The ‘Our Father’ Considered: Part II: Commentary

Extract

(viii) Our Father, Who Art In Heaven : At the very outset our Lord, whose teaching on concord and unity is habitually emphatic, shows that he does not mean us to pray as isolated individuals, everyone busy about his own affairs alone. We are not to my ‘My Father, in heaven’ or ‘Give me daily bread'. We are not to pray forgiveness only for our own sins, nor seek merely personal deliverance from temptation or immunity from harm. Our prayer is to be comprehensive, for all. We are to pray for the whole body of the faithful and not for one alone; or, better still, to see each individual as really and inseparably one with the whole body which we are. Each is to pray for all as constituting one single whole. That is what God wants: he is the God of peace: as Teacher his theme was peace and unity; as Redeemer he gathered the whole of humanity as one man to his embrace.