The Reconstructed

Hallowed be your name.

And now for a word we never use. We use the word holy a little more, but it is also a word that is infrequently used. For the angels the word holy is common fare. But we needed a verb in the prayer. We needed something to do. The prayer needed an action or at least needed to remind us of an action.

We had nouns a plenty, possessive nouns even, but now we need to make something holy. The prayer needs to take on devotion and that can only happen after we have uttered a few preliminary words regarding who all is involved. Us and God. God is in Heaven and we are on earth, the gap is evident, and the Lord’s prayer itself is closing the gap but how specifically?

Through this word: hallowed. This word means to venerate, or to set apart. And we are doing this setting apart with our words and attention towards something which just so happens to be the “your name.” The name of God. 

Interesting that Jesus seems to be following Jewish tradition even in the Lord’s prayer. He does not use the name of God. He treats the name of God as Holy. Instead the prayer addresses God directly with its own kind of intimacy. We start with Father and from that place of closeness we then acknowledge a gap of distance which reminds us of the gap in veneration. We worship God. God does not worship us. Our gaps are making the picture larger and clearer.

In Greek, it would read more like “hallowed is the name of you.” The prayer acknowledges that God has a name (John Mark Comer). I don’t want to overlook the power of this statement though. In venerating God, the statement is making a brash claim on behalf of the asker. We’ve already established the intimacy of Jesus inviting us into the “our,” the allowance to lay claim to God as ours. But here is the closest thing we get to a claim of power or a suggestions of the potential for God’s vulnerability. (Every one of these posts is teetering and seething with controversy, aren’t they?)

Jesus tells us here that it’s okay for us to tell God that we know His name. This is the boldest claim yet. We declare, “we know your name is Holy,” without saying His name. We honor His name, by acknowledging His name, without speaking it. Strange because we could say it, but we do not. Because we are exercising our restraint in honoring his request. We choose reverence though the already established intimacy suggests it might not even be insulting to say God’s name. 

Yet we choose the power of restraint to tread carefully for all the asking we are about to do. We are about to ask for the kingdom, so lest we get too formal and familiar, we pause to consider what we are asking for, seeing how Jesus’ own disciples got it wrong. We hardly know what we are asking for and so often what we unknowingly end up asking are for our own desires to be conformed to His because mine are off the mark.

What makes this particular type of prayer intriguing to me is how most Evangelicals make a naive pivot. We set all our prayers in Jesus’ name. The incantation of naming Jesus somehow gives prayer more validation. “I will do whatever you ask for in my name,” Jesus says in John 14:13, which gives some the impression that the emphasis is less on what we are asking for and more on who we are asking. This is the complexity of why prayer must be taught and why I myself need to be taught because I largely ignore the actual implication of centering what I’m asking around the character of Jesus. This is why James talks about asking amiss. You can’t separate what you’re asking from the who, which is why the emphasis of who probably does matter more because Jesus can and does say no. Sometimes, it seems exclusively, no when I persistently ask for the wrong thing. 

Which tempts me to usually ask for nothing, though God knows what we need before we even ask. I don’t really want to dig. I just want to ask for the thing that I’m supposed to ask for. But the only way I can know that is in relation to the holy name. 

I have permission to ask the one who is holy, but in the prayer we haven’t got to the asking yet because we have to establish the relationship, become convinced God is good. And what makes him good is that he is holy.

Why is it taking me so long to get what I want? 

G-d question.

Next time, we are looking at the name.