Delivered Sunday, July 28, 2019 at Trinity Presbyterian Church, Arlington VA
Text: Luke 11:1-13
Part 2 of a 2 week series. Part 1 is here.
Manuscript:
If you were here last week or listened to the sermon podcast, you may be thinking that our Gospel reading and the sermon title seem familiar, don’t worry. You aren’t losing your mind. The Lord’s Prayer occurs twice in the Gospels, once in Matthew and once in Luke. Last week we read Matthew’s version, which is set in the Sermon on the Mount. Today, we read from Luke, where it is placed in the context of a conversation with the disciples. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus teaches the prayer after giving a pair of examples of how NOT to pray, thus last week’s sermon title. If you missed last week’s sermon, or just need a refresher, you can find the full sermon on the Trinity website, but the core is to make sure that your prayers are centered on God, not on yourself.
Luke’s version lacks these warnings about using prayer to make other people think you are pious but instead focuses on the assurance that God does hear your prayers, which is why that “not” was deleted this week.
So, why do we have these two settings of the Lord’s Prayer?
The scholarly consensus is that the Gospels of Matthew and Luke were written around the same time, probably 10 or 20 years after the Gospel of Mark, and between 10 and 30 years before the Gospel of John. The main reason that we think this has to do with source analysis. Universities, Seminaries and Divinity Schools devote entire courses on this subject, so the best I can offer you in the time we have today is an incredibly brief summary of one of several theories: the authors of Matthew and Luke both appear to quote from Mark, from which we can assume that Mark’s Gospel was already at least reasonably well known. There is also a lot of material that is unique to either Matthew or Luke, which is why we think they come from about the same time period: neither author seems aware of the other, and each author seems to have at least one major source that the other did not. Finally, there is a lot of material, including the Lord’s Prayer that is common to Matthew and Luke but is not present in Mark. Scholars have surmised that this came from another source that both Matthew and Luke know, but that, unfortunately, we have now lost. This source is called Q, based on the German word for source. Why German? Because it was mostly German scholars who first figured all this out. John is a whole other thing that we’ll have to put aside for today lest you all be forced to miss your lunch plans…and possibly your dinner plans as well.
I want to take just a moment to emphasize that Matthew and Luke’s different contexts for the Lord’s Prayer are not necessarily contradictory. Jesus probably said it more than once. It has, after all, become THE definitive Christian prayer, recited in some form by pretty much every Christian community. It’s very likely the one piece of liturgy that every Christian in the world could recite, from memory at least something close. We don’t even bother printing the text in our bulletin, just up on the screens. It has been translated into every language in which Christians worship, and probably a few in which they don’t.
Translation is, of course, a place where things often get…fuzzy.
When I lived in Northern Ireland, I once heard an Irish comedian tell a story about going to a mixed, that is, Protestant and Catholic, wedding. The couple included the Lord’s Prayer in the wedding liturgy as a nice, ecumenical moment. It almost worked. Everyone stood up, and, in unison, worked their way through the prayer, marching word for word almost all the way through the whole prayer. They were doing great until they said “deliver us from evil,” at which point all of the Catholics sat down, only for the Protestants to keep going with “for thine is the Kingdom and the power, and the glory forever” while throwing a little side-eye at the seated side of the chapel.
That last line of the prayer that Protestants include isn’t actually in either the Matthew or the Luke version of the text. It’s an addition from a later part of Matthew and seems to have worked its way into the prayer over time, starting as a sort of post-Prayer benediction spoken only by the priest, but somewhere along the way Protestants just started saying it in unison.
That’s not the only hiccup that can occur in ecumenical worship.
During the week, I work for a Methodist church. Most days, we get together around 11 am for a sort of micro-staff meeting. We stand in a circle, and each person gives the two-sentence version of what they are doing that day, and if there is anything unusual in their schedule. We end these meetings by putting our hands in the circle, “Go Team” style and reciting the Lord’s Prayer.
Some of you know where this is going.
We put our hands in, and we find our unison voice and start the Lord’s Prayer, staying in unison until I, the sole Presbyterian, break rank.
There are three common English translations of the Lord’s prayer. In one version, our version, we ask “Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.” In another version, used by this Methodist church, they say “Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.” This split is some 400 years old. Rather more recently, a third option arose, which replaces “trespass” with “sin” in an attempt to make everyone to get along.
How did we end up with this debt/trespass/sin confusion?
We start with the original texts, which actually do use all three of those words.
We’ll look at Matthew first. The prayer itself, as Jesus teaches it in Matthew, uses a Greek word associated with debts, both literal, but also moral debts. After the prayer itself is over, however, Jesus uses a different word, translated as trespasses to further explain the prayer.
In Luke’s version of the prayer, Jesus uses the third word, “sin:” asking God to forgive our sins for we forgive those indebted to us.”
All three versions have some justification.
As to how we ended up with the debts/trespasses split in English in the first place:
The first English translation of the New Testament came from John Wycliffe, around 1380. Wycliffe did not go back to the Hebrew and Greek for his translation but worked from the Vulgate, a Latin translation. Wycliffe, following the Latin, used debts but was declared a heretic by the Catholic Church who were not thrilled with the idea of a translation that they didn’t authorize or write.
Almost 200 years later, William Tyndale decided to try again. Unlike Wycliffe, Tyndale went back to the original Hebrew and Greek texts for his translation, published in 1526, in which he used “trespasses.” Unfortunately, despite Henry VIII’s split with the Catholic Church, the King was, on this matter at least, was in agreement with the Pope. Tyndale spent the next 10 years on the run before the authorities caught up with him. As a result, he was not able to explain his choice. It did, however, live on. The Anglican Book of Common prayer began using “trespasses” in 1549, 13 years after Tyndale’s death. Despite the decision by the King James translators in 1611 to switch to “debts,” the Book of Common Prayer has held to “trespasses.” It’s become so common that Roman Catholics also uses “trespasses” in English, even though the Latin version of the prayer uses “debts.”
I couldn’t find any explicit reason why the Scottish Presbyterians decided to buck the translational trend and use “debts” when all the other English-speaking Christians had aligned behind “trespasses.”
The most entertaining account of that reasoning, at least that I was able to find, is that the English royals and nobility who largely controlled the Church of England were literally worried about keeping people off their land. In contrast, the Scottish Presbyterians were mostly from the Merchant class and were thus worried about getting paid.
I like this story because there is a long history of local and immediate concerns being self-servingly inserted into translations. Following Tyndale’s translation, English speaking Calvinists in Switzerland printed their own translation with a distinctly anti-monarchy stance. This version came into wide use, but the King wasn’t thrilled, leading to the authorization of the King James Bible (which takes a far friendlier tone toward kings). The Roman Catholic Church eventually got on board with offering translations and put it it’s own English version. So if, in the midst of all of these competing translations circulating throughout the UK, we happened to adopt two competing versions of the Lord’s Prayer over different class concerns…well, that wouldn’t be a surprise. I could also believe that the Scottish Presbyterians, sometimes known as “dissenters” chose to use “debts” instead of trespasses purely to be different. The fact that it is a more justifiable translation is just icing.
There is, though, one problem with that justification. If your concerned about people trespassing on your estate, or worried that people may not pay you what they promised, it’s a bit counter-intuitive to make that the central part of this prayer.
This line of the Lord’s Prayer that if we take seriously, we should find terrifying.
Forgive us as we forgive others.
Last week, I talked about prayer being thoughtful, and I just briefly touched on how we ought to be willing to allow ourselves to be changed by our prayers. This line is why.
Most of us are terrible at forgiving. It would be for more comforting to pray that we be able to forgive others as God forgives us.
Jesus doesn’t let us off so easily. Jesus insists that we do the work to learn to forgive others.
In Matthew, Jesus’ explanation after the prayer drives that point home: “For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses.”
In Luke, Jesus is kinder. Luke follows the prayer with two short stories, one about a friend who, though initially reluctant to help, eventually does, even for no other reason than to be left alone, contrasting this with God, who will respond promptly. Luke’s other story is about a parent who knows better than to give a child a snake or a scorpion when that child has asked for food, assuring us that God knows what is good for us and will provide it.
I don’t think Jesus is just talking about material goods. If we are to take seriously the text of the Lord’s Prayer, particularly our request that God forgive us as we forgive others, then we can rest only in the knowledge that God can and will also provide us that help in offering forgiveness.
The text of the prayer tells us to pray that God will forgive us as we forgive others. It leaves us to pray on our own that we can learn to forgive as God forgives us.