June 23, 2024 - Pastor Message
November 21, 2024THE CATHOLIC TREASURY OF PRAYER
THE CATHOLIC TREASURY OF PRAYER
THE LORD’S PRAYER (CONT.)
“Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name” (Matthew 6:9).
Continuing our journey together through the Lord’s Prayer, we come to the phrase: “who art in heaven.” Human beings have used many images over the centuries to attempt to picture and understand heaven, most commonly a magnificent place that is far above us. The Lord’s Prayer reminds us that heaven is simply where God is. Since God transcends, or is beyond, all time and space, heaven is not a place as we understand it but simply an expression of God’s wholly unique and transcendent being. We often picture heaven as above us because God’s being is so far above and beyond us, his creation. By proclaiming God as the one who is in heaven, we worship and adore him in his majesty.
Yet, the same, transcendent God is also our loving Father, who not only creates us, but in his great mercy enables us in our lowliness to share in his divine life. This is the meaning of the next phrase, the first petition of the prayer: “hallowed be thy name.” To hallow something is to make it holy, and to be holy means to be of or like God. But when we ask that God’s name be hallowed, we are not asking that God make his name holy - it already is! In biblical times, names had power. They revealed the true essence of a person. God’s name is so holy, that, for most of human history, he did not reveal it. But in the fullness of time, when his great plan for our redemption was ready to be fulfilled, God revealed his name by “emptying himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross. Therefore, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the Glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:7-11).
God reveals his name in Jesus, whose name means “God saves.” That is who God is and how he desires to be known because that is what he does. He saves us from our self-inflicted damnation, the opposite of his plan for us. Though himself all holy, he willingly assumed our broken nature and suffered the consequence of sin, death. Having paid the wages of sin, he redeemed us, and on the third day was reborn from the tomb in a new, glorified humanity. Pouring out the gift of the Holy Spirit into the world, he has enabled us to share in that same new life. Saved from the lowliness of our sinful humanity, we become coheirs with Jesus in the glory of God’s divinity.
When we pray “hallowed be thy name,” that is what we truly mean. Not that God make his name holy, which it already is, but that he make us holy in the name of Jesus, the only name by which we are saved (Acts 4:12). We pray that the words of the letter to the Philippians, quoted above, be fulfilled, that by the grace of the Holy Spirit, we ourselves become ever more of and like God by becoming ever more of and like Jesus, and that, in our words and actions, we confess ever more, to the glory of God the Father, that Jesus Christ is Lord.
Fr. Marc Stockton
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