Jesus of Nazareth

by Joseph Ratzinger

  The process that was brought to completion in the Incarnation had begun with the giving of the divine name. When we come to consider Jesus' high-priestly prayer, in fact, we will see that he presents himself there as the new Moses: "I have manifested thy name to...men" (Jn 17:6). What began at the burning bush in the Sinai desert comes to fulfillment at the burning bush of the Cross. God has now truly made himself accessible in his incarnate Son. He has become a part of our world; he has, as it were, put himself into our hands.

  This enables us to understand what the petition for the sanctification of the divine name means. The name of God can now be misused and so God himself can be sullied. The name of God can be co-opted for our purposes and so the image of God can also be distorted. The more he gives himself into our hands, the more we can obscure his light; the closer he is, the more our misuse can disfigure him. Martin Buber once said that when we consider all the ways in which God's name has been so shamefully misused, we almost despair of uttering it ourselves. But to keep it silent would be an outright refusal of the love with which God comes to us. Buber says that our only recourse is to try as reverently as possible to pick up and purify the polluted fragments of the divine name. But there is no way we can do that alone. All we can do is plead with him not to allow the light of his name to be destroyed in this world.

  Moreover, this plea--that he himself take charge of the sanctification of his name, protect the wonderful mystery of his accessibility to us, and constantly assert his true identity as opposed to our distortion of it--this plea, of course, is always an occasion for us to examine our consciences seriously. How do I treat God's holy name? Do I stand in reverence before the mystery of the burning bush, before his incomprehensible closeness, even to the point of his presence in the Eucharist, where he truly gives himself entirely into our hands? Do I take care that God's holy companionship with us will draw us up into his purity and sanctity, instead of dragging him down into the filth?

  THY KINGDOM COME

  In connection with the petition for God's Kingdom, we recall all our earlier considerations concerning the term "Kingdom of God." With this petition, we are acknowledging first and foremost the primacy of God. Where God is absent, nothing can be good. Where God is not seen, man and the world fall to ruin. This is what the Lord means when he says to "seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well" (Mt 6:33). These words establish an order of priorities for human action, for how we approach everyday life.

  This is not a promise that we will enter the Land of Plenty on condition that we are devout or that we are somehow attracted to the Kingdom of God. This is not an automatic formula for a well-functioning world, not a utopian vision of a classless society in which everything works out well of its own accord, simply because there is no private property. Jesus does not give us such simple recipes. What he does do, though--as we saw earlier--is to establish an absolutely decisive priority. For "Kingdom of God" means "dominion of God," and this means that his will is accepted as the true criterion. His will establishes justice, and part of justice is that we give God his just due and, in so doing, discover the criterion for what is justly due among men.

  The order of priorities that Jesus indicates for us here may remind us of the Old Testament account of Solomon's first prayer after his accession to office. The story goes that the Lord appeared to the young king in a dream at night and gave him leave to make a request that the Lord promised to grant. A classic dream motif of mankind! What does Solomon ask for? "Give thy servant therefore a listening heart to govern thy people, that I may discern between good and evil" (1 Kings 3:9). God praises him because instead of asking for wealth, fortune, honor, or the death of his enemies, or even long life (2 Chron 1:11), tempting as that would have been, he asked for the truly essential thing: a listening heart, the ability to discern between good and evil. And for this reason Solomon receives those other things as well.

  With the petition "thy Kingdom come" (not "our kingdom"), the Lord wants to show us how to pray and order our action in just this way. The first and essential thing is a listening heart, so that God, not we, may reign. The Kingdom of God comes by way of a listening heart. That is its path. And that is what we must pray for again and again.

  The encounter with Christ makes this petition even deeper and more concrete. We have seen that Jesus is the Kingdom of God in person. The Kingdom of God is present wherever he is present. By the same token, the request for a listening heart becomes a request for communion with Jesus Christ, the petition that we increasingly become "one" with him (Gal 3:28). What is requested in this petition is the true following of Christ, which becomes communion with him and makes us one body with him. Reinhold Schneider has expressed this powerfully: "The life of this Kingdom is Christ's continuing life in those who are his own. In the heart that is no longer nourished by the vital power of Christ, the Kingdom ends; in the heart that is touched and transformed by it, the Kingdom begins.... The roots of the indestructible tree seek to penetrate into each heart. The Kingdom is one. It exists solely through the Lord who is its life, its strength, and its center" (Das Vaterunser, pp. 31f.). To pray for the Kingdom of God is to say to Jesus: Let us be yours, Lord! Pervade us, live in us; gather scattered humanity in your body, so that in you everything may be subordinated to God and you can then hand over the universe to the Father, in order that "God may be all in all" (1 Cor 15:28).

  THY WILL BE DONE ON EARTH AS IT IS IN HEAVEN

  Two things are immediately clear from the words of this petition: God has a will with and for us and it must become the measure of our willing and being; and the essence of "heaven" is that it is where God's will is unswervingly done. Or, to put it in somewhat different terms, where God's will is done is heaven. The essence of heaven is oneness with God's will, the oneness of will and truth. Earth becomes "heaven" when and insofar as God's will is done there; and it is merely "earth," the opposite of heaven, when and insofar as it withdraws from the will of God. This is why we pray that it may be on earth as it is in heaven--that earth may become "heaven."

  But what is "God's will"? How do we recognize it? How can we do it? The Holy Scriptures work on the premise that man has knowledge of God's will in his inmost heart, that anchored deeply within us there is a participation in God's knowing, which we call conscience (cf., for example, Rom 2:15). But the Scriptures also know that this participation in the Creator's knowledge, which he gave us in the context of our creation "according to his likeness," became buried in the course of history. It can never be completely extinguished, but it has been covered over in many ways, like a barely flickering flame, all too often at risk of being smothered under the ash of all the prejudices that have piled up within us. And that is why God has spoken to us anew, uttering words in history that come to us from outside and complete the interior knowledge that has become all too hidden.

  The heart of this historically situated "complementary teaching" contained in biblical Revelation is the Decalogue given on Mount Sinai. As we have seen, this is by no means abolished by the Sermon on the Mount, nor is it reduced to an "old law," but it is simply developed further in a way that allows its full depth and grandeur to shine forth in all its purity. The Decalogue is not, as we have seen, some burden imposed upon man from the outside. It is a revelation of the essence of God himself--to the extent that we are capable of receiving it--and hence it is an exegesis of the truth of our being. The notes of our existence are deciphered for us so that we can read them and translate them into life. God's will flows from his being and therefore guides us into the truth of our being, liberating us from self-destruction through falsehood.

  Because our being comes from God, we are able, despite all of the defilement that holds us back, to set out on the way to God's will. The Old Testament concept of the "just man" meant exactly that: to live from the word of God, and so from his will, and to find the path that leads into harmony with this will.

  Now, when Jesus speaks to us of Go
d's will and of heaven, the place where God's will is fulfilled, the core of what he says is again connected with his mission. At Jacob's well, he says to the disciples who bring him food: "My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish his work" (Jn 4:34). What he means is that his oneness with the Father's will is the foundation of his life. The unity of his will with the Father's will is the core of his very being. Above all, though, what we hear in this petition of the Our Father is an echo of Jesus' own passionate struggle in dialogue with his Father on the Mount of Olives: "My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt"--"My Father, if this cannot pass unless I drink it, thy will be done" (Mt 26:39, 42). When we come to consider Jesus' Passion, we will need to focus explicitly on this prayer, in which Jesus gives us a glimpse into his human soul and its "becoming-one" with the will of God.

  The author of the Letter to the Hebrews finds the key to the heart of the mystery of Jesus in the agony on the Mount of Olives (cf. Heb 5:7). Basing himself on this glimpse into Jesus' soul, he uses Psalm 40 to interpret the mystery. He reads the Psalm thus: "Sacrifices and offerings thou hast not desired, but a body hast thou prepared for me.... Then I said, 'Yes, I have come to do thy will, O God,' as it is written of me in the roll of the book" (Heb 10:5ff.; cf. Ps 40:7-9). Jesus' whole existence is summed up in the words "Yes, I have come to do thy will." It is only against this background that we fully understand what he means when he says, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me" (Jn 4:34).

  And in this light, we now understand that Jesus himself is "heaven" in the deepest and truest sense of the word--he in whom and through whom God's will is wholly done. Looking at him, we realize that left to ourselves we can never be completely just: The gravitational pull of our own will constantly draws us away from God's will and turns us into mere "earth." But he accepts us, he draws us up to himself, into himself, and in communion with him we too learn God's will. Thus, what we are ultimately praying for in this third petition of the Our Father is that we come closer and closer to him, so that God's will can conquer the downward pull of our selfishness and make us capable of the lofty height to which we are called.

  GIVE US THIS DAY OUR DAILY BREAD

  The fourth petition of the Our Father appears to us as the most "human" of all of the petitions: Though the Lord directs our eyes to the essential, to the "one thing necessary," he also knows about and acknowledges our earthly needs. While he says to his disciples, "Do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat" (Mt 6:25), he nevertheless invites us to pray for our food and thus to turn our care over to God. Bread is "the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands," but the earth bears no fruit unless it receives sunlight and rain from above. This coming together of cosmic powers, outside our control, stands opposed to the temptation that comes to us through our pride to give ourselves life purely through our own power. Such pride makes man violent and cold. It ends up destroying the earth. It cannot be otherwise, because it is contrary to the truth that we human beings are oriented toward self-transcendence and that we become great and free and truly ourselves only when we open up to God. We have the right and the duty to ask for what we need. We know that if even earthly fathers give their children good things when they ask for them, God will not refuse us the good things that he alone can give (cf. Lk 11:9-13).

  In his exposition of the Lord's Prayer, Saint Cyprian draws our attention to two important aspects of the fourth petition. He has already underscored the far-reaching significance of the word our in his discussion of the phrase "our Father," and here likewise he points out that the reference is to "our" bread. Here, too, we pray in the communion of the disciples, in the communion of the children of God, and for this reason no one may think only of himself. A further step follows: we pray for our bread--and that means we also pray for bread for others. Those who have an abundance of bread are called to share. In his exposition of the First Letter to the Corinthians--of the scandal Christians were causing in Corinth--Saint John Chrysostom emphasizes that "every bite of bread in one way or another is a bite of the bread that belongs to everyone, of the bread of the world." Father Kolvenbach adds: "If we invoke our Father over the Lord's Table and at the celebration of the Lord's Supper, how can we exempt ourselves from declaring our unshakable resolve to help all men, our brothers, to obtain their daily bread?" (Der osterliche Weg, p. 98). By expressing this petition in the first person plural, the Lord is telling us: "Give them something to eat yourselves" (Mk 6:37).

  Cyprian makes a second important observation: Anyone who asks for bread for today is poor. This prayer presupposes the poverty of the disciples. It presupposes that there are people who have renounced the world, its riches, and its splendor for the sake of faith and who no longer ask for anything beyond what they need to live. "It is right for the disciple to pray for the necessities of life only for today, since he is forbidden to worry about tomorrow. Indeed, he would be contradicting himself if he wanted to live long in this world, since we pray instead that God's Kingdom will come quickly" (De dominica oratione 19; CSEL III, 1, p. 281). There must always be people in the Church who leave everything in order to follow the Lord, people who depend radically on God, on his bounty by which we are fed--people, then, who in this way present a sign of faith that shakes us out of our heedlessness and the weakness of our faith.

  We cannot ignore the people who trust so totally in God that they seek no security other than him. They encourage us to trust God--to count on him amid life's great challenges. At the same time, this poverty, motivated entirely by commitment to God and his Kingdom, is also an act of solidarity with the world's poor, an act that historically has created new standards of value and a new willingness for service and for commitment on behalf of others.

  Moreover, the prayer for bread just for today also evokes Israel's forty years of wandering in the desert, when the people lived on manna--on the bread that God sent from heaven. Each Israelite was to gather only as much as was needed for that particular day; only on the sixth day was it permissible to gather enough of the gift for two days, so as to be able to keep the Sabbath (Ex 16:16-22). The community of the disciples, which draws new life from God's goodness every day, relives in a new way the experience of the wandering People of God, whom God fed even in the desert.

  The petition for bread just for today thus opens up vistas that reach beyond the horizon of the nourishment that is needed day by day. It presupposes that the community of his closest disciples followed the Lord in a radical way, renouncing worldly possessions and adhering to the way of those who "considered abuse suffered for the Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt" (Heb 11:26). The eschatological horizon comes into view here--pointing to a future that is weightier and more real than the present.

  With that we touch upon one of the words of this petition that sounds quite innocuous in our usual translations: Give us this day our daily bread. "Daily" renders the Greek word epiousios. Referring to this word, one of the great masters of the Greek language--the theologian Origen (d. ca. 254)--says that it does not occur anywhere else in Greek, but that it was coined by the Evangelists. Since Origen's time, it is true, an instance of this word has been found in a papyrus dating from the fifth century after Christ. But this one example alone is insufficient to give us any certainty about the meaning of this word, which is at any rate very unusual and rare. We have to depend on etymologies and the study of the context.

  Today there are two principal interpretations. One maintains that the word means "what is necessary for existence." On this reading, the petition would run as follows: Give us today the bread that we need in order to live. The other interpretation maintains that the correct translation is "bread for the future," for the following day. But the petition to receive tomorrow's bread today does not seem to make sense when looked at in the light of the disciple's existence. The reference to the future would make more sense if the object of the petition were the bread that really does b
elong to the future: the true manna of God. In that case, it would be an eschatological petition, the petition for an anticipation of the world to come, asking the Lord to give already "today" the future bread, the bread of the new world--himself. On such a reading, the petition would acquire an eschatological meaning. Some ancient translations hint in this direction. An example is Saint Jerome's Vulgate, which translates the mysterious word epiousios as supersubstantialis (i.e., super-substantial), thereby pointing to the new, higher "substance" that the Lord gives us in the Holy Sacrament as the true bread of our life.

  The fact is that the Fathers of the Church were practically unanimous in understanding the fourth petition of the Our Father as a eucharistic petition; in this sense the Our Father figures in the Mass liturgy as a eucharistic table-prayer (i.e., "grace"). This does not remove the straightforward earthly sense of the disciples' petition that we have just shown to be the text's immediate meaning. The Fathers consider different dimensions of the saying that begins as a petition for today's bread for the poor, but insofar as it directs our gaze to the Father in heaven who feeds us, it recalls the wandering People of God, who were fed by God himself. Read in the light of Jesus' great discourse on the bread of life, the miracle of the manna naturally points beyond itself to the new world in which the Logos--the eternal Word of God--will be our bread, the food of the eternal wedding banquet.