Editorial introduction: The Lord’s Prayer

Abstract

I have been praying the Lord’s Prayer for as long as I can remember. Growing up in Ebenezer United Methodist Church in rural Westmoreland County, Virginia, this prayer from Jesus has been a part of my faith experience since birth. We recited it each week in worship and I do not remember a time when I could not recite it by heart. It is a beautiful thing to say these words aloud in a gathered community of faith week in and week out. Now, as a Bible scholar myself, I continue to find the prayer fascinating because it represents a prayer of Jesus preserved in two Gospels, which gives readers deep insight into Jesus’s ministry, mission, and vision for the world. One of the challenges presented by the Lord’s Prayer, however, is its familiarity. I suspect that, for many Christian readers of this journal, this prayer is the one they have most frequently prayed in their own faith traditions, as well. Of course, the danger of familiarity is that the words of the prayer simply become rote for many worshipers. Does a prayer mean, or do, anything if one utters the words automatically, without any sense of the significance they possess? Thus, one of my guiding concerns in shaping this issue of Review and Expositor has been to assemble a diverse group of voices to help readers see and hear the Lord’s Prayer with fresh eyes and ears. My hope is that these articles will help readers understand the deep layers of meaning in the prayer and approach it with new intention. Perhaps even more so, I hope that for readers who do pray this prayer regularly, these articles will enable them to pray the prayer in a way that is transformational once again, just as it was for Jesus’s earliest followers. As is so often the case in biblical interpretation, looking at texts from multiple angles is important. The scholars and authors who contributed to this issue have done just that, helping readers to view the Lord’s Prayer through various lenses. The diversity of articles speaks to the complexity of interpreting the prayer, as well as the multifaceted relationship Christians have with it. It is also abundantly clear from these articles that the Lord’s Prayer can and should be an active and dynamic force in shaping not only worship, but also fellowship, discipleship, and mission for Christians and faith communities today. The first of the issue’s thematic offerings, C. Clifton Black’s article, “The religious world of the Lord’s Prayer,” helps situate this prayer in the larger context of its time. He reminds readers that this prayer from Jesus did not arise within a vacuum, but rather displays important connections to, as well as distinctions from, Greek, Hebrew, Roman, and Hellenistic Jewish prayers in antiquity. David M. May’s article, “Saying the Lord’s Prayer in Baptist Bibleland,” considers how the Lord’s Prayer has been received and used (or not!) by Baptists, specifically. He notes that many