Real Bread and Real Debts In The Lord's Prayer
One of the most familiar Bible passages is the "Lord's Prayer," which 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. Although it is not immediately obvious to most people who pray this prayer, economic issues are at the heart of 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."
The prayer Jesus taught his disciples was more than a prayer for spiritual nurture and forgiveness of sins. When he referred to daily bread and forgiveness of debts, he was referring to real bread and real economic debts.
The fundamental meaning of the Greek word for "debts" is financial. The prayer makes the need for real bread and payment of debt explicit. This intention is consistent with Jesus' concern for the poor and dispossessed of his society.
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."
When "Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" become spiritual metaphors, they lose the connection with real food and economic debt, which was what Jesus intended.
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 prayer uses the word "sin" rather than "debt." This loses the financial reality behind the metaphor and obscures the underlying concern with real bread and real debts.
To pray as Jesus intended, Christians need to retrieve the original meanings of words that have been treated as spiritual metaphors. The cost of daily bread is especially significant in an era of global food shortages and rising prices for basic staples such as wheat, rice, and corn. And forgiveness of debts has particular meaning for those facing foreclosure and bankruptcy because of debts they cannot repay.
Jesus intended his words to refer to suffering and injustice in his own society. This prayer for bread and debts referred to real bread and forgiveness of real financial debts.
Article Source: http://www.search-raven.com
About the Author
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if much of what you learned about Jesus and money is false? Get your copy of Going Broke With Jesus at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com to discover how often Christians misunderstand what Jesus taught about money.
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by: KalindaRoseStevenson,PhD
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