Office Of Readings | Week 11, Tuesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Cyprian On The Lord’s Prayer | Hallowed Be Thy Name

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Office Of Readings | Week 11, Tuesday, Ordinary Time | A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Cyprian On The Lord’s Prayer | Hallowed Be Thy Name

‘Hallowed be thy name.’

Honouring The Name Of The Father

Saint Cyprian of Carthage, writing in the 3rd century during times of persecution and doctrinal unrest, offers a spiritually profound and pastorally sensitive reflection on the opening petitions of the Lord’s Prayer. His meditation on ‘Hallowed be thy name’ invites us to reflect not only on what we say in prayer, but how we live as those who call God ‘Father’.

Cyprian begins with awe at the divine generosity that permits us to address God with familial intimacy. In calling God ‘Father’, we are not merely using a title; we are claiming a relationship, a birthright conferred upon us by baptism and grace. This privilege, as Cyprian says, is not one we could have presumed on our own. It is a bold claim rooted in the Sonship of Christ, into which we are adopted.

Yet the invocation comes with responsibility. To call God our Father is to commit to living as His children. Cyprian’s moral exhortation is strong: we must behave as ‘temples of God’, letting our lives reflect the Spirit’s indwelling. The Father delights in His children when they mirror His holiness, just as we rejoice in calling Him Father.

Sanctifying The Name

The phrase ‘Hallowed be thy name’ may seem, at first glance, to concern God’s own glory. Yet Cyprian explains that we are not asking God to be made holy—He is holiness itself—but rather that His name may be held as holy within us. The sanctity of God’s name is manifest in our conduct, our worship, and our witness. This aligns with the Old Testament reverence for the divine Name, and Jesus’ own teaching that people may ‘see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven’ (Matthew 5:16).

This inner sanctification begins with baptism, but, as Cyprian stresses, it must be renewed daily. Because we stumble daily, we need daily grace. The Lord’s Prayer becomes, then, not a one-off statement of praise but a perpetual plea for consistency between our confession and our conduct.

Sanctification As A Lifelong Process

Cyprian draws upon the Pauline teaching from 1 Corinthians 6 to identify what it means to be sanctified: we are washed, justified, and made holy in Christ and in the Spirit. Yet this sanctification, while begun in baptism, is not static. The Christian must strive to preserve this grace against temptation, sin, and forgetfulness. Cyprian references Christ’s own words to the man healed at Bethesda, ‘Go and sin no more, lest something worse happen to you,’ (John 5:14) to illustrate the peril of treating sanctity lightly.

The urgency and frequency of this prayer—‘day and night’—is a mark of Christian vigilance. It expresses an awareness that sanctity is fragile without divine protection, and that our holiness is not self-made but divinely sustained.

A Reading From The Treatise Of Saint Cyprian On The Lord’s Prayer | Hallowed Be Thy Name

How great is the Lord’s indulgence! How kindly he bends down to us, how he overflows with goodness towards us! For he wishes us to pray in the sight of God in such a way as to call God Father and to call ourselves sons of God, just as Christ is the Son of God. No-one would have dared to claim such a name in prayer, unless he himself had given us permission to pray this. And so, beloved brethren, we should know and remember that when we call God our Father, we must behave as children of God, so that whatever pleasure we take in having God for our Father, he may take the same pleasure in us.

Let us behave like temples of God, so that it may be clear that God dwells in us. Let our doings not fall away from the Spirit, but let us, who have begun to be heavenly and spiritual, consider and do nothing but heavenly and spiritual things. As the Lord God himself has said: Those who honour me, I will honour them; but those who despise me will be despised. And the blessed apostle has also said in his letters: You are not your own property: you have been bought at a great price. Glorify God and carry him in your bodies.

After this we say Hallowed be thy name. This is not because we want God to be made holy by our prayers: what we are asking God is that his name should be hallowed within us. After all, how can anything be needed to sanctify God, who himself is the source of sanctity? But because he says be holy, as I am holy, we ask and beg of him that we, who have been sanctified in baptism, may continue in that which we have begun to be. And this we pray daily, for our need is for daily sanctification so that we who daily fall away may wash away our crimes by continual sanctification.

As for the nature of the sanctification that comes to us from God, the Apostle tells us when he says: They will not inherit the kingdom of God, who fornicate, or worship idols, or commit adultery; catamites or sodomites, thieves, cheats, drunkards, slanderers or extortioners. You were like this once, but you were washed, you were justified, you were made holy in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and in the Spirit of our God. He says that we are sanctified in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God. We pray that this sanctification may remain with us; and because our Lord and Judge warns the man who was healed and given life by him not to sin again, lest something worse happen to him, we make this prayer without ceasing, we beg for it day and night, that the sanctification and life that comes from God may be preserved by his protection.

Prayer With Jesus

O Holy Father,
whose name is holy beyond all measure,
we thank You for the grace to call You ‘Father’ through Your Son, Jesus Christ.
Grant that Your name may be hallowed in us—
not only in our words,
but in the holiness of our lives.
Let Your Spirit keep us faithful,
Your mercy renew us daily,
and Your sanctifying grace preserve us from all sin.
May our hearts, our speech, and our actions give glory to Your name,
until the day when we hallow it perfectly in Your kingdom.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Glossary Of Christian Terms

• Sanctification: The process by which a person is made holy, particularly through baptism, faith, and the work of the Holy Spirit.
• Hallowed: An old English term meaning ‘made holy’ or ‘treated as sacred’.
• Temple of God: A biblical image (see 1 Corinthians 3:16) referring to the human body or community as a dwelling place of the Holy Spirit.
• Baptism: The sacrament through which one is cleansed of sin, becomes a Christian, and enters into God’s family.
• Adoption: The theological concept that Christians become sons and daughters of God through Christ.
• Justified: Declared righteous before God, a central concept in Pauline theology.
• Catamite: A now outdated and offensive term once used in classical contexts, included here for its historical reference to 1 Corinthians 6; modern translations use more precise language to describe same-sex practices in the Greco-Roman world.
• Pauline teaching: Refers to doctrines and exhortations found in the letters of St Paul in the New Testament.