Winter
Books
Say
it in secret: Our Father, Jesus’ subversive prayer
THE PRAYER THAT JESUS
TAUGHT US
by Michael H. Crosby
Orbis Books, 202 pages,
$19
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Reviewed by GERALD M.
FAGIN
Reciting the Our Father reverently takes about 20 seconds. In
The Prayer That Jesus Taught Us, Capuchin Fr. Michael Crosby makes clear
that understanding its subversive meaning and living out its implications takes
a lifetime. Author and activist Michael Crosby returns to a reflection he began
25 years earlier in Thy Will Be Done: Praying the Our Father as Subversive
Activity, but now, as he admits, with more nuanced biblical scholarship
that situates the prayer in the broader social context of Matthew’s
gospel. The thesis remains that the Lord’s Prayer is not simply a pious
formula unconnected to our social and political lives, but rather a challenging
judgment on injustice wherever it is found, either in society or in the
church.
Crosby presents Jesus’ prayer as the “original
anti-establishment household prayer.” Early Christian house churches
understood themselves as alternatives to the Temple and the pagan world of the
Empire, alternatives “struggling to be just in an unjust world.”
Crosby proposes that one reason that Matthew’s Jesus advises his followers
to say the prayer in secret was that it articulated subversive alternatives to
the injustices of the surrounding society and culture. Throughout the book,
Crosby envisions how this same critique of unjust structures must be made of
our contemporary social order. Jesus’ prayer calls us to create
communities of justice and compassion.
Crosby offers a rich reflection on each phrase of Jesus’
prayer by exploring the contexts of the New Testament Mediterranean world and
of our contemporary world. It is a difficult book to summarize, rich in
experiences and applications, but perhaps a few examples will be an invitation
to explore the book on one’s own.
In analyzing “Hallowed Be Your Name,” he contrasts
holiness as separation with holiness as mercy. Jesus rejected the system of
exclusion based on purity and cleanliness and replaced it with a ministry of
inclusion based on justice and compassion. The ministry of Jesus sets an agenda
of justice both in the church and in society that will make God’s name
holy.
Crosby further contrasts God’s kingdom with the values of
religion and society and interprets Jesus’ use of parables as advocating a
way of justice that means the creation of a new social order. He dissociates
God’s will from any form of violence and identifies it with the work of
compassion and justice. Both in society and in the church, God wills that the
basic rights of all should be fostered.
Crosby puts the first three petitions of Jesus’ prayer in the
context of the phrase “on earth as it is in heaven.” God’s reign
is not simply a future reality, but a present experience of healing,
reconciliation, justice and compassion. Globalization and environmental
degradation challenge this reign, but it will come about through God’s
power manifested in Jesus and shared with us.
The last three petitions for daily bread, forgiveness and freedom
from evil and temptation present their own challenges to our contemporary
world. How do we pray for our daily bread in a world devastated by hunger? This
petition reminds us of our absolute dependence on God and our interdependence
on each other. It calls us to a compassionate heart that recognizes needs and
moves to respond to them.
Crosby interprets the pleas for forgiveness of our debts in the
light of Matthew’s parable of the reign of God and the merciless official
(Matthew 18: 23-34). The king subverts the existing order by not only forgiving
the official’s debt, but also releasing him from slavery. This
“forgiveness from the heart” invokes the principles and practices of
jubilee, of periodic freeing of slaves and forgiveness of debt. It raises
searching questions about what this would look like if applied to contemporary
economic policies and structures.
Finally, “temptation” and “evil” are connected
to power structures and possessions that promote a process of seeking, finding,
selling and buying at odds with the gospel call to conversion. Crosby ends
where he began, with a call for new households of faith that will be prophetic
communities that speak and act for justice.
New Testament scholars may well critique some of his exegesis and
question whether his own agenda has at times shaped his reading of the biblical
text. Some readers may have trouble adjusting to his recasting the language of
Father into the language of patron/client. But his radical reading of the
Jesus’ prayer offers a new hermeneutic for approaching this gospel and, in
particular, the prayer that Christians so often repeat in private piety and in
communal worship. This is a demanding book both in its content and in its
challenge to our living the gospel today. In fact, if people take Crosby’s
reading of the Jesus prayer seriously, many Christians will either have to
change their priorities in a capitalist society or find a less subversive
prayer to recite. Some, of course, may simply prefer to return to the early
church’s practice of reciting it only in secret.
Jesuit Fr. Gerald M. Fagin is associate professor of theology
and spirituality at Loyola Institute for Ministry, Loyola University, New
Orleans.
National Catholic Reporter, October 4,
2002
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