Ron Csillag

In Ontario’s it’s often the little things that kick up the biggest fuss. This time, it’s Premier Dalton McGuinty’s pledge to do away with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the start of legislative sessions because it no longer reflects the province’s diversity.

The announcement a few weeks ago caught a lot of people by surprise, with some media pundits suspecting that it was a sop to certain religious groups who felt slighted by the premier’s refusal to fund faith-based schools - a hot issue in the recent election.

As with anything that combined politics with religion, the debate swirled around three main positions: Those who advocated that the prayer should be kept not necessarily as a nod to Christianity, but in recognition of Ontario’s heritage; those who would outlaw religious expression in the public square altogether; and those who believe Canada is a Christian country that must retain its Christian principles.

Some proposed alternating the Lord’s Prayer with invocations from other faiths. But isn’t the Lord’s Prayer ecumenical in spirit? How can anyone object to its universal teachings and ideals?

Some investigation and a little Scripture reading reveal two main findings: Like Christianity itself, the Lord’s Prayer is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, while at the same time, it is the best-known Christian prayer, primarily because it is the only one authorized by Jesus himself.

It appears in two places in the New Testament. In the book of Matthew, it is part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, while in Luke’s gospel, a disciple comes to Jesus and asks to be taught to pray the way John the Baptist had taught his followers. Jesus obliges with a succinct few lines.

But where did he get it?

Hamilton’s Rabbi Bernard Baskin, who has studied the prayer’s roots, offers an explanation. “Jesus wasn’t a pagan or a Greek. It came from the Jewish tradition almost phrase by phrase.”

The Interpreter’s Bible, a well-known Christian source, agrees. The Lord’s Prayer “is thoroughly Jewish,” and nearly every phrase is paralleled in the Jewish liturgy. “Thus it is Jesus’s inspired and original summary of his own people’s piety at its best.”

Many scholars have noted the distinct similarities between the Lord’s Prayer and the Jewish mourner’s prayer, the Kaddish (”May (God) establish His kingdom during our lifetime and during the lifetime of Israel”), the Eighteen Benedictions of Jewish liturgy (”Forgive us our Father, for we have sinned” is the sixth blessing), Talmudic prayer (”Lead me not into sin or iniquity or temptation or contempt,” goes one - though it came after Jesus) and many Hebrew scriptures in which we find “Give us this day our daily bread,” or some variation of it.

Jesus merely “brilliantly” condensed and concentrated important Jewish ethical teachings in a unique manner, and at the same time, the Lord’s Prayer sums up the essence of the Christian faith, says Darrell Johnson, a teacher at Vancouver’s evangelical Regent College and author of Fifty-Seven Words That Change the World: A Journey Through the Lord’s Prayer.

Worth noting too are different word usages. Though Matthew uses the term “debts” and “debtors,” older English versions of the Lord’s Prayer use the term “trespasses,” while others, such as Luke, use “sins.”

And Catholics and Protestants pray it differently, with the latter adding the concluding line in some texts, known as a doxology. Scholars agree it was appended later and was in any case probably lifted from the Book of Chronicles, in which King David is quoted: “Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendour.”

A final irony, so far as the situation in Ontario goes, is that Jesus preferred private prayer.

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:6) he chides “hypocrites” who pray in public in order to be seen and heard, and “pagans” who “babble.” Rather, he counsels the faithful: “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”

It’s possible, Baskin points out, that the very public Lord’s Prayer was meant as a protest against fixed, statutory, public prayer.