On the Lord's Prayer

Contents

Reading pages: 1119–1137 · 1139–1157 · 1159–1177 · 1179–1193

1. 1119Opening the first homily on the Lord’s Prayer, Gregory says his hearers must first learn that they ought to pray at all, since everyone, from shopkeeper to buyer, gives the hour of prayer to business.
2. 1121Craftsmen, teachers, litigants, and judges forget prayer and trust their own skill; hence greed, quarrels, and injustice multiply; if prayer came first and God were remembered, sin would find no entry.
3. 1123Every undertaking done with prayer is kept from sin, since prayer joins us to God; Gregory praises prayer in a long list of its benefits for every condition of life and recalls Jonah, Hezekiah, the three young men, Amalek, and Sennacherib’s army.
4. 1125God’s benefits span past, present, and future, so we can never thank him enough; yet we give him no time, though he made the world for us, formed us in his image, and restores us to paradise, while we stay awake only for gain.
5. 1127Christ forbids “babbling” in prayer, that is, asking for vain things like a child daydreaming of kingdoms and flying; to ask God for base, passionate things is like asking a generous king to make clay pots.
6. 1129To pray for harm to an enemy is to ask God to share our anger and become cruel; such prayers, like prayers for glory or victory, are “babbling”; Gregory turns to the objection that prophets prayed against their enemies.
7. 1131The saints who seem to curse their enemies are praying against sin, not people: the Psalmist wants sin to fail, and the enemies he wishes put to shame are the demons and passions that war against the soul.
8. 1133The prophets’ curses are aimed at sin, not at people, for God did not make death; if God sometimes grants worldly requests, it is to strengthen weak faith and lead us, like children growing up, to ask for higher things.
9. 1135Worldly gifts are toys to lead us to ask the Father for greater things; to ask God only for earthly goods is to pray “like the gentiles,” who have no hope beyond this life. Homily 2 begins: Moses could not bring the people near to God at Sinai.
10. 1137Unlike Moses at Sinai, Christ leads all believers up to heaven itself, makes them sharers in God, shows God’s glory to the pure in heart, and asks for purification not from marriage but from every passion.
11. 1139One must first vow and offer something to God before asking; Christ bids us say “Father,” but to call God Father one would need wings to rise above all changing things to the unchanging One, and a soul and conscience like his, for the Good cannot be father of evil.
12. 1141To call God “Father” while living in sin is to make him the cause of one’s evils and so to insult him; the sinner’s father is the devil, the father of lies; Christ’s command to say “Father” is a command to live as God’s children.
13. 1143God would reject the sinner who calls him Father; “Father in heaven” recalls our lost fatherland, as in the parable of the prodigal son, whose confession, robe, ring, and kiss signify repentance and the restoration of the first state.
14. 1145Calling on the Father in heaven recalls our heavenly fatherland; the road back is likeness to God, which lies within our choice, for God is not distant in place; whoever is joined to God is already in heaven, but whoever bears the marks of the evil one cannot be God’s son.
15. 1147Homily 2 ends: the sinner’s prayer calls on the devil, so we must examine our lives before saying “Father,” setting our hearts on heaven, and then God will receive us like the prodigal son. Homily 3 opens with the priest’s preparation for entering the sanctuary.
16. 1149As the high priest was purified and vested before entering the sanctuary, so Christ makes all believers priests, clothing them with virtues and bringing them into the sanctuary of the heart to offer themselves as a living sacrifice.
17. 1151Whoever can rightly call God Father wears the spiritual priestly robe of virtues and enters the heavenly sanctuary; Gregory now turns to the petitions themselves.
18. 1153“Hallowed be thy name” asks that God’s name be glorified in our lives rather than blasphemed by the bad conduct of Christians; a pure and virtuous life makes even outsiders glorify God.
19. 1155To pray “Hallowed be thy name” is to ask to become virtuous so that God is glorified in us; “Thy kingdom come” cannot ask God to become king, but asks that his free and life-giving rule replace the tyranny of sin, passion, and death in us.
20. 1157When God’s kingdom comes, the passions vanish like smoke and melt like wax, as darkness before light; the soul prays that God’s angelic forces may overthrow the enemy, so that grief gives way to life and peace.
21. 1159The Spirit who cleanses from sin and Christ who made purification for sins have one activity and therefore one nature with the Father; against the Pneumatomachians, Gregory argues that the Spirit’s “coming” and cleansing do not make him inferior, since the Father too “comes” and forgives sins.
22. 1161Homily 3 ends with a prayer for the Spirit’s cleansing. Homily 4 opens on “Thy will be done” and “our daily bread” with a physician’s account of health as the balance of the elements, to be applied to the soul.
23. 1163Christ, the true physician, heals our sickness, which came from separation from God’s will, by union with that will; to pray “Thy will be done” is to confess the past and ask that virtue, above all love, drive out the vices; we need God’s help because it is harder to recover than to fall.
24. 1165Because human nature, weakened by sin, cannot return to the good unaided, we pray “Thy will be done”; “as in heaven, so on earth” refers to the two kinds of rational beings, angels in heaven and humans on earth, perhaps so joined that the human body may share at last in heaven.
25. 1167In heaven God’s will is done without hindrance because the angels are free of vice; we pray that our life be cleansed so that his will may be done in us too; and the next petition, for daily bread, shows how embodied people can approach angelic freedom from need by contentment with little.
26. 1169“Give us bread” asks for necessities, not for the long list of luxuries for which people mine, trade, and sail; what nature owes the body is only bread, and luxury is the enemy’s weed among the wheat.
27. 1171Like a serpent that cannot be drawn back once its head is in a crevice, pleasure must be stopped at its first entry; once it enters through taste, it leads to gourmandizing, luxury, and greed that ruins others.
28. 1173Gluttony ends in licentiousness; bread is enough, seasoned by a good conscience and by hunger, and earned by the toil of keeping the commandments.
29. 1175“Today” teaches that life lasts a day and forbids anxiety about tomorrow: God who gives the day gives what it needs, as he feeds ravens and eagles, while the rich fool lost all in one night; we should ask today for bread and seek above all the kingdom.
30. 1177Homily 4 ends: seek the kingdom first. Homily 5 opens on “Forgive us our debts”: forgiving belongs to God alone, so one who forgives imitates and in a way becomes like God, while one who exacts his debts harshly cuts himself off from God’s mercy.
31. 1179The petition gives the one who prays boldness and makes him his own judge: if we forgive, God has already forgiven; daringly, Gregory says the order is reversed, and we may ask God to imitate our forgiveness, in proportion to his greater power.
32. 1181Gregory lists humanity’s debts to God — desertion from its Maker, slavery to sin, the ruin of the divine image, the prodigal’s squandering — so that no one should pray as though his conscience were clean; he raises the question how the blameless can ask for forgiveness.
33. 1183Even the saints must pray for forgiveness, as sharers in Adam’s nature and fall; praying toward the east recalls the lost paradise, and like the prodigal we confess our condition, clothed in garments of skin and fig leaves instead of the divine robe.
34. 1185All die in Adam and so share his need of forgiveness; but each person’s own conscience suffices, for no one is sinless in sight, hearing, taste, or touch, the “windows” through which death enters the soul.
35. 1187Sins of thought and will are countless, and no one is pure; so all must ask for forgiveness, but the prayer is useless unless we forgive others, since the creditor who imprisons his debtor and charges interest condemns himself.
36. 1189The parable of the unforgiving servant shows how small our neighbours’ debts are beside ours to God; the master who rages at a slave should remember that slavery comes from power, not nature, since God gave humans dominion only over animals, and that he himself has deserted his own divine Master.
37. 1191We must be able to say truly that we have forgiven; “temptation” and “the evil one” are names for the same enemy, who rules the world, so to pray against temptation is to ask to be kept apart from the world, as one who fears war or the sea keeps away from them.
38. 1193Gregory closes the fifth homily and the series with the prayer to be kept from the evils of life and delivered from the evil one, and a Trinitarian doxology.