In a way it’s rather comforting to hear in today’s Gospel that the Apostles needed help to learn to pray. They had been chosen by Our Lord to be His closest helpers and companions and yet they felt that they didn’t know how to pray properly. They saw Jesus praying; they also knew that St. John the Baptist had given his own followers some careful guidance in prayer; and so they asked Our Lord to teach them how to pray as well.

    This is the origin of the “Lord’s Prayer”, the very prayer which Jesus Himself taught His followers to use. Both St. Matthew and St. Luke record this for us. St. Matthew’s version is slightly longer, and is the one with which we are familiar. St. Luke’s, which we hear today, is more condensed and omits two of the invocations with which we are familiar. This is typical of St. Luke’s practice of abridging and adapting texts which a non-Jewish audience, for which he was writing, might find difficult to understand.

    How does St. Luke’s shortened version of Our Lord’s prayer help us to understand it any better? The phrases he leaves out are in a sense contained in those he writes down for us. For instance, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven”, which St. Matthew alone records for us, completes and expands the meaning of “Thy kingdom come”, which is the only phrase St. Luke gives us here. Similarly, Luke omits “deliver us from evil”, as being an expansion of “Do not put us to the test”, or to put it more familiarly—”Lead us not into temptation”.

    This gives us five invocations in St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer: the first two are devoted entirely to God and His glory, the final three to our own special needs.

1. Father, may your name be held holy. The first invocation opens with the title “Father”. God is not simply the supreme Being and Creator, but He is also a loving parent, who encourages us to address Him with a name that inspires trust, confidence and love for Him in return. We also pray for the fulfilment of the First Commandment which emphasises the uniqueness and infinite holiness of God, and asks that all creation may give Him the honour due to Him as God.

2. Your kingdom come. This invocation is a prayer for God’s reign to be complete in every part of creation. It is easy to see how this includes the invocation which follows it in our more familiar version of the prayer: “Thy Will be done on earth as it is in heaven”. Wherever God reigns, there His will must be done. We pray here for every person who ignores or opposes God’s Will to acknowledge Him with joy and gratitude, and for ourselves to be fully conscious at all times of His Will and to put it into action.

3. Give us each day our daily bread. We now turn to our own needs. First we pray for our sustenance, for all that we need in order to live.

4. Forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive each one who is in debt to us. This invocation is one of the most important and difficult to put into effect. We note also that it is the only one that contains a condition. We ask God’s forgiveness for our sins only in as much as we forgive those who sin against us, who are therefore “in debt” to us. Our Lord frequently tells us in His parables about the need to cancel others’ debts to us if we wish our own to be cancelled by God.

5. Do not put us to the test. This invocation implies the familiar final phrase “but deliver us from evil”, even though it is not explicitly included here. It is a prayer for deliverance from all forms of spiritual danger that might imperil our souls and our eternal salvation. It might seem at first that we are almost accusing God of leading us into temptation, but this is to misinterpret a form of speech that Jews would find quite natural. We should understand this part of the prayer to mean that we are asking God never to abandon us but to grant us all we need to avoid damnation.