Our Father Is the Hardest Two Words in That Prayer

A woman told me she has never been able to say the first two words of the Lord's Prayer out loud in a room.

She says the rest of it fine. She has said it at funerals and at weddings and in a hospital. She moves her mouth for the opening and comes in properly at the third word, and she has been doing that for about thirty years and nobody has ever noticed.

She is not angry with God. She was very clear about that and I believed her. The problem is not theological.

The problem is that the word is occupied. When she says it, a specific man arrives in the room, and she cannot get him out of it long enough for the word to mean anything else.

I want to take that seriously, because the usual answer to it is to explain that God is not like your father, which is true and which does not work, because she knows that already and has known it for decades and the word still opens the wrong door.

So let me show you what the prayer itself does, in the very next clause, which I think is the most pastoral thing in it.

The address has two parts and the second one relocates it

Here is the opening.

After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. (Matthew 6:9, King James Version)

Our Father which art in heaven.

Read the second half as part of the address rather than as decoration. He does not say Our Father, full stop. He says Our Father which art in heaven, and that clause is doing work: it locates the one being addressed somewhere else entirely.

For a person with an occupied word, that is not a poetic flourish. It is a change of address. The prayer specifies, in its opening line, that this is not the man in the house you grew up in.

And our rather than my, which does something else again. It puts a person into a group at the exact moment the word is hardest to say, so that it is not being carried alone.

You are addressing somebody at a different address, and the prayer says so in its first line. Matthew 6:9 says Our Father which art in heaven, locating the one addressed, and it is the Holy Spirit, Romans 8:26 helping our infirmities because we know not what we should pray for as we ought, who carries a word a person cannot get out.

Jesus takes the title off everybody else

There is a sentence in Matthew that is unusually blunt and is exactly to the point here.

And call no man your father upon the earth: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. (Matthew 23:9)

Call no man your father upon the earth. He is speaking about religious titles in context, and I am not going to pretend He was addressing this particular pain.

But look at the ground He stands the instruction on: for one is your Father, which is in heaven. The reason given is a matter of ownership of the title, and He is quite happy to say that it belongs to one Person.

Which means the word is not fundamentally your father's word with God borrowing it. In Jesus's own framing it runs the other way around, and every human holder of the title is holding it on loan.

That reframing does not remove a memory. It does change which one is the original.

You are using a word that belongs to Him first rather than one borrowed from a man. Matthew 23:9 says one is your Father, which is in heaven. It is the same Spirit, Galatians 4:6 sent forth into our hearts crying Abba, Father, who is named as the one putting that word into use.

The moment He gives the word away

There is a line after the resurrection that I think about more than almost any other, because of who is included in it.

Jesus saith unto her, Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father: but go to my brethren, and say unto them, I ascend unto my Father, and your Father; and to my God, and your God. (John 20:17)

My Father, and your Father.

He had never said it quite like that before. And He says it to a group who had, days earlier, run away and denied Him and hidden in a room.

That is the timing that gets me. The word is handed over at the point of their worst performance, by a Man who has just come out of a grave, and the people receiving it have nothing whatsoever to recommend them that week.

You have been handed the word at a point of no performance at all. John 20:17 says my Father, and your Father to a group that had just scattered. It is the Spirit of God, Romans 8:15 the Spirit of adoption whereby we cry, who does the crying rather than requiring it to be earned.

Hebrews grants the difference honestly

And there is a passage that compares human fathers with God, and the striking thing is how frankly it treats the human side.

For they verily for a few days chastened us after their own pleasure; but he for our profit, that we might be partakers of his holiness. (Hebrews 12:10)

After their own pleasure. That is a remarkable phrase to find in Scripture about fathers. It grants that human fathering is often done according to the father's own mood, temperament and preference, rather than according to the good of the child.

The writer is not sentimental about it. He does not say your father did his best. He says human correction ran on human preference, and then draws a contrast: but he for our profit.

So Scripture itself is the one making the distinction. A person with an occupied word is not being disloyal by noticing a difference; the New Testament noticed it first and wrote it down.

You are permitted to notice a difference that Scripture noticed first. Hebrews 12:10 grants that human fathers chastened after their own pleasure before it says anything about God, and it is His Spirit, Romans 8:16 bearing witness with our spirit, who does the telling that a comparison alone cannot.