Matthew 6:5-13 – prayer and atonement
Prayer is the most important activity of our lives because it is the main way in which we develop a relationship with our Father in heaven. Jesus sees prayer as a relationship rather than a ritual, as we see in these few verses.
How is it we can have that relationship? Well, the Lord’s Prayer in its two forms actually gives us an insight, as I believe it did for archbishop Anselm around the year 1000 AD. I refer to his theory of the atonement – or at-one-ment. Many have wrestled with this. On the one hand, the atonement is so simple we can just accept it, on the other, it’s beyond fathoming. But to grapple with it is to learn more about God himself. The old BCP liturgy refer to Jesus making a ‘full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction’. This embodies no less than three theories of atonement, the last of which, ‘satisfaction’, comes from Anselm.
Now the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew 6:12 reads ‘Forgive us our debts’ while in
Luke 11:4 reads ‘Forgive us our sins’. For Anselm, living under the mediaeval feudal system, this would have been very significant, and would have helped in his thinking of the satisfaction theory of the atonement.
If a serf offends his lord, he is automatically in debt and had to pay a
‘satisfaction’. If he could not pay, then he suffered punishment. Anselm saw in this a metaphor that if we offend, that is ‘ sin’
against God, missing the mark, we are so indebted to him that we cannot possibly pay the debt we owe to satisfy him, and thus deserve punishment. However, Jesus pays the satisfaction for us by his death on the cross thus removing the need for our punishment.
Sin is falling short of God’s best for us, which we do all the time even, according to Anselm, every second that we are not acknowledging his presence with us in our waking hours.
So then, tied up in the two versions of this prayer, we have the very words that remind us why it is that we have the privilege to pray it! God in Christ has reconciled us to himself by forgiving the unpayable debt we owe, and forgiving the sin that led to that debt.
To conclude, we were created by God to have a relationship with him. Jesus’ death on the cross made this at-one-ment possible and prayer is the way we deepen and strengthen our friendship with him. That is why prayer is such an important activity of our lives, something that we make time for, and grow into as we mature in faith.
David