The first request in Jesus’ prayer is for the coming of the reign of God or God’s “Kingdom.” For the people for whom this prayer was written, the reign of God simply meant a world where God’s desire for justice, compassion, and safety for all would be made manifest. In this world, here and now, all violence, injustice, and oppression would be put right. It would be a world rich with diversity, yet marked by ethics we today name as equity and inclusion. Then, the immediate context was Roman oppression of the people praying this prayer. Today, injustice takes many forms, and this prayer addresses them all.
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This is Part 2 of A Prayer For Liberation
(Read this series from its beginning here.)
This is evident in the next request, for our daily bread. This isn’t a prayer for the assurance of an afterlife or a ticket into a heavenly realm. Nor is it for private piety or holiness. This is a prayer for the basic needs of our material, concrete, well-being—our daily bread. Simply put, it is a prayer for enough to eat each day. It is a prayer for all to have what they need, not simply to survive, but to thrive. This is not a request for an inward, private spiritual experience, nor for post mortem security. It’s a prayer for the needs we have right now, here, in our physical world. At the heart of all of Jesus’ teachings in the gospels is that the material needs of people are holy.
And this leads us to the next request in Luke’s version which is for the forgiveness of sins, which had a longer history in the forgiveness of literal debt. This portion of the prayer is rooted in the Hebrew idea of a jubilee. First, let’s consider how debt was originally to be handled in the Torah:
“‘If any of your fellow Israelites become poor and are unable to support themselves among you, help them as you would a foreigner and stranger, so they can continue to live among you. Do not take interest or any profit from them, but fear your God, so that they may continue to live among you. You must not lend them money at interest or sell them food at a profit. I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt to give you the land of Canaan and to be your God.” (Leviticus 25:35-38)
So, if a fellow Israelite fell on hard times, they were to be helped. No interest or profit was to be made off of their plight. This theme continued in Deuteronomy:
“You may charge a foreigner interest, but not a fellow Israelite, so that the LORD your God may bless you in everything you put your hand to in the land you are entering to possess.” (Deuteronomy 23:20)
Yet the instruction for how to help a fellow Israelite did not end with prohibiting interest or profit. It went even further. We’ll pick up with that in Part 3.
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