SIMPLY CHRISTIAN - EXCERPTS 4

刚刚读完N.T. WRIGHT所著SIMPLY CHRISTIAN （why christianity makes sense), 很有收获。基督徒只读圣经可能不够，要读一些有名的著作，帮助自己理解。这里我摘了一部分打出来，和大家分享。

4 Prayer 

Our Father in heaven
Hallowed be your name
You8r kingdom come
Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven
Give us this day our daily bread
Forgive us our debts, as we too have forgiven our debtors
Do not bring us to the time of trial
But rescue us from the evil one
For the Kingdom, the power, and the glory are Yours truly,
Now and forever. Amen. 

There are problems deciding what the “real” wording is, not least because the Greek versions of the prayer aren’t quite the same, haven’t always got exact word-by-word English equivalents, and may not reproduce exactly the flavor of the Aramaic prayer Jesus himself probably used. But again, the precise wording doesn’t matter. Don’t allow the surface noise to put you off. 

Go instead for the heart of it. It’s a prayer about God’s honor and glory in heaven – which, as we’ve seen, pretty much sums up what a lot of Christianity is all about. It’s a prayer for bread, for meeting the needs of every day. And it’s a prayer for rescue from evil.  

At every point, the prayer reflects what Jesus himself was doing in his work. It isn’t a general prayer to a generalized “divinity” or “godhead.” It isn’t even a typical Jewish prayer (though almost every element in it can be matched to Jewish prayers of the period)The prayer is , so to speak, Jesus-specific.

It was after all Jesus who was going around saying it was time for the Father’s name to be honored, for his kingdom to come on earth as in heaven. It was Jesus who fed the crowds with bread in the desert. It was Jesus who walked, clear-eyed, into the “time of trial”, the great tribulation that was rushing like a tidal wave upon Israel/>/> and the world, so that by taking its full force on himself others might be spared it. And it was Jesus who was inaugurating God’s kingdom, exercising God’s power, and dying and rising to display God’s glory. The “Lord’s prayer”, as we call it, grows directly out of what Jesus was doing in Galilee/>. And Gethsemane/>, too: the prayer looks directly forward to what he achieved in his death and resurrection.

The prayer is therefore a way of saying to the Father: Jesus has caught me in the net of his good news. The prayer says: I want to be part of his kingdom-movement. I find myself drawn into his heaven-on-earth way of living. I want to be part of his bread-for-the-world agenda, for myself and for others. I need forgiveness for myself – from sin, from debt, from every weight around my neck – and I intend to live with forgiveness in my heart in my own dealings with others. (Notice how remarkable it is that, at the heart of the prayer, we commit ourselves to live in a particular way, a way we find difficult.) And because I live in the real world, where evil is still powerful, I need protecting and rescuing. And, in and through it all, I acknowledge and celebrate the Father’s kingdom, power and glory.

Prayer between Heaven and Earth

Christian prayer is simple, in the sense that a small child can pray the prayer Jesus taught. But it’s hard in the demands it makes as we go on with it. The agony of the Psalmist reached its own climax when Jesus wept and sweated blood in Gethsemane/> (在等待被捕前), struggling with his Father about the final step in his lifelong vocation. That led, in turn, to his hanging in despair on the cross, with the first verse of Psalm 22 (My God, why did you abandon me?) all that was left to say, the God-given way of shouting out his Godforsakenness. When Jesus told us to take up our cross and follow him, he presumably expected that following him would include moments like that for us.

We are called to live at the overlap both of heaven and earth- the earth that has yet to be fully redeemed as one day it will be – and of God’s future in this world’s present. We are caught on a small island near the point where these tectonic plates – heaven and earth, future and present – are scrunching themselves together. Be ready for an earthquake! When Paul writes his greatest chapter about life in the Spirit and the coming renewal of the whole cosmos , he points out at the heart of it all that, while we don’t know how to pray as we ought, the Spirit – God’s very own Spirit – intercedes for us according to God’s will. It is a small passage (Romans 8:26-27), but it’s extremely important both for what it says and for where it says it. Here’s the context, God’s whole creation is groaning in labor pains, says Paul, waiting for the new world to be born from its womb. The church, God’s people in Messiah, find themselves caught up in this, as we, too, groan in longing for redemption. (Paul was talking, a few verses earlier, about shearing the sufferings of the Messiah. Did he, perhaps, have Gethsemane/> in mind?) Christian prayer is at its most characteristic when we find ourselves caught in the overlap of the ages, part of the creation that aches for new birth.

God himself is groaning from within the heart of the world, because God, by the spirit, dwells in our hearts as we resonate with the pain of the world. This is the strange, new getting-in-touch-with-the-living-God, who is doing a new thing, who has come to the heart of the world in Jesus precisely because all is not well and it needs to be put right, who now comes by his Spirit to the place where the world is in pain in order that, in and through us – those who pray in Christ and by the Spirit – the groaning of all creation may come before the Father himself, the heart searcher, the one who works all things together for good for whose who love him. This is what it means to be “conformed to the image of his Son”. This is what it means, within the present age, to share his glory.
…
But the whole point of the Christian story, at the climax of the Jewish story, is that the curtain has been pulled back, the door has been opened form the other side, and like Jacob we have glimpsed a ladder between heaven and earth with messengers going to and fro upon it, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand” says Jesus in Matthew’s gospel, not offering a new way of getting to heaven hereafter, but announcing that the rule of the heaven, the very life of heaven, is now overlapping with earth in a new way – a way which sweeps together all the moments from Jacob’s ladder to Isaiah’s vision , all the patriarchal insights and prophetic dreams, and turns them into a human form, a human voice, a human life, a human death. Jesus is the reason for Option Three; and, with that, prayer has come to age. Heaven and earth have overlapped permanently where he stands, where he hung, where he rises, wherever the fresh wind of his Spirit now blows. Living as a Christian means living in the world as it’s been reshaped by and around Jesus and his Spirit. And that means that Christian prayer is a different kind of thing – different both from the prayer of the pantheist, getting in touch with the inwardness of nature, and that of the Deist, sending out messages across a lonely emptiness.

Christian prayer is about standing at the fault line, being shaped by Jesus who knelt in Gethsemane/>, groaning in travail holding heaven and earth together like someone trying to tie two pieces of rope with people tugging at the other ends to pull them apart. It goes, quite closely, with the triple identity of the true God at which we stared, dazzled, in the previous section of this book. No wonder we give up so easily. No wonder we need help.
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Just as reading scripture in worship is done not to tell the congregation something they didn’t know, but  to praise God for what he’s done, in the same way declaring who YHWH truly is, and what he requires of his covenant people, is indeed a prayer, an act of worship and commitment. It is a means precisely of turning away from oneself and one’s own list of needs, wants, hopes, and fears and placing all one’s attention on God, God’s name, God’s nature, God’s intentions, God’s invitation to love him, God’s glory. Even thinking through the fact that this prayer is a prayer thus highly instructive.

 
to be continued