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Luke 11: 1-4 – Week 27 Ordinary Time, Wednesday (King James Audio Bible KJV, Spoken Word)
1 AND it came to pass, that, as he was praying in a certain place, when he ceased, one of his disciples said unto him, Lord, teach us to pray, as John also taught his disciples.
2 And he said unto them, When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done, as in heaven, so in earth.
3 Give us day by day our daily bread.
4 And forgive us our sins; for we also forgive every one that is indebted to us. And lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.
We are given different accounts of Jesus teaching his disciples the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father, in today’s verses from the Gospel of Luke, and also in the Gospel of Matthew, during the Sermon on the Mount. Here the situation is quite different from that of Matthew. Jesus has been praying, seemingly apart, to his Father, and so it is after this that the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. This is unusual: prayer, especially of the psalms, would have been an integral part of these Jewish people’s daily routine. We are alerted to the Lord’s Prayer being an additional offering, an innovation of grace, and a further initiation for the Christian. The prayer furthermore reflects John the Baptist’s teaching of his disciples. Indeed, a perfectly reasonable translation of the Greek is to say that the disciples of Jesus are asking Jesus to teach them the very same prayer which John taught. We can only speculate as to the extent that Jesus ‘followed after’ John prior to beginning his ministry, during the course of his perfect humanity’s spiritual formation through the hidden years.
As Christians, we usually pray the version of the Lord’s Prayer given in Matthew. In Matthew’s Gospel, there are seven petitions. Here there are five. Both accounts are concerned to simplify prayer, to distil the form of words so as perfectly to capture the essentials of our true relationship with God. We confess and glorify God; we ask for the coming of the Kingdom, for holiness to triumph on Earth as in heaven; we ask for food to sustain us; we ask that we may be accepted and involved within an economy of universal forgiveness; and we ask that we may be protected from temptations of sin, from evil. As we make our petitions, we speak to God with the simplicity of a child addressing his father.
There has been much discussion of the rendering into English as ‘daily bread’ the Greek word epiousion. The word exists nowhere else that we know of, apart from in the Gospels of Mathew and Luke. The word appears to be a compound of epi and ousios. Epi means over, above, beyond, in addition to. Ousious refers to the substance of something. Therefore, putting these words together, we have something like supersubstantial, or super-essential. We have, perhaps, the Eucharist. We ask for the unfolding of supernatural reality within our daily, Earthly lives, along with basic sustenance. There is a certain sense of liminality as we gear our daily lives toward eternal reality, as, as Christians, we ask that our own little corner of the world may become among heaven’s outposts.
Concluding Prayer | Love Revealed By Jesus Christ
Lord, holy Father, faithful to your promise
you sent your Spirit
to bring together a people divided by sin.
Give us grace to foster unity and peace among men.
Through Christ our Lord.
King James Audio Bible | Endnotes
A Life Of Prayer | Saint Teresa Of Avila
Born in Spain in 1515, Saint Teresa of Avila devoted her life to prayer and contemplation, and her teachings on prayer and spiritual growth have had a profound impact on the Church and on Christian spirituality more broadly.
At the heart of Saint Teresa’s teachings on prayer is the idea that prayer is an intimate sharing between friends, a means of coming into closer communion with God. She believed that the soul is like a castle made of a single diamond, in which there are many rooms, each leading to a deeper level of spiritual intimacy with God. Saint Teresa’s most famous work, The Interior Castle, offers a detailed guide to the journey of prayer and spiritual growth, based on her own personal experiences and insights.
In The Interior Castle, Saint Teresa emphasizes the importance of perseverance, humility, and contemplative prayer in the spiritual journey. She writes that the journey of prayer begins in the first room of the castle, where the soul awakens to the reality of God’s presence and begins to seek Him with greater fervor. As the soul progresses through the castle, it encounters various obstacles and challenges that must be overcome through prayer, humility, and perseverance.
Saint Teresa describes the second room of the castle as the room of self-knowledge, where the soul comes to recognize its own sinfulness and need for God’s mercy. In this room, the soul learns to embrace humility and to seek God’s forgiveness through prayer and repentance.
The third room of the castle is the room of prayer, where the soul begins to experience a deeper sense of intimacy with God through contemplative prayer. Here, Saint Teresa emphasizes the importance of silence and stillness, as well as the need to let go of distractions and attachments in order to fully enter into God’s presence.
As the soul progresses through the castle, it encounters deeper levels of spiritual growth and transformation, culminating in the seventh room, where it experiences a profound sense of oneness with God and a deep understanding of His love and mercy. Saint Teresa writes that it is impossible for a soul not to come forth resplendent when it has been granted a vision of the great Majesty.
Saint Teresa’s teachings on prayer and spiritual growth continue to inspire and guide Christians today. Her emphasis on the importance of love, intimacy, and perseverance in seeking God is as relevant now as it was in her own time. As Saint Teresa wrote: ‘The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.’ Saint Teresa’s writings, including The Interior Castle, continue to offer valuable insights and guidance to anyone seeking to deepen their relationship with God through prayer and contemplation.
Here are some thoughts from Saint Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle:
- ‘The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.’
- ‘The soul, I see clearly, is like a castle made of a single diamond or crystal, and this diamond is in the shape of a square. […] Anyone who looked upon it would be dazzled and stupefied by the brilliance of this crystal.’
- ‘Mental prayer, in my opinion, is nothing else than an intimate sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with Him who we know loves us.’
- ‘The devil knows well that a person who prays is lost to his temptations, so he tries to hinder the soul from beginning to pray.’
- ‘It is impossible for a soul not to come forth resplendent when it has been granted a vision of the great Majesty.’
Jesus speaks of his crucifixion as he speaks of his being sent by his Father and of his being consubstantial with his Father. Jesus has made himself man, and this was necessary for our sakes. However, his being is most truly in heaven. He is divine. The entirety of Jesus’ being, as God the Son, is beyond our human comprehension. In order to be with Jesus, we must surrender our fears and our doubts and have faith in what has been promised to us. Jesus is from above – and he asks us to join him [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
In this reading concerning The Song of Songs, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux explores the relationship between human weakness and the mercy of Christ. His language is personal and contemplative, yet it expresses a clear theological conviction: the wounds of Christ are the place where fear, guilt, and insecurity are overcome [ … ]
