil, and hopefully we might all agree that our faith is
probably not as strong as Jesus’ is and that we would fail in temptations and
trials, and we see that exact same thing with the disciples, which can and
perhaps should give us some more guidance to this petition. In the Garden of
Gethsemane on Jesus’ last night, Jesus goes off to pray and asks that this cup
be taken from him, but then he says “but not my will, but your will be done.” Another
petition. And then he goes back and finds Peter, James and John sleeping and
Jesus says to Peter: “Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time
of trial.” Or into the time of temptation.
And what is the time of trial that Peter will face? The answer that
would be easiest to give would be his denial of Jesus, but Jesus has already
told him that that is going to happen, and so that’s not the trial. Instead,
when the crowd arrives with the chief priests and the scribes to arrest Jesus,
in Matthew and Luke we are told that one of the disciples strikes one of the
slaves with a sword and cuts off his ear. But, in John we are told that the one
who strikes is Peter.
John Dominic Crossan argues that the trial that Peter, and
the other disciples, should have been praying to avoid was our tendency to
strike out in anger and violence. That the trial was whether they could follow
the path of peace and of forgiveness that Jesus has called for them, for us. Or
we might say, is Peter going to live into the ways of the Kingdom of God, the
reign of God, or the ways of the kingdoms of the world. Because Rome brought
forth peace by violence and repression, but Christ for us to bring forth peace
through love. But Peter fails the test, perhaps because he wasn’t praying for
help in that moment, and he uses violence in the face of violence. Jesus then
tells him to put the sword away, for those who live by the sword will die by
the sword, then heals the slave’s ear and goes to his death, with forgiveness
on his lips. Jesus faces violence with love and healing and peace.
But there is one other trial that I would like us to
consider, and that comes from a quote that one of the books I am using began the
chapter with from the comedian Don Novello, best known for his character Father
Guido Sarducci, who said, “a halo has to fall just a few inches to become a
noose.” In one of his parables, Jesus tells of a Pharisee and a tax collector
who go to the Temple to pray, and the Pharisee looks around in his
righteousness and says, “God, I thank you that I am not like other people:
thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector.” Whereas the tax
collector bows his head and says “God, be merciful to me, a sinner.” And Jesus
says that one man goes home justified and one doesn’t, and it’s the tax
collector who is justified for all who humble themselves will be exalted and
all who exalt themselves will be humbled. And then thinking that Jesus’ biggest
arguments are with those who consider themselves religious, or righteous before
God, and so our trial that we are asking God to help us with is to humble
ourselves, which has played a key role in several of the petitions, as well as
in doing the things God has called to do, to do God’s will not our own and call
it God’s, so that we will truly hallow God’s name and make it holy and bring
glory to him. So that our halos stay on our heads rather than falling around
our necks and choke out of faith.
Which leads directly into the final part of the petition, and another reason why I think these are all part of the same petition, and that is to deliver us from evil or the evil one. When we talked about God as father and male pronouns, we talked about the fact that Greek is a gendered language. That is the words have genders assigned to them rather than using pronouns as we do in English. But this word can be either neutered, no gender, in which it refers to just evil in general. If you want to see the word as masculine, then it refers to personified evil, or the evil one. And it can be either of those depending on where you want to put the emphasis. Now, as a general rule, I tend to reject the personification or identification of evil with the devil or Satan, again because much of it is not scriptural, but more importantly because doing so can too often become a crutch, an excuse. I’m sure you’ve heard people say, either seriously or in jest, the devil made me do it. That means they don’t actually have to take personal responsibility. And more importantly it can cause is to think that evil is out there, out in the world, and not see the evil that is within us, or the brokenness within us.
As James says, we are the ones who give into our desires which are within us, for we have the ability to be both bringers of peace or bringers of violence, bringers of love or bringers of hate, bringers of forgiveness or bringers of vengeance. It’s all within us. But, as members of the 12-step programs emphasize, we cannot do the right thing by ourselves, we have to have God’s assistance. And so that’s what we are asking for here: God lead us because we know that we fall short of your glory, and so lead us to righteousness, lead us to you, lead us to humility, lead us to bring glory to your name, lead us to choose peace, lead us to choose love, lead us to live and abide in you as you abide in us. And lead us to remember that even when we fail and fall, that your forgiveness is there for us, just as our forgiveness is and has been given to those who fail and fall in their relationship with us. That is what we pray this day and every day. I pray that it will be so my brothers and sisters. Amen.
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