Lord, Teach Us to Pray - Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you, friends. We come to this 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and we have a great privilege because we're reading in our gospel Luke's account of Jesus' great prayer. So the disciples say, Lord, you know, teach us how to pray. And so Jesus himself tells them how to pray. So it's a very sacred moment, and I think we should move into that space. We're not just asking a guru or asking someone that we admire. We're asking the Son of God, how do I pray? and, you know, we become so familiar with the Our Father that I think we forget the spiritual power of it. So what I want to do is just kind of walk through. And each of the evangelists has a somewhat different take, and Luke's got a few distinctive features. But here's how it begins. Jesus says, when you pray, say, Father, hallowed be your name. So first of all, and again, I know we pray this prayer all the time, and so it just kind of runs through our mind.

0:57 but pause at that opening word, Father. God is power, yes. God is the first cause of all things, yes. God is the sovereign master of the universe, yes. All that's true. But Jesus says now when you pray, when you invoke God, you don't begin with those titles. You begin with this very intimate title, Father. Think of that relationship with your Father. the intimacy that's implied, the tenderness of it. That's how we approach the creator of the entire cosmos. When you pray the Our Father next time, let that sink in. Pause at that opening word, Father, Father. But now I'm going to press a little bit, even beyond this point, because precisely as Christians, another dimension opens up here.

1:57 Jesus is, in the unique sense, the Son of the Father. From all eternity, he's the Son within the life of the Trinity. What's he doing now? He's inviting us, listen now, as the Son of God, the one who really alone is justified in referring to the Father. but he's inviting us to share in that relationship that he has with his father. So we're not simply signaling, as important as that is, our sort of tender, childlike relationship to God. Something even more, we're praying in union with the Son. We become sons and daughters in the Son. When we pray, we're not outside of God so much petitioning. We're invited by Jesus inside, inside the very life of the Trinity.

2:58 Think about that, everybody. Next time you say, our Father. It's our in the sense of all of us, but even more powerfully, I'm saying it with Jesus. He's the Son, yes, in that unique sense. But we're sons and daughters in the Son, and in that relationship we pray. And then what's the first thing we ask? Hallowed be your name. I know it sounds peculiar to the modern English ear. I mean, what it means is, may your name be held holy. And you say, well, okay, isn't God's name always holy? Well, yeah, it is in itself. The prayer is, see, may we hold this name holy. Now, what does holy mean in the Bible? Kadosh in the Hebrew has the sense of other, of set apart as distinctive.

4:00 That's what holy means. So, Father, may we hold your name as set apart. Now, what does that mean? It means God is without competition the highest good. So there's all the goods in the world that we seek. I talk about it all the time, pleasure and fame and power and honor and all this. Good things, and we seek them. But above them all, in an absolutely unique and qualitatively different sense, is the goodness of God.

4:40 Deuteronomy chapter 6, the Shema prayer. Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God, is God alone. No competition. Remember in the accounts of the Ten Commandments, I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God. It doesn't mean God's having emotional problems. It means he's distinctive, kadosh, set apart, holy, hallowed. It's a very powerful scene. It's the opening move of the prayer. is if we get this wrong, see, everything else will be wrong. If God is one good among many, or God's like, he's number four on my list of priorities, the whole spiritual life's off kilter.

5:19 Hallowed be your name. You're the highest good. You are the summum bonum. It's a very important move in the spiritual order. Then we pray what? Your kingdom come, and your will be done on earth as in heaven. I've said before to you, I think, that in many ways this is the whole of the Christian spiritual life. So to get this right, and that's why Jesus places it right at the heart of the prayer. So your kingdom come. Jesus' preaching is ordered to this idea, isn't it? That's what's on his lips when he begins preaching in the hills of Galilee is the kingdom of God is at hand. Every move he makes is meant to embody and express the kingdom. What's the kingdom?

6:13 It's God's way of ordering things. God's way of ordering things, God's law. Now, that obtains always in heaven. So that's the eternal law that's identical to the divine mind. It's the way the realm of the saints and angels is ordered, according to love and to justice and to peace. What are we praying? May that ordering that obtains always in heaven become the ordering of the earth. May your kingdom come, your will be done, here as it is there. We're praying for a correspondence. Now, Catholics, listen, every single time we come together for the Mass, we are begging for and indeed embodying this correspondence.

7:15 When we say, for example, at the Holy Holy, may our voices blend with theirs, we're talking about the song of the angels, right? That means the ordering of things in heaven. May our voices here harmonize with their voices in heaven. We're asking for a union of heaven and earth. By the way, what are the angels singing? Well, go to the prophet Isaiah. Kadosh, kadosh, kadosh. Holy, holy, holy. Now see, bring these first parts of the Our Father together. Hallowed be your name. That's the ordering of heaven, you see. That's what it's like to be in the kingdom of heaven. We're praying that that order would become the order of the earth. Boy, as I say, the whole of the Christian life, moral life, spiritual life, the life of prayer and liturgy, all of it is contained in that great petition. And then this, I love, because it's so mysterious. Give us each day our daily bread.

8:28 The Greek behind this is very intriguing, because it's unique, really, to the Gospels. The Greek here is ton arton ton epiouzion. Artos means bread in Greek, right? What is epiouzion? Well, epi, E-P-I, is like an intensifier, means on. I'm a bishop, for example, and the word episkopos, episkopos. Well, skope means to look, and episkopos means to look out on, right? So I'm an overseer of the life of the church. That's what episkopos means. Well, here we have epiusion. Well, usia means substance. We say, for example, that Jesus is one substance with the Father.

9:17 So epiusios means super substantial. It means substantial to the highest degree. It's curious, isn't it? So we pray, give us our super substantial bread. St. Jerome, when he was rendering this Greek text into Latin in the Vulgate, look it up, go online, look it up. He says, panem supersubstantialum. That's exactly it, our supersubstantial bread. Now, a lot of reasons, it'll take me too far afield, why we say daily. But the Greek is supersubstantial. Okay, what bread are we asking for? We're not just asking for the bread that will feed our bodies.

10:11 That's the point. Give us each day this super substantial bread. Well, now, we Catholics know what he's talking about. We talk about the Eucharistic bread being transubstantiated into the body of Christ. not ordinary bread not just a symbol of christ who cares but the super substantial bread that's it that's it that's what we're asking for in the our father give us each day lord not just the bread that will keep us alive physically but the bread that will keep us alive spiritually think about that, please, everybody, next time you pray the Our Father and you come to that line about the daily