From the Archives: The Our Father and the Eucharist

Chasuble (1680) from Nikolaikirche, Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein, in the collection of the Städtische Museen und Sammlungen für den Landesteil Schleswig.

The following essay by the Rev. Peter M. Berg is from Gottesdienst Volume XXI, No. 3, Michaelmas 2013.

The Our Father and the Eucharist

When it comes to the Holy Liturgy of the Church, the Our Father has pride of place. It has its station in the daily offices, a prominent position in the Lord's Day Mass, and it appears in most of the auxiliary services. This claim cannot be made for any other sacred text, not even the ecumenical creeds. The Lord's Prayer simply fits. Its absence leaves a gaping hole. This is no truer than when it comes to the Liturgy of the Faithful, the Holy Communion. The Our Father is not liturgical filler which can just as easily be left out as included. Rather its theological connections with the Verba Testamenti make its inclusion inevitable, and this author would assert, divinely so. This is my thesis.

Now our Lutheran Biblicists will cry out, "Gimme a Bible passage!" So I will oblige them: the Fourth Petition, the Eucharistic Plea. For those who take a surface and materialistic view of this petition, the thought of the inevitable place of the Lord's Prayer in the Liturgy of the Faithful seems like an allegorical stretch. However, these people are not in line with many of the church fathers and Martin Luther himself. To take the "bread" of this petition as exclusively referring to material stuff is to ignore the Savior's warning about the bread that perishes. The church fathers took a multifaceted view of the petition, seeing it as referring to bread for our bellies, the Word of God, the Eucharist, and above all, Jesus. This layered approach is neither antithetical nor contradictory, but rather complementary. This was the approach of such fathers as Cyprian, Tertullian, and Origen. Luther can be quoted in the same vein in his 1519 Exposition of the Lord's Prayer. Yes, early Luther, but Luther unaffected by the controversies surrounding the later Sacramentarian debate with the Reformed. (Please see my article in the 2012 Christmas issue of Gottesdienst, "The Eucharist and St. John 6.") Perhaps the well known ambiguity of epiousion (daily) is purposeful, encouraging this multilayered interpretation.

Before dealing with the rationale behind my thesis, we would do well to listen to the witness of the liturgical tradition of the Church. In the pre-Vatican II Roman Mass, the Lord's Prayer immediately follows the Canon and is placed just before the Fraction and the Agnus Dei.

This placement has been attributed to Gregory the Great. In the Byzantine Rite, the Lord's Prayer precedes the Distribution and follows the Institution, the Epiklesis, various commemorations of the saints, and the Supplication. In the Formula Missae, Luther's revision of the Mass, the order goes as follows: the Preface, Words of Institution, the Sanctus, the Elevation, the Lord's Prayer, the Pax, the Administration, the Agnus Dei, and the Close. Luther's severe excising of the Canon brought the Our Father into closer proximity to the Verba. In his Deutsche Messe (not Luther's happiest liturgical contribution) the Lord's Prayer is removed from the Liturgy of the Faithful and placed into the Liturgy of the Catechumens, set in a paraphrase, situated between the Sermon and an exhortation to the communicants.

In the early Lutheran church orders there is an approximate fifty-fifty split when it comes to placing the Lord's Prayer either before or after the Consecration. This division is reflected in Lutheran Service Book (CPH, 2006). Divine Services, Settings One and Two, offer both options, depending upon which column of the text is followed. Divine Service, Setting Three, places the Lord's Prayer immediately before the Consecration.

Now to the prayer itself. Much can be learned about the Christological/Eucharistic character of the Our Father by looking at its structure. There are seven petitions: three on one side, and three on the other, with the petition about bread, the fourth, in the middle. The tripartite structure of the first half of the prayer that follows the Address to the Father might indicate that the Fourth Petition, like the Address, has a similar relationship to that which follows it. The prayer begins with the Father, but concludes with the Son, the Bread of Life, who makes the Father known through the Spirit. This is indicated in the original text where the words "Father" and "Bread" appear first in their respective sentences, which is not the case with the other petitions. Just as the divine name, kingdom, and will relate to the Father in a special way, so forgiveness and deliverance from temptation and evil relate to the Son. However, the structure of the prayer can be viewed in a slightly different though related way.

Structurally the prayer also forms a chiasm, with corresponding or antithetical thoughts balanced on either side of the middle petition (see diagram above). The holiness of God's name is paired with the petition about deliverance from evil. This deliverance from evil was wrought when the Holy Name was placed upon us in Baptism, and when we daily live in our Baptism. The prayer for the coming kingdom is matched with the prayer about temptation. When one hears the word temptation it is difficult not to think of the threefold temptation of Christ by Satan (St. Matt. 4). The temptation of Christ was a continuation of the age-old debate about how the kingdom comes. Does it come by man's self-willed reach to the wrong tree? Is it a kingdom of glory or one of the Holy Cross? Will it come through raw power, or the spiritual exhibitionism of contemporary worship, or by a simple genuflection in the wrong direction? Our Lord refused these blandishments, and instead of a spectacular free fall into angelic hands, He took an unspectacular stairway and did not stop walking until He came to Calvary.

Working chiastically toward the middle we come to the third pairing: God's will and the forgiveness of our trespasses.

These two are linguistically linked by the twofold request that God's will be done on earth as it is in heaven, and that heaven would forgive our trespasses as we on earth forgive the trespasses of those who trespass against us. Indeed, what is the will of God but the salvation or forgiveness of sinners, and that His Church lives as a reconciled community? Through these chiasms we have been brought to the petition about bread. In many chiasms there is a middle, and the middle of a chiasm is the most important thing. This petition is about much more than bread for the stomach. Jesus is the true Bread of Life.

With our ears we feed upon His Holy Word and with our mouths and hearts we feed upon Him in His Holy Supper. All that precedes the Eucharistic Petition leads to it. Jesus, who revealed the name of the Father, who did the Father's will unto death, and who with the Father sends the Holy Spirit and thus the kingdom, most fully reveals and gives all this in the Eucharist, our daily provision along life's way. Having been forgiven as we kneel at the rail, we can hardly withhold forgiveness from those with whom we kneel. Finally, in the Bread of Life, in Jesus and His preaching and His Supper, we have help in time of temptation and the deliverance from all evil. Amen.

The Our Father holds an integral part in the Lutheran Canon of the Mass, and divinely so.