Jesus' New Exodus Prayer for His New Exodus People (a.k.a. The Lord's Prayer)
The New Exodus Setting
“Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world He created according to his will. May he establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future. And say Amen.”
This is the Kaddish, a regular feature of Jewish prayer extolling praise and longing/mourning for the quick establishment of God's rule at the time of Jesus. The long exile begun in Babylon but extending even now to Rome's overlordship of the people in their own land was intolerable to the Jews and they passionately wanted it over. They looked forward to a long-promised New Exodus to remedy this terrible situation.
Jesus offers his disciples his version of this prayer as a model prayer for those who join him in God's New Exodus movement. It is a New Exodus (NE) prayer (N.T. Wright, Brant Pitre). It grows out of and relates to the historical context which Jesus was born into and ministered in – a time of great ferment and revolutionary fervor for the establishment of God's rule and the ousting of the pagan Romans and their hated rule over God's people.
None of the models on offer for how the Jewish people ought to deal with Rome won Jesus' approval. The Sadducees' capitulation to and assimilation into Roman rule certainly didn't. Nor did the Essene withdrawal to set up a community in the desert to practice a pure faith and wait for God's day of intervention to establish his kingdom. Jesus' NE movement was certainly anti-Roman and pro-God's rule in the here and now and in the midst of daily life. Jesus, however, knew of any enemy more powerful than Rome (or any imperial power) that lay behind and sponsored its rule. This sinister power is what he discerns and seeks to engage and defeat in this, God's final and ultimate NE movement.
Zealots offered a guerilla movement of armed revolt against the Romans and their Jewish sympathizers. Jesus burned with a similar zeal for God and his rule over his people (Jn.2:17) but he rejected the strategy of armed revolt. Instead he offered tactics (de Certeau) for the powerless to use in their daily interactions with the powerful to force the former to recognize and respect the humanity and needs of the latter. His NE sermon (Mt.5-7) is full of such wisdom.
Pharisees wanted God's rule over Israel as much as any of the other groups. As much as Jesus did. Because they are his major opponents in the gospels (which as such means we get a somewhat one-sided view of them there) it is worth a longer look at them. N. T. Wright sets their views out like this:
Who we? We are a group of Jews who find ourselves dissatisfied with the way our country is being run and with our life as a people, at home and abroad. We are therefore devoting ourselves to the study and practice of Torah, as a kind of elite corps, intending to advance the time when Israel will finally be redeemed, when our God will reveal his faithfulness to our nation.
Where are we? Mostly, it seems, in the holy land, which is where we might prefer to be; but some of us live and work in the Diaspora. We are, however, mostly living under the rule of the Roman empire (some, perhaps, far out in the east, have other pagan overlords), and we have struck a deal that we will pray for the emperor, not to him as everyone else is forced to do.
What’s wrong? There are not nearly enough of us who take Torah with proper seriousness, and even among those who do there are schools developing which the tough-minded among us regard as dangerously compromised. What counts, after all, is absolute purity. We do not imagine that we never sin, or never incur impurity, but we deal with it at once according to the methods and means of atonement and purification given by God and prescribed in the law. That is what it means to be ‘perfect in the law’. But we cannot compromise or collude with the wickedness we see in the nations all around us, and that goes especially for the rulers of the nations. Ever since the days in Egypt, and then again from the time in Babylon (where some of us still are) to the present, we have known what pagan rulers are like, and what it’s like to live under them. We will not be content until we no longer have to live as, in effect, slaves under these pagans, paying them taxes. Behind the problem of Israel’s large-scale failure to obey Torah prop- erly is the much bigger problem: when will our God reveal his faithfulness to the covenant, by judging the pagans, liberating us from their wicked grasp, and setting up his ultimate kingdom? That’s what’s wrong: it hasn’t happened yet.
What’s the solution? To the smaller-scale problem: a campaign to persuade more Jews to take upon themselves the yoke of Torah. To the larger-scale problem: to pray (prayer is especially important; the Shema alone is the very foundation of our existence) and to wait in purity, to keep the feasts and the fasts, to study scripture . . . and perhaps, so some of us think, to join up with those who are eager for armed resistance and revolution. We have as our great models of ‘zeal for Torah’ the heroes of old, Phinehas and Elijah especially. They were not afraid to use the sword in the service of God. Nor were our more recent heroes, the Maccabaean freedom-fighters. We venerate, too, the martyrs who died cruel deaths rather than defile themselves with pagan food and practices. We are waiting for a new exodus, and perhaps a new Moses to lead it. Some of us want to hurry that process along.
It is easy to note a number of key similarities between the Pharisees and Jesus' movement as well as the intensity of the opposition between them. Similar (though not identical) aims, similar audience, similar (though not identical) theology, all this brewed a serious conflict between groups seeking the same thing, one through Torah-adherence looking for Messiah/New Moses/New Exodus and the other through adherence to Jesus as Messiah/New Moses/New Exodus. For the one Torah was the lens through which everything was viewed, Jewish identity, hope, and ethics. For the other Jesus was the lens through which everything (even Torah) was viewed. Thus he articulated a new way of being Jewish. A way that portended the defeat of God's enemies (Rome and that bigger sinister power sponsoring it), a return of God to his temple (reconceptualized as the resurrected Jesus himself), the true function of Torah and, indeed, all Israel's scriptures, the renewal of Israel as the Abrahamic people through whom God intended to bless the whole world (i.e. the Gentiles), and the fulfillment of God's aim to have a shalom-saturated world to enjoy in fellowship with his human creatures.
The gathering and reconstituting of Israel as God's Abrahamic people was Jesus' primary goal in his earthly ministry. Since that was the Pharisees' goal too (from their perspective), it's no wonder they were a;lways fussing with one another. It's worth noting that this conflict was far more and profound than the simple caricature of the Pharisees as nit-picking legalists, boorish moralists, in comparison with whom Jesus was a breath of fresh, freeing, gracious air. These were two serious ways of being Jewish in a time when when such self-definition was a matter of life and death.
None of these four models sufficed for God's New Exodus, however. And that for two reasons. First, none lf them had the Messiah. And second, and perhaps consequently, they focused too solely on Rome as the enemy to be defeated. God's NE movement had the Messiah (so they claimed) and he was able to see beyond Rome to its spiritual core and focused the NE struggle there. He also saw what any clear-minded observer could see at that time - that war with Rome could only be a disaster for the Jews. And so it was. Rome would be defeated in a spectacular collapse but it take some four more centuries for that to come (see Rev.18). Meanwhile, the sinister power behind Rome would be defeated by this Messiah making Rome's defeat inevitable.
But I'm getting ahead of the story. Here at the beginning Jesus is recruiting Israel to become Abrahamic again to play its role as God's New Exodus people. Those who follow him need a prayer suitable for this time and this movement. Matthew presents it as part of Jesus' NE sermon in Mt.6 while Luke gives it in a slightly different form at the request of his followers (Lk.11). We'll follow Matthew's version here.
Jesus' New Exodus Prayer
Like the Kaddish Jesus' prayer is an eschatological prayer. That is, it's a prayer for the ultimate reality of God to come and deliver, redeem, and set right all that has gone wrong. And that what this New Exodus is all about.
And it's also a prayer for the here and now, the present of Jesus' followers: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Mt.16:28). Whatever Jesus teaches us to pray for here, it is something that will happen in their lifetimes or generation. What that means for us as we pray this prayer today we will consider at the end of this essay.
Jesus kicks the prayer off with an address to God infrequently used in prayer, “Our father.”1 But when it is it is usually in the context of a New Exodus. Two of the most important texts are in Isa. 63:10–17 and Jer. 3:16–19.
-There are strong linguistic parallels with the Lord’s Prayer (“our father” in Isa.63:16 and “my father” in Jer.3:19.
-each of these texts describes the future ingathering of Israel and the Gentiles in a new Exodus.
-this is the only place in Isaiah where the divine use of divine “Father” language occurs and the only other “father” language for God in Jeremiah is also in a New Exodus setting (Jer.31:7-9).
The first petition of the prayer is actually an imperative: “May your name be hallowed.” A feckless and idolatrous trashing of God's name, reputation, and power in a pagan world by rebellious Israel was a major problem for God as well as the people. The original Exodus was as much about establishing the knowledge and reputation of Israel's God with the plagues and the mighty defeat of Pharaoh's army. Having squandered that reputation God must act in power and grace again to fulfill his promises and purposes in the world. And this is exactly what God has determined to do:
“And I will sanctify my great name (hagiasō to onoma mou…), which was profaned among the nations, which you profaned in the midst of them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord when I am sanctified among you before their eyes” (Ex.36:23 LXX).
This cri de coeur by another one dear to the Jewish heart: “May your kingdom come; may your will be done, as in heaven and upon earth. Jesus summarizes the Kadish's “May he establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future.” As we noted above, God's kingdom, which was the keynote of Jesus' message, is something to occur with that generation of his first followers. “It will consist,” writes Andrew Perriman, “of a transfer of sovereignty over Israel from Caesar to YHWH, but Daniel’s vision of the symbolic Son of man figure has suggested that YHWH will then give this sovereignty to the suffering community - that is, to Jesus and those who suffer in him.”2
And not only is this kingdom or rule of God to come within that first generation of Jesus' followers, God's will is to be done as well (another way of talking about the kingdom) not only soon but here on earth just like it is done in heaven!
Jesus tells his followers in God's NE movement to pray in these first three petitions for God
-to justify his reputation and will and way before the world,
-to bring his kingdom (quickly), and
-to have his will done here and now on this green earth as it is done in heaven.
His second set of three petitions, though they may appear to change the focus to our human, daily needs, in reality they maintain the NE focus with which they began.
In the fourth petition Jesus instructs us to pray for “daily bread.” Does he mean our regular allotment of food or is this an allusion to the manna God feed the original Exodus people with each day? The NE focus of the prayer thus far suggests the latter. Pitre calls this the “most obvious sign of the presence of a new Exodus typology in the Lord’s Prayer”3 though it probably does not seem so to readers today.
This, then, is no mundane provision for human hunger Jesus talks about. This is God's miraculous provision for his people marching through the desert out of Egypt on the way to Sinai (see Ex.16:4–5, 13–15, 31; Psa.78:23-25,29). “Mortals ate the bread of angels” the psalmist tells us. Attendant to the NE Jesus' people will need to rely on God for their sustenance and ongoing life. Further, this manna bespeaks an eschatological food, the bread of the age to come. Pitre notes
“Many ancient Jews expected that when the Messiah finally came, he would cause the manna to come down from heaven again. One of the most explicit descriptions of this comes to us from the first-century Jewish writing known as 2 Baruch. In a vision of the messianic age, the text states:
'And it will happen that when all that which should come to pass in these parts is accomplished, the Messiah will begin to be revealed. . . . And those who are hungry will enjoy themselves and they will, moreover, see marvels every day. . . . And it will happen at that time that the treasury of manna will come down again from on high, and they will eat of it in those years because these are they who will have arrived at the consummation of time.' (2 Baruch 29:3–8).”4
And many expected this new manna to come at a New Passover5 which would signal the onset of the long-awaited moment prayed for here. The connection with Jesus' meal at the last supper with his followers seems obvious. It too is a NE (and new covenant) event.
These two senses of God's provision for his people's needs during this NE and his provision of spiritual food for their life in this new reality of his kingdom come mingle together here.
“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” - this fifth petition reflects the eschatological summons to the New Exodus in Isa.40: 1-2 and more particularly 55:7 (LXX):
“…let the ungodly leave his ways, and the transgressor his counsels: and let him return to the Lord, and he shall find mercy; for he shall abundantly pardon your sins.”
And when we note that just above this passage in 55:1-2 God exhorts Israel to purchase “good bread” from him the connection of the fourth and fifth petitions as NE texts becomes clear.
But more may be intended here as well. In a NE contexts “debts” would easily bring to a Jewish mind the famous Jubilee legislation in Lev.25. Once a generation (every 50th year) Israel was to practice a great social leveling – debts accrued during this time were forgiven and lsnd was returned to the family it was given to by Joshua. These provisions were rooted in Israel's experience of the first Exodus from Egypt (Lev. 25:38, 42, 55) and expected again as a part of the NE (see Isa. 61:1–2, 4, 7; “the year of the Lord's favor,” v.2) expectation. Pitre cites this passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls in evidence:
“And as for what he said: 'In [this] year of Jubilee, [you shall return, each one, to his respective property' (Lev. 25:13), concerning it he said: 'Th]is is [the manner of the release:] every creditor shall release what he lent [to his neighbour. He shall not coerce his neighbour or his brother, for it has been proclaimed] a release for G[od]' (Deut. 15:2). [Its interpretation] for the last days refers to the captives. . .they are the inherita[nce of Melchize]dek, who will make them return. And liberty will be proclaimed for them, to free them from [the debt of] all their iniquities. And this [wil]l [happen] in the first week of the Jubilee. . .in which atonement shall be made for all the sons of [light and] for the men [of] the lot of Melchizedek. . .for it is the time for 'the year of favor' (Isa. 61:2). . .(11QMelchizedek 2:1–9)”6
The forgiveness of debts prayed for here, then, points to the inauguration of the New Exodus. This reality is not simply “spiritual” (as we count such things), between us and God, but a reality practiced among the people of the NE. And its chief agent, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, is “Melchizedek” (Gen.14; Messiah).
The final petition Jesus offers is “And may you not lead us into trial, but deliver us from the evil one.” Here Jesus realistically exhorts his followers to pray for God's provision and protection during the birth pangs of this inaugural period of the NE. Troubles and trials will accompany the arrival of God's movement to set all things right even as the original troop of Exodus travelers underwent severe testing (Ps.94:8 LXX; 4 Macc.9:7) such that some lost their faith as a result. Many of the New Testament statements about the trials and tribulations of God's people are situated within this context of the birth pangs of this fresh and final act of God's liberating act for his world (see 1 Pet.1:6-7; 4:12,13).
The “evil one” (not “evil” in the abstract in this context) is behind this trouble, resisting and trying to derail this NE movement in any way possible. “This is the Satan who seeks to divert Jesus from his calling, who demands to sift the disciples like wheat, who inspires the extreme opposition of Greek-Roman paganism.”7
How Do We Pray This Prayer Today?
It's probably occurred to you that if the Lord's Prayer is historically anchored in the setting of longing and anticipation for God's New Exodus in the 1st century a. d. then what can it mean for us to pray it 20 centuries later? Its widespread use in worship tends to incline us to treat it as a timeless prayer that anyone can pray anytime anywhere with no loss of meaning. Yet the context of God's NE restricts that field of meaning in a way that makes praying it timelessly distorting of its meaning.
Perriman pushes this hard in this direction. If this reading of the prayer is right, he contends it's already been answered. “The people of God was restored, Caesar was finally overthrown, God’s kingdom was established, the community survived the eschatological crisis and entered the promised land - or as Paul puts it, inherited the world (Rom. 4:13).” He suggests we pray it as a way to remember the journey God and God's people have taken to enable us to be where we are today (similar in this way to how we celebrate the Lord's Supper).
“We do not need to pray for the kingdom to come - certainly not in the way that the disciples did. The prayer has its place in the narrative, but the story-line has moved on. The victory over Satan and death that is envisaged in the New Testament has been won; Jesus is our king. Our task is to live and work under that kingship. But we cannot forget the basic reason why sovereignty was given to the Son of man: we have a ‘king’ who gave himself out of love for God and for his people so that the mission of God would have a future.”8
This, I think, is a valid way to pray this prayer today.
There is another way too. A christological way. We noted earlier that the difference between the Pharisees and Jesus movement was . . . Jesus. If we look out the window though on any given morning it won't look like God's name has been hallowed, his kingdom come, his will is being done here and now as it is in heaven, and so on. So is Perriman wrong after all? Is this prayer not already answered?
I don't believe Perriman is wrong. I think he and Pitre and Wright are correct to locate this prayer in salvation history as a prayer for those on whom the New Exodus has dawned. And I think his suggestion for how to pray the prayer is on target too. But as we look out our windows and see the world looking pretty much as it always has, understanding this prayer through Jesus, seeing him as its fulfillment, can give us a somewhat different take on it and on our lives.
Has God's name been hallowed, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus has done it.
Has God's kingdom come, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus brought it.
Has God's will been done here on earth as it is in heaven, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus has done it.
Yes, yes, Jesus is our confidence and assurance that that God's NE movement has been executed and completed in and by him. It has not fully played put yet. God's eternal purpose for which he instituted the NE has not yet been fulfilled de facto though its fulfillment is certain by virtue of Jesus' resurrection and exaltation as world ruler.
This, in fact, is how the writer of Hebrews sees it. In Heb.2:8-9 we read,
“Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”
God created humanity for dominion over his creation, to care for it and guide it to its full flourishing as God's vice-regents. They failed and forfeited that vice-regency. In other words, when we look out our windows we don't see things as they should be. However, we do see Jesus, crucified, risen, and exalted - God as us, us as we should be. He hallowed God's name, as we all should have. He brought God's rule over nations and creation. He did God's will in the midst of all sorts of opposition and resistance. Jesus is our guarantee, our “down payment” as Paul put it (Eph.1:14), that God has made good on all his promises (2 Cor.1:20). He is God's New Exodus in person.
As those Christ-followers called to share in the extension and implementation of the fruits of his victory w pray this NE prayer in both memory and hope. Both the salvation history approach of (Perriman) and the christological approach I am sketching draw on both with differing emphases. Seeing Christ as the fulfillment of the prayer makes us look back to his earthly ministry in which he hallowed God's name, brought in God's kingdom, and did God's will here and now as it is done in heaven. And to our lives today in gratitude for the assurance he will keep on provisioning us with the physical and spiritual sustenance he did for them, and will keep and bring us through the attacks of the evil one in all their variety in our time and place.
And in both memory and gratitude we find ourselves caught up in Jesus' own life and come to know God in him as “our father” Thus, this prayer's historical rootage in a particular context is both vital for its proper understanding and at the same time for stirring up memory and gratitude in its pray-ers and readers at later times and other places in the church's journey. Taking it as a timeless prayer obscures this historically determinative meaning and dilutes the quality of the memory and gratitude evoked.
2 Andrew Perriman, “The Lord's Prayer and its Eschatological Context” https://www.postost.net/commentary/lord-s-prayer-eschatological-context.
3 Pitre, “The Lords Prayer and the New Exodus,” 84.
4 Pitre, “The Lord's Prayer and the New Exodus,” 85.
5 Brown, The Gospel according to John, 1:265, citing B. Gärtner, John 6 and the Jewish Passover, Coniectanea Neotestamentica 17 (Lund: Gleerup, 1959), 19.
6Pitre, “The Lord's Prayer and the New Exodus,” 89.
7Perriman, “The Lord's Prayer in its Eschatological Context” https://www.postost.net/commentary/lord-s-prayer-eschatological-context.
The New Exodus Setting
“Magnified and sanctified be his great name in the world He created according to his will. May he establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future. And say Amen.”
This is the Kaddish, a regular feature of Jewish prayer extolling praise and longing/mourning for the quick establishment of God's rule at the time of Jesus. The long exile begun in Babylon but extending even now to Rome's overlordship of the people in their own land was intolerable to the Jews and they passionately wanted it over. They looked forward to a long-promised New Exodus to remedy this terrible situation.
Jesus offers his disciples his version of this prayer as a model prayer for those who join him in God's New Exodus movement. It is a New Exodus (NE) prayer (N.T. Wright, Brant Pitre). It grows out of and relates to the historical context which Jesus was born into and ministered in – a time of great ferment and revolutionary fervor for the establishment of God's rule and the ousting of the pagan Romans and their hated rule over God's people.
None of the models on offer for how the Jewish people ought to deal with Rome won Jesus' approval. The Sadducees' capitulation to and assimilation into Roman rule certainly didn't. Nor did the Essene withdrawal to set up a community in the desert to practice a pure faith and wait for God's day of intervention to establish his kingdom. Jesus' NE movement was certainly anti-Roman and pro-God's rule in the here and now and in the midst of daily life. Jesus, however, knew of any enemy more powerful than Rome (or any imperial power) that lay behind and sponsored its rule. This sinister power is what he discerns and seeks to engage and defeat in this, God's final and ultimate NE movement.
Zealots offered a guerilla movement of armed revolt against the Romans and their Jewish sympathizers. Jesus burned with a similar zeal for God and his rule over his people (Jn.2:17) but he rejected the strategy of armed revolt. Instead he offered tactics (de Certeau) for the powerless to use in their daily interactions with the powerful to force the former to recognize and respect the humanity and needs of the latter. His NE sermon (Mt.5-7) is full of such wisdom.
Pharisees wanted God's rule over Israel as much as any of the other groups. As much as Jesus did. Because they are his major opponents in the gospels (which as such means we get a somewhat one-sided view of them there) it is worth a longer look at them. N. T. Wright sets their views out like this:
Who we? We are a group of Jews who find ourselves dissatisfied with the way our country is being run and with our life as a people, at home and abroad. We are therefore devoting ourselves to the study and practice of Torah, as a kind of elite corps, intending to advance the time when Israel will finally be redeemed, when our God will reveal his faithfulness to our nation.
Where are we? Mostly, it seems, in the holy land, which is where we might prefer to be; but some of us live and work in the Diaspora. We are, however, mostly living under the rule of the Roman empire (some, perhaps, far out in the east, have other pagan overlords), and we have struck a deal that we will pray for the emperor, not to him as everyone else is forced to do.
What’s wrong? There are not nearly enough of us who take Torah with proper seriousness, and even among those who do there are schools developing which the tough-minded among us regard as dangerously compromised. What counts, after all, is absolute purity. We do not imagine that we never sin, or never incur impurity, but we deal with it at once according to the methods and means of atonement and purification given by God and prescribed in the law. That is what it means to be ‘perfect in the law’. But we cannot compromise or collude with the wickedness we see in the nations all around us, and that goes especially for the rulers of the nations. Ever since the days in Egypt, and then again from the time in Babylon (where some of us still are) to the present, we have known what pagan rulers are like, and what it’s like to live under them. We will not be content until we no longer have to live as, in effect, slaves under these pagans, paying them taxes. Behind the problem of Israel’s large-scale failure to obey Torah prop- erly is the much bigger problem: when will our God reveal his faithfulness to the covenant, by judging the pagans, liberating us from their wicked grasp, and setting up his ultimate kingdom? That’s what’s wrong: it hasn’t happened yet.
What’s the solution? To the smaller-scale problem: a campaign to persuade more Jews to take upon themselves the yoke of Torah. To the larger-scale problem: to pray (prayer is especially important; the Shema alone is the very foundation of our existence) and to wait in purity, to keep the feasts and the fasts, to study scripture . . . and perhaps, so some of us think, to join up with those who are eager for armed resistance and revolution. We have as our great models of ‘zeal for Torah’ the heroes of old, Phinehas and Elijah especially. They were not afraid to use the sword in the service of God. Nor were our more recent heroes, the Maccabaean freedom-fighters. We venerate, too, the martyrs who died cruel deaths rather than defile themselves with pagan food and practices. We are waiting for a new exodus, and perhaps a new Moses to lead it. Some of us want to hurry that process along.
It is easy to note a number of key similarities between the Pharisees and Jesus' movement as well as the intensity of the opposition between them. Similar (though not identical) aims, similar audience, similar (though not identical) theology, all this brewed a serious conflict between groups seeking the same thing, one through Torah-adherence looking for Messiah/New Moses/New Exodus and the other through adherence to Jesus as Messiah/New Moses/New Exodus. For the one Torah was the lens through which everything was viewed, Jewish identity, hope, and ethics. For the other Jesus was the lens through which everything (even Torah) was viewed. Thus he articulated a new way of being Jewish. A way that portended the defeat of God's enemies (Rome and that bigger sinister power sponsoring it), a return of God to his temple (reconceptualized as the resurrected Jesus himself), the true function of Torah and, indeed, all Israel's scriptures, the renewal of Israel as the Abrahamic people through whom God intended to bless the whole world (i.e. the Gentiles), and the fulfillment of God's aim to have a shalom-saturated world to enjoy in fellowship with his human creatures.
The gathering and reconstituting of Israel as God's Abrahamic people was Jesus' primary goal in his earthly ministry. Since that was the Pharisees' goal too (from their perspective), it's no wonder they were a;lways fussing with one another. It's worth noting that this conflict was far more and profound than the simple caricature of the Pharisees as nit-picking legalists, boorish moralists, in comparison with whom Jesus was a breath of fresh, freeing, gracious air. These were two serious ways of being Jewish in a time when when such self-definition was a matter of life and death.
None of these four models sufficed for God's New Exodus, however. And that for two reasons. First, none lf them had the Messiah. And second, and perhaps consequently, they focused too solely on Rome as the enemy to be defeated. God's NE movement had the Messiah (so they claimed) and he was able to see beyond Rome to its spiritual core and focused the NE struggle there. He also saw what any clear-minded observer could see at that time - that war with Rome could only be a disaster for the Jews. And so it was. Rome would be defeated in a spectacular collapse but it take some four more centuries for that to come (see Rev.18). Meanwhile, the sinister power behind Rome would be defeated by this Messiah making Rome's defeat inevitable.
But I'm getting ahead of the story. Here at the beginning Jesus is recruiting Israel to become Abrahamic again to play its role as God's New Exodus people. Those who follow him need a prayer suitable for this time and this movement. Matthew presents it as part of Jesus' NE sermon in Mt.6 while Luke gives it in a slightly different form at the request of his followers (Lk.11). We'll follow Matthew's version here.
Jesus' New Exodus Prayer
Like the Kaddish Jesus' prayer is an eschatological prayer. That is, it's a prayer for the ultimate reality of God to come and deliver, redeem, and set right all that has gone wrong. And that what this New Exodus is all about.
And it's also a prayer for the here and now, the present of Jesus' followers: “Truly, I say to you, there are some standing here who will not taste death until they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom” (Mt.16:28). Whatever Jesus teaches us to pray for here, it is something that will happen in their lifetimes or generation. What that means for us as we pray this prayer today we will consider at the end of this essay.
Jesus kicks the prayer off with an address to God infrequently used in prayer, “Our father.”1 But when it is it is usually in the context of a New Exodus. Two of the most important texts are in Isa. 63:10–17 and Jer. 3:16–19.
-There are strong linguistic parallels with the Lord’s Prayer (“our father” in Isa.63:16 and “my father” in Jer.3:19.
-each of these texts describes the future ingathering of Israel and the Gentiles in a new Exodus.
-this is the only place in Isaiah where the divine use of divine “Father” language occurs and the only other “father” language for God in Jeremiah is also in a New Exodus setting (Jer.31:7-9).
The first petition of the prayer is actually an imperative: “May your name be hallowed.” A feckless and idolatrous trashing of God's name, reputation, and power in a pagan world by rebellious Israel was a major problem for God as well as the people. The original Exodus was as much about establishing the knowledge and reputation of Israel's God with the plagues and the mighty defeat of Pharaoh's army. Having squandered that reputation God must act in power and grace again to fulfill his promises and purposes in the world. And this is exactly what God has determined to do:
“And I will sanctify my great name (hagiasō to onoma mou…), which was profaned among the nations, which you profaned in the midst of them; and the nations shall know that I am the Lord when I am sanctified among you before their eyes” (Ex.36:23 LXX).
This cri de coeur by another one dear to the Jewish heart: “May your kingdom come; may your will be done, as in heaven and upon earth. Jesus summarizes the Kadish's “May he establish His kingdom during your life and during your days, and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily and in the near future.” As we noted above, God's kingdom, which was the keynote of Jesus' message, is something to occur with that generation of his first followers. “It will consist,” writes Andrew Perriman, “of a transfer of sovereignty over Israel from Caesar to YHWH, but Daniel’s vision of the symbolic Son of man figure has suggested that YHWH will then give this sovereignty to the suffering community - that is, to Jesus and those who suffer in him.”2
And not only is this kingdom or rule of God to come within that first generation of Jesus' followers, God's will is to be done as well (another way of talking about the kingdom) not only soon but here on earth just like it is done in heaven!
Jesus tells his followers in God's NE movement to pray in these first three petitions for God
-to justify his reputation and will and way before the world,
-to bring his kingdom (quickly), and
-to have his will done here and now on this green earth as it is done in heaven.
His second set of three petitions, though they may appear to change the focus to our human, daily needs, in reality they maintain the NE focus with which they began.
In the fourth petition Jesus instructs us to pray for “daily bread.” Does he mean our regular allotment of food or is this an allusion to the manna God feed the original Exodus people with each day? The NE focus of the prayer thus far suggests the latter. Pitre calls this the “most obvious sign of the presence of a new Exodus typology in the Lord’s Prayer”3 though it probably does not seem so to readers today.
This, then, is no mundane provision for human hunger Jesus talks about. This is God's miraculous provision for his people marching through the desert out of Egypt on the way to Sinai (see Ex.16:4–5, 13–15, 31; Psa.78:23-25,29). “Mortals ate the bread of angels” the psalmist tells us. Attendant to the NE Jesus' people will need to rely on God for their sustenance and ongoing life. Further, this manna bespeaks an eschatological food, the bread of the age to come. Pitre notes
“Many ancient Jews expected that when the Messiah finally came, he would cause the manna to come down from heaven again. One of the most explicit descriptions of this comes to us from the first-century Jewish writing known as 2 Baruch. In a vision of the messianic age, the text states:
'And it will happen that when all that which should come to pass in these parts is accomplished, the Messiah will begin to be revealed. . . . And those who are hungry will enjoy themselves and they will, moreover, see marvels every day. . . . And it will happen at that time that the treasury of manna will come down again from on high, and they will eat of it in those years because these are they who will have arrived at the consummation of time.' (2 Baruch 29:3–8).”4
And many expected this new manna to come at a New Passover5 which would signal the onset of the long-awaited moment prayed for here. The connection with Jesus' meal at the last supper with his followers seems obvious. It too is a NE (and new covenant) event.
These two senses of God's provision for his people's needs during this NE and his provision of spiritual food for their life in this new reality of his kingdom come mingle together here.
“And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors” - this fifth petition reflects the eschatological summons to the New Exodus in Isa.40: 1-2 and more particularly 55:7 (LXX):
“…let the ungodly leave his ways, and the transgressor his counsels: and let him return to the Lord, and he shall find mercy; for he shall abundantly pardon your sins.”
And when we note that just above this passage in 55:1-2 God exhorts Israel to purchase “good bread” from him the connection of the fourth and fifth petitions as NE texts becomes clear.
But more may be intended here as well. In a NE contexts “debts” would easily bring to a Jewish mind the famous Jubilee legislation in Lev.25. Once a generation (every 50th year) Israel was to practice a great social leveling – debts accrued during this time were forgiven and lsnd was returned to the family it was given to by Joshua. These provisions were rooted in Israel's experience of the first Exodus from Egypt (Lev. 25:38, 42, 55) and expected again as a part of the NE (see Isa. 61:1–2, 4, 7; “the year of the Lord's favor,” v.2) expectation. Pitre cites this passage from the Dead Sea Scrolls in evidence:
“And as for what he said: 'In [this] year of Jubilee, [you shall return, each one, to his respective property' (Lev. 25:13), concerning it he said: 'Th]is is [the manner of the release:] every creditor shall release what he lent [to his neighbour. He shall not coerce his neighbour or his brother, for it has been proclaimed] a release for G[od]' (Deut. 15:2). [Its interpretation] for the last days refers to the captives. . .they are the inherita[nce of Melchize]dek, who will make them return. And liberty will be proclaimed for them, to free them from [the debt of] all their iniquities. And this [wil]l [happen] in the first week of the Jubilee. . .in which atonement shall be made for all the sons of [light and] for the men [of] the lot of Melchizedek. . .for it is the time for 'the year of favor' (Isa. 61:2). . .(11QMelchizedek 2:1–9)”6
The forgiveness of debts prayed for here, then, points to the inauguration of the New Exodus. This reality is not simply “spiritual” (as we count such things), between us and God, but a reality practiced among the people of the NE. And its chief agent, according to the Dead Sea Scrolls, is “Melchizedek” (Gen.14; Messiah).
The final petition Jesus offers is “And may you not lead us into trial, but deliver us from the evil one.” Here Jesus realistically exhorts his followers to pray for God's provision and protection during the birth pangs of this inaugural period of the NE. Troubles and trials will accompany the arrival of God's movement to set all things right even as the original troop of Exodus travelers underwent severe testing (Ps.94:8 LXX; 4 Macc.9:7) such that some lost their faith as a result. Many of the New Testament statements about the trials and tribulations of God's people are situated within this context of the birth pangs of this fresh and final act of God's liberating act for his world (see 1 Pet.1:6-7; 4:12,13).
The “evil one” (not “evil” in the abstract in this context) is behind this trouble, resisting and trying to derail this NE movement in any way possible. “This is the Satan who seeks to divert Jesus from his calling, who demands to sift the disciples like wheat, who inspires the extreme opposition of Greek-Roman paganism.”7
How Do We Pray This Prayer Today?
It's probably occurred to you that if the Lord's Prayer is historically anchored in the setting of longing and anticipation for God's New Exodus in the 1st century a. d. then what can it mean for us to pray it 20 centuries later? Its widespread use in worship tends to incline us to treat it as a timeless prayer that anyone can pray anytime anywhere with no loss of meaning. Yet the context of God's NE restricts that field of meaning in a way that makes praying it timelessly distorting of its meaning.
Perriman pushes this hard in this direction. If this reading of the prayer is right, he contends it's already been answered. “The people of God was restored, Caesar was finally overthrown, God’s kingdom was established, the community survived the eschatological crisis and entered the promised land - or as Paul puts it, inherited the world (Rom. 4:13).” He suggests we pray it as a way to remember the journey God and God's people have taken to enable us to be where we are today (similar in this way to how we celebrate the Lord's Supper).
“We do not need to pray for the kingdom to come - certainly not in the way that the disciples did. The prayer has its place in the narrative, but the story-line has moved on. The victory over Satan and death that is envisaged in the New Testament has been won; Jesus is our king. Our task is to live and work under that kingship. But we cannot forget the basic reason why sovereignty was given to the Son of man: we have a ‘king’ who gave himself out of love for God and for his people so that the mission of God would have a future.”8
This, I think, is a valid way to pray this prayer today.
There is another way too. A christological way. We noted earlier that the difference between the Pharisees and Jesus movement was . . . Jesus. If we look out the window though on any given morning it won't look like God's name has been hallowed, his kingdom come, his will is being done here and now as it is in heaven, and so on. So is Perriman wrong after all? Is this prayer not already answered?
I don't believe Perriman is wrong. I think he and Pitre and Wright are correct to locate this prayer in salvation history as a prayer for those on whom the New Exodus has dawned. And I think his suggestion for how to pray the prayer is on target too. But as we look out our windows and see the world looking pretty much as it always has, understanding this prayer through Jesus, seeing him as its fulfillment, can give us a somewhat different take on it and on our lives.
Has God's name been hallowed, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus has done it.
Has God's kingdom come, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus brought it.
Has God's will been done here on earth as it is in heaven, despite appearances? Yes, Jesus has done it.
Yes, yes, Jesus is our confidence and assurance that that God's NE movement has been executed and completed in and by him. It has not fully played put yet. God's eternal purpose for which he instituted the NE has not yet been fulfilled de facto though its fulfillment is certain by virtue of Jesus' resurrection and exaltation as world ruler.
This, in fact, is how the writer of Hebrews sees it. In Heb.2:8-9 we read,
“Now in subjecting all things to them, God left nothing outside their control. As it is, we do not yet see everything in subjection to them, but we do see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone.”
God created humanity for dominion over his creation, to care for it and guide it to its full flourishing as God's vice-regents. They failed and forfeited that vice-regency. In other words, when we look out our windows we don't see things as they should be. However, we do see Jesus, crucified, risen, and exalted - God as us, us as we should be. He hallowed God's name, as we all should have. He brought God's rule over nations and creation. He did God's will in the midst of all sorts of opposition and resistance. Jesus is our guarantee, our “down payment” as Paul put it (Eph.1:14), that God has made good on all his promises (2 Cor.1:20). He is God's New Exodus in person.
As those Christ-followers called to share in the extension and implementation of the fruits of his victory w pray this NE prayer in both memory and hope. Both the salvation history approach of (Perriman) and the christological approach I am sketching draw on both with differing emphases. Seeing Christ as the fulfillment of the prayer makes us look back to his earthly ministry in which he hallowed God's name, brought in God's kingdom, and did God's will here and now as it is done in heaven. And to our lives today in gratitude for the assurance he will keep on provisioning us with the physical and spiritual sustenance he did for them, and will keep and bring us through the attacks of the evil one in all their variety in our time and place.
And in both memory and gratitude we find ourselves caught up in Jesus' own life and come to know God in him as “our father” Thus, this prayer's historical rootage in a particular context is both vital for its proper understanding and at the same time for stirring up memory and gratitude in its pray-ers and readers at later times and other places in the church's journey. Taking it as a timeless prayer obscures this historically determinative meaning and dilutes the quality of the memory and gratitude evoked.
2 Andrew Perriman, “The Lord's Prayer and its Eschatological Context” https://www.postost.net/commentary/lord-s-prayer-eschatological-context.
3 Pitre, “The Lords Prayer and the New Exodus,” 84.
4 Pitre, “The Lord's Prayer and the New Exodus,” 85.
5 Brown, The Gospel according to John, 1:265, citing B. Gärtner, John 6 and the Jewish Passover, Coniectanea Neotestamentica 17 (Lund: Gleerup, 1959), 19.
6Pitre, “The Lord's Prayer and the New Exodus,” 89.
7Perriman, “The Lord's Prayer in its Eschatological Context” https://www.postost.net/commentary/lord-s-prayer-eschatological-context.
8Ibid.
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