Compare Mark 11:25-26; Luke 11:1-4
Today’s reading is “the Lord’s prayer,” as it’s called.
It deserves a book. (It’s received books.) And I’ve actually thought about writing one. But not today. Not here.
It’s passages like this that tempt me to violate my self-imposed rule not to try to post exhaustive commentary but to limit myself to merely an observation or two. I simply don’t have time to do more, and I would soon be unable to do this at all if I were giving an unsustainable amount of time and energy to it.
So I’ll confine myself to one brief point:
“Forgive us our debts,” goes the prayer, “as we also have forgiven our debtors.”
This strikes me as a rather dangerous prayer. Those who pray it are essentially recognizing the divine standard of forgiveness, and stating their acceptance of it:
“For if ye forgive men their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you: But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.” (Matthew 6:14-15)
That’s a demanding rule.
So, in order to cheer us all up, I end with a joke:
“Lead us not into temptation,” says one wit. “We can find it easily enough on our own.”
***
A straightforward principle here:
Simply put, don’t do good things in order to garner praise from others. Do them because they’re good things.
A corollary principle, if you really must think about extrinsic pay-offs:
Our Father in Heaven is watching. You won’t miss out on a reward.
But it’s a reward for which you must have trust, or faith, because it won’t necessarily come immediately. There won’t be an instant pay-off, in the form of admiration from the opposite sex, wealth, fame, pats on the back, and/or gratifying public praise. For those who do their good deeds in order to receive such immediate gratification, they’ll be done when they get it. The score will be settled. Nothing more will be owed to them. They’ll have their reward.
I suppose, as a parallel, that you could think of acting in a movie and demanding your pay-off now. So you take your $1000 check instead of the 1% of gross ticket receipts that was first offered you for the part that you played in that odd soon-to-be released film called Star Wars.
Among the marks of maturity, I suppose, is the capacity to delay gratification in order to do better in the long term. A young child, if he doesn’t get his candy right now, thinks it’s the end of the world. Even a slightly older child, offered an ice cream now or, alternatively, unlimited ice cream in perpetuity if she’ll just wait for ten minutes, will very likely choose the immediate single scoop. Mature people, by contrast, know that a lengthy period of vocational training, or of law or medical school, or of investing rather than consuming, will pay off handsomely in the long term.
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