Prayer: In Luke (11:1), Jesus’ disciples have seen how his prayer illumines his countenance. So they ask Jesus to teach them to pray in the same way.
Jesus answers by giving them this prayer which, in its simplicity, contrasts sharply with many of the very fulsome formulations used in Jewish and Greco-Roman prayers of his day. Tertullian called the Lord’s Prayer, despite its brevity, “truly a summary of the whole Gospel.” In it we ask, not only for all the things we can rightly desire, but also in the sequence that they should be desired (Catechism of the Catholic Church, n 2763, citing St. Thomas Aquinas).
Reverent approach to God, once the domain of priests and Levites, now becomes open to all. And we can approach confidently, because Jesus has sympathy for us and teaches us that we have a loving God in heaven. We often forget that the biblical expression of our Father “in heaven” does not mean a place, but a way of being: It does not mean that God is distant, but majestic (Catechism, n 2794). We often forget, too, that the ideas about God given us by Jesus are completely new. For the Jews, God was holy—and therefore separate, apart, different. The gods of the Greeks were even more aloof. We are lucky to have had Jesus teach us about the true God and how we can best live our lives in imitating and serving him.