Religion Kalinda Rose Stevenson, PhD on 28 Apr 2008
The Lord’s Prayer When Bread Is Scarce and Debts Are High
The “Lord’s Prayer” is one of the most well-known portions of the Bible. It occurs in both the “The Sermon On The Mount” in Matthew 6:9-13 and “the Sermon on the Plain” in Luke 11:1-4. Many people who recite this prayer don’t realize that economic matters are central to the prayer.
Even though every Christian church uses the Lord’s Prayer, following Matthew’s version rather than Luke’s, there are variations in the exact wording.
Most Protestant churches end the prayer with the words, “For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory.” Roman Catholics omit this phrase. Some churches use the archaic English “thy” and “thine.”
The most critical vocabulary difference is whether a church refers to “debts,” “trespasses,” or “sins.”
When Jesus taught his followers to pray for daily bread and forgiveness of debts, it was more than a prayer for spiritual sustenance and forgiveness of sins. He was first of all referring to real bread and real debts.
The most basic meaning of the Greek word for “debts” is financial. This meaning is consistent with the approach of Jesus to the social and ethical injustices of his society against the poor and dispossessed. In the prayer, he makes explicit the need for real bread and for payment of debt.
The prayer cannot be understood without also seeing it in terms of the Kingdom of God, which does not refer to an afterlife in Heaven. It refers to the expectation of the rule of God, in which God will end oppression, poverty, and suffering on earth. “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”
A prayer with the words: “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” loses the economic foundation of the prayer when “bread” and “debt” become spiritual metaphors, with no connection to real food and economic debt.
For Jesus’s audience, bread and debt were much more than metaphors. Hunger and debt were constant realities of life for an underfed, overtaxed population. Much of the misery of the peasants and beggars in Palestine resulted from debt. The peasants had to turn over much of what they grew to the king or other members of the urban elite class who claimed proprietary rights to whatever the peasants grew on the land. As a result, many of the peasant farmers were hopelessly in debt. Many of the beggars had been forced off their land by failure to pay their debts.
Jesus condemned the society, which had created such a vast gap between the haves and the have-nots. He criticized the rich for exploiting and oppressing the poor. He also criticized the religious system for judging so many groups of people in the society to be “unclean” and unworthy of God’s blessing.
He saw firsthand the extent of hunger, poverty, sickness, and suffering endured by most of the population. He saw how the rich landowners grew rich at the expense of the poor. He saw people who were homeless because they had been driven off their land by high rents and taxes. He saw people living in poverty because the largest percentage of what they grew or made or caught was confiscated by taxes. He knew what it was to live under Roman occupation, where Roman soldiers could force people to do almost anything. He saw how the Temple system collaborated with the Roman occupiers to bleed the people of their money and their power.
It is also true that Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer preserves an Aramaic idiom. Aramaic writings show that the language of “debt” and “debtors” was used regularly for “sin” and “sinners.” Jesus spoke Aramaic and clearly intended that the word “debts” in the prayer refer to both money debts and sins.
In Luke, the financial reality behind the metaphor is lost because Luke uses the word “sin” rather than “debt.” This obscures the underlying concern with real bread and real debts.
If Christians want to pray as pray as Jesus intended, it is essential to recover the literal meanings of the words that have been treated as spiritual metaphors. Especially in these times, when basic staples such as wheat, rice, and corn are in short supply, prayer for daily bread is not simply a spiritual exercise. And prayer for forgiveness of debt is a reality for those facing foreclosure and bankruptcy, because they cannot pay their economic debts.
Jesus meant his words to address suffering and injustice in his own society. His prayer for bread and debts referred to real bread and forgiveness of real financial debts.
About the Author:
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if much of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Get your copy of Going Broke With Jesus at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com to see how often Christians misunderstand what Jesus said about money.
