Food for thought

On the one hand, it looks very much as if under the current circumstances prayers will have no effect on God. Even Jeremiah’s intercession will be of no avail. On the other hand, the question remains as to why Yhwh needs to reinforce His prohibition on intercessory prayer. Is there not a sense that God needs to put a ban on Jeremiah’s prayer, precisely because prophetic intercession is highly effective?—Standing in the Breach, page 355

Change his mind for him

More often than not, our petitionary prayers are aimed at changing God or getting God to modify or hurry up fulfilling what we presume to be his plans for the world (which, if we are honest with ourselves, are often closely identified with our own hopes for ourselves and those we identify with, especially in times of war and national crises).—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 163

<idle musing>
That's the final post from this book. I encourage you to grab a copy and read it. My excerpts haven't done it justice. And it should be available in a few weeks, I see that the publication date is June 1. Mind you, I'm not getting paid to promote this. I don't even get a physical copy of the book! (Not that I want one, the PDF is better for my purposes.)
</idle musing>

So how would you translate it, then?

So what did Jesus intend his disciples to be asking for or saying when they recited the prayer he gave them? To answer this, I resort to paraphrase:
(Father)
We recognize that you alone are sovereign, and we pledge our loyalty to you even if this becomes costly for us.
(May your name be hallowed)
Protect us from dishonoring you through disobedience to your ways; enable us to remain true υἱοὶ θεοῦ [sons/children of God] even at the cost of our lives.
(May your kingdom come/May your Holy Spirit come upon us and cleanse us)
Shape us and maintain us as your people. Enable us to do your will.
(Do give/go on giving us our ἐπιούσιον bread)
Do not allow us to become like the wilderness generation, who grew dissatisfied with your ways and doubted your will to protect them and bring them to their destiny.
(Forgive us our sins [or debts] as we have forgiven those who have sinned against especially to out enemies)
We are intent to show the mercy you require υἱοὶ θεοῦ to show to those who have wronged us; and you may reject us if we do not.
(And do not lead us into πειρασμός)
And do not allow us to do what the wilderness generation did at Meribah and Massah and put you to the test, especially by denying that the way of the peacemaker, the εἰρηνηποιός, is truly your way of achieving your goals for the word.—The Disciples’ Prayer, pages 162–63

What was the sin of Massah?

What, in Jesus’ eyes, might the community of believers whom he has called to be “sons of God” actually do that would be the functional equivalent of Israel’s sin at Massah? The answer to this question seems clear enough given all that I have said about Jesus’ understanding of what being faithful “sons” entails. The community would be rejecting the call from Jesus that it should regard as “of God,” and therefore be bound by, the principle of nonretaliation and especially the constraint to love the enemy. For, as we have seen, a posture of nonretaliation and the willingness to love the enemy are together the epitome and the essence of the way that the community of Jesus’ disciples has been charged to show itself faithful to the God it acknowledges as Father. This is what Jesus declares the disciples must commit themselves to if they are to be acknowledged by God as “sons.” This is the way of God that “this generation,” the antitype of the community Jesus tries to form, refuses to accept as the path God has ordained for those of Israel to follow.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 159

<idle musing>
Strong words, aren't they? And ones that the church, at least in the U.S., needs to hear. We are called to be ministers of reconciliation. And we spew hate all too easily. Lord, forgive us! And keep us from putting you to the test!
</idle musing>

Deliver us from Massah

To sum up: In one section of his passionately rendered, and lamentably unfinished, New Testament Theology titled “What did Jesus expect?” Joachim Jeremias summed up all of his studies of the original meaning of the petition καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν with the words: “The petition for protection from [entering into] πειρασμός is the desperate cry of faith on trial: preserve us from apostasy, keep us from going wrong.” The evidence I have examined in the preceding pages indicates that in this conclusion Jeremias is absolutely right. It is protection from “going wrong” that is the intended object of the “temptation” request. But what we must also conclude, in the light of the evidence I have adduced above, that the nature of the “going wrong” envisaged in the petition is that of the particular sin Israel engaged in at Massah, the grumbling and the disobedience that was tantamount to “putting God to the test.” Therefore, I submit that the original meaning of the “temptation” request is understood only when we see that καὶ μὴ εἰσενέγκῃς ἡμᾶς εἰς πειρασμόν was intended to be taken as a cry in which the community of believers asks to be protected by God not from experiencing πειρασμός, but from subjecting God to it.—The Disciples’ Prayer, pages 158–59

Stay away!

What Mark presents as the occasion for Jesus to utter this command to Peter, James, and John that they should pray to be protected against becoming the agents of πειρασμός [peirasmos (testing/trying/tempting)] is his realization that they are on the verge of putting God to the test. In Mark’s presentation, then, the “testing” against which Jesus commands Peter, James, and John to pray can be nothing other than the testing of God and his faithfulness. The objective of the petition in Mark 14:38 is help in refraining from putting God to the test. I argue that this is also the objective of the parallel request in the Disciples’ Prayer.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 155

Keep watch!

Now, as Mark indicates elsewhere, being willing to “stay awake” and “watch” is, among other things, to refuse to succumb to any doubt that God will provide, especially when it seems otherwise. To “fall asleep” and to be unwilling to “watch” is equivalent to denying that God is faithful and that his ways are adequate to his purposes.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 154

More on testing

The third consideration is that a call from Jesus for his disciples to pray for protection from “putting God to the test” is exactly what we should expect from Jesus, who knew that at the center of his own trials as Son to maintain his faithfulness to God was an inclination to put God to the test. It is what we should expect if he was trying to shape his disciples to denounce, as he did, the wickedness and faithlessness of “this generation”; what we should expect if he wished them, as he himself did, to avoid showing themselves as in any way inclined to refuse to trust in God’s providential care for them, or to express doubt that God’s particular ways for them as his υἱοί [children] were sufficient for achieving God’s ends. As we have already seen, this is the biblical understanding of “putting God to the test.” In fact, it would be surprising if we did not find Jesus issuing so biblical a call for the disciples to petition God for help in avoiding putting God to the test.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 151

Lead us not into temptation? or Don't let us test you?

It follows that if πειρασμός here means “the testing of God,” then given all that the idea of “the testing of God” connotes, the request in which the term appears must mean something like “prevent us, Father, from putting you to the test by doubting your ways and renouncing all that you have deemed fit for us to follow.”

There are four reasons for regarding this as a correct interpretation of the text. The first is the often overlooked consideration that in the biblical tradition, seeking God’s help to avoid engaging in πειρασμός against him is both a perfectly acceptable thing to pray for and something that God would be willing to grant. ... Indeed, it seems no small coincidence that we find the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews urging (albeit implicitly) just such a prayer on his readers when, as a result of their experiencing a crisis, they began to lose their confidence in the ways God had given them to live out their Christian confession (see Heb. 3:7-9)—The Disciples’ Prayer, pages 150–51

Father

As Mary Rose D’Angelo has shown, the primary function of the address “Father” is to affirm three things: that it is the God of Israel alone, and not another singular claimant to the title, who deserves to be called and acknowledged as “Father”; that the disciples are intent to pledge their filial loyalty to the God of Israel and to serve him as he decrees faithful υἱοὶ θεοῦ [children of God] should; and that the God of Israel is recognized both as their refuge, when “sonship” becomes costly, and as the one who can prevent them from falling into apostasy.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 133

Following the leader

The parable begins with a king acting in a way quite uncharacteristic of any agrarian ruler. He forgives a debt of unimaginable proportions. But why? First, the king presides over subjects who are crippled by debt and who, therefore, in their inability to pay tribute and taxes frustrate his ability to rule. Second, the king needed his servant for the efficient administration of his kingdom. To throw the servant in jail would bung up the works, so to speak, since the servant was not easily replaceable. So, as J. Duncan M. Derrett has noted, “The release was for the good of the kingdom.” It was but the first in a series of actions whose purpose was to “lighten the burdens of the provinces” and “oil all the wheels” for the well-being of the entire kingdom. The great act of debt forgiveness was meant to initiate further acts of forgiveness of debt. The king has made it a point of honor, and he expects the servant to understand. He has broken the cycle of ruthless exploitation and extraction, and what the patron has done, the client must do. But the servant fails to imitate his master and instead engages in what William Herzog II has called the tactics of a typical powerful bureaucrat. In doing so, he makes the king look like a fool, or worse, like a weak and gullible ruler without power over the behavior of his subjects. In other words, in not acting as his master has done, the servant disgraces his patron and brings his name into disrepute and thus backs the king into a corner. Shades of not hallowing the ruler’s name!—The Disciples’ Prayer, pages 131–32

Let go of the pride

As Bruce Malina and others have shown, to cancel lawful debts, let alone to forgive one’s enemies, without some good or mitigating reason was an action that brought intense shame on the one who did so. For in this, the one forgiving debt and offenses to his person (and his people) would be showing himself as a fool, as weak, as fearful of standing up for his rights, and as someone who, as we might say, was ready to let others “get away with murder.” Thus the promise of forgiveness to those who owe “debts” is the abandonment of the cultural criteria for maintaining one’s honor when disgraced, through retaliation. It is a commitment to magnanimity, mercy, and peace, even if it means that others will see one remaining in disgrace.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 130

Could it be?

Consider the implication of the fact that Jesus uses the phrase ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου as a coordinate of the phrase “May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου, ὡς ἐν οὐρανῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς [genēthētō to thelēma sou, hōs en ouranō kai epi gēs], Matt. 6:10bc). If we assume, as I think we should, that the concern of this coordinate phrase is God’s enabling of the disciples’ obedience in the face of a desire to act otherwise, then it seems more likely that the sense of the petition ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου, for Jesus (and certainly for Matthew), was less to implore God to manifest his reign ahead of the time he intended to do so, than to invite God to ensure that the will of his people is in harmony with his own purposes for them. The fuller connotation of the petition might then be paraphrased, “may we be made worthy of your reign by being conformed not to our own will but to yours.”—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 113

<idle musing>
Interesting proposition, isn't it? I ran into the same idea while reading David Clark's dissertation. At the time, I was skeptical—as I was when I started reading this book. But, I think Gibson makes a good argument. In fact, I've come to believe he's correct.
</idle musing>

Come? Or "draw us near"?

In the formal and material parallel to the “kingdom” request found in Rev. 22:20c—namely, the petition ἔρχου, κύριε Ἰησοῦ (erchou, kyrie Iēsou), which, like the “kingdom” request in the Disciples’ Prayer, consists of a form of ἐρχομαι (erchomai) in the imperative subject, and also is uttered in the context of an announcement of the dawning of a divine visitation. The function of the verb ἐρχομαι is not so much to express a sense of distance and separation as it is to invite closeness, and concomitantly to express the desire to be acceptable to the one invited to “come.” It is not the Lord (or, in the Disciples’ Prayer, the kingdom) that must be “turned” so that it “come”; rather, both prayers express the desire that the one praying be turned from disobedience and conformed to the reality, or the person, that is called upon to “come.” This suggests that the ἐλθέτω in the petition ἐλθέτω ἡ βασιλεία σου expresses the wish to be made worthy of God’s kingdom and to be protected from all that would prevent this end.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 112

Hold on!

It [the Lord's Prayer] was intended to shape the disciples as a group that, in word and deed, would stand as a witness against the teachings of “this generation” regarding how Israel should be Israel. The occasion of Jesus’ giving it to the disciples was his perception that they were in grave danger of falling away from their calling and becoming members of “this generation,” and so he gave them the prayer as a means to secure from God the divine aid necessary to remain faithful to their calling. Its petitions echo the narrative of the wilderness generation, which Jesus regarded as the biblical prototype for the disobedient in his own time.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 104

Not of "this generation"

Each of the individual petitions of the Disciples’ Prayer not only recalls but also appears to be set out in (conscious?) contradistinction to the description of the wilderness prototype of “this generation.” The “wilderness generation” was called by a messenger of God (Moses) to be God’s people by following the ways this messenger had proclaimed. Yet it refused to sanctify God’s name and instead profaned it (Num 20:12; 27:14). It did not do God’s will (Psalm 95). It called on God to stop giving them the “bread for the morrow” it received from him, and with which it should have been satisfied (Num. 11:1-6; Ps. 78:17-18). And it put God to the test (Exod. 17:1-9; Deut. 6:16; Ps. 78:40-41; 95:1-11; 106:14).

Why would Jesus make reference to all of this, and why would he frame the petitions of the prayer he gave his disciples in terms of not doing what the biblical prototype of “this generation” does, unless he was trying to give to his disciples something that would help them avoid becoming like them?—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 98

Why disciples?

But Jesus called and gathered disciples for another reason as well: to found what sociologists have called “intentional communities,” small groups and cells of followers, some living within their home villages and towns, some on the road as itinerants. These cells would, by living out a particular kind of corporate life consistent with the path of faithfulness to God that he was calling Israel to adopt, make incarnate his vision of what faithful Israel should look like. This must not, mind you, be in any way understood as something tantamount to a desire on Jesus’ part to found a church. For as far as Jesus was concerned, there already was a “church,” one he wholeheartedly belonged to, namely, the ἐκκλησία κυρίου (ekklēsia kyriou), the “congregation of the Lord,” that is, the people of Israel. Moreover, he never spoke of the group he called into being except in terms of titles used previously by the prophets and his contemporaries to designate the people of Israel, one of which was, notably, “son” or “sons of God.” Rather, he called and gathered disciples around himself in order to accomplish what he believed was another task given to him by God, namely, to reconstitute Israel and to rescue it from what he and other figures of his day called the “wrath to come,” that is, the judgment, often embodied in national calamity, that the prophets declared was inevitable for Israel if they were persistent in covenant unfaithfulness.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 86

Loving means not willing the destruction of enemies

To be a son of God, then, is to act in the world as God does, showing mercy and forgiveness toward all, refusing to retaliate injury for injury, accepting suffering and persecution as the price of living in conformity to God’s will, and, most importantly, loving and not “hating” (seeking or willing the destruction of) those ordinarily deemed the enemies of Israel.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 84

<idle musing>
And the standard hasn't changed in 2000 years...mercy and forgiveness, loving. And the last time I checked, those three words don't have a meaning of "hate" or "bomb them to death" in their definition. No, not even for "American interests" that "need to be defended."
</idle musing>

The path of the "true child of God"

Jesus is presented not only as calling those who aspire to be true sons of God to imitate God specifically in his displays of indiscriminate mercy to the “wicked” but also as declaring that conduct to be worthy of the office and title of a “true child of God.” To be called and appointed by God to this office and title, one must acknowledge that the path of nonviolence, nonretaliation, and, preeminently, active love and concern for the enemy is the path “of God."—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 83

Peacemakers

It is interesting to note that, as H. Windisch has pointed out, Jesus’ view of who and what a peacemaker is stands in stark contrast with the view, current in the Hellenistic world, of what this office entailed. Those who were to establish peace, security, and economic welfare were expected to do so only for their own people and through the conquest of their enemies.—The Disciples’ Prayer, page 82

<idle musing>
And what has changed? What do "peace-keeping missions" do today but enforce our view? Why is it that the politicians are always "defending American interests" if not because they believe this? The pax americana is the same as the pax romana; if you don't support the regime, it isn't very peaceful. The more things change, the more they remain the same...<sigh>
</idle musing>