Luke's Prayer

I remember being taught, many year ago, that is two people see exactly the same thing and then recount it back they are likely to recall, at the least, different details.
The way we observe and then remember thing has many layers - much to do with who we are, where and how we grew up and what we believe about the world.

Sometimes when we look at the Bible we forget that the Gospels are written by four, very different voices. This difference in emphasis and passion does not mean that any of them are untrue - rather that they are human witnesses to the events of Jesus Christ and human voices in interpreting some of the meaning of that.

Today's Eucharistic reading is Luke's version of the Lord's Prayer. I remember being taught, very early on, that Luke has a shorter version of the Lord's Prayer than Matthew - but it is not until you go back to the Greek that you realize that it is not a simple contraction of the longer version, but uses some different words in a different order. It is spoken in Luke's voice, then, not Matthew's.

We tend to use Matthew's version liturgically - perhaps both were used liturgically by the early Christians - they could reflect different communities.

The emphasis in Luke seems to be much more that this is the form our prayers should take generally. The giving of the Lord's Prayer is coupled with the story of a nighttime caller who persistently asks a friend for help.

This urgency and constancy in prayer is in line with Luke's general emphasis on the coming of the kingdom and the urgency of that task. For Luke, the Kingdom of God is not something far away but something which is here and now - something which we are daily living in.

Luke emphasises our reliance on God for sustenance both by the way he uses "every day" - perhaps we could say "Give us today our daily bread, every day" and also in the person of the guest begging at the door.

Whilst Matthew often seems to colour inside the lines in his Gospel - Luke does not - he sometimes furiously scribbles - his passions coming out in his defence of the poor and oppressed. He seems to be worried that there will be some sort of final trial - something more significant than our daily temptations and he certainly uses two different words for sin - he asks God to forgive sin and mentions that we forgive debts - Jesus uses the words to mean both - so this is not to say that our translation is wrong but I wonder whether Luke was pointing out, in his use of language, that great problem which many of us face in understanding how we will ever forgive as God forgives.

Father, your name be made holy, your rule be brought in......this is how Luke starts his prayer and how he sees the world. A world where God is both intimate and holy, a world where God's rule is both present and to come.