Vigil lamps in the Cathedral of the Resurrection, or Holy Sepulchre, in Jerusalem.
The Lord’s Prayer
The Lord’s Prayer is an ancient compilation from two Biblical prayers given by Jesus Christ, in the Gospels of St Matthew and St Luke. The translation below is from the Book of Common Prayer (1662).
The Lord’s Prayer
OUR Father, which art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name.
Thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
in earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread;
and forgive us our trespasses
as we forgive them that trespass against us;*
and lead us not into temptation,*
but deliver us from evil. Amen.
* The use of ‘trespasses’ instead of ‘debts’ (which is the word recorded by both Matthew and Luke) is characteristic of the Early Modern English tradition, but also ancient, going back at least to Origen of Alexandria (?184-?254). The word comes from Jesus’s additional remarks on the prayer in the verses that follow: see Matthew 6:9-15.
* Just as Christians are forbidden to seek martyrdom, so too Jesus teaches us to pray that we will not be tested. He himself prayed so before his arrest, in Matthew 26:39. Some translations of the Lord’s Prayer try to ‘improve’ this line by removing the idea that God leads his people into temptation at all. But God does so time and again in Scripture; testing and choosing lies at the very heart of Israel’s story. See the sacrifice of Isaac: Genesis 22:1; Israel’s flight from Egypt: Deuteronomy 8:2; who is on the Lord’s side? in Exodus 32:26; the testing of Job: Job 1:6-12; and of course Christ’s own temptations: Matthew 4:1. God never expects of us more than we can reasonably give: see 1 Corinthians 10:13; and such tests are designed to make us better and stronger: see James 1:2-4. If we make wrong choices, that is our responsibility, and not God’s: see James 1:13. St John Chrysostom therefore wrote of this line in the Lord’s Prayer: “Here, he restrains our conceit, teaching us to beg to be excused from struggles, rather than rush into them – for that makes victory all the more glorious for us, and defeat for the devil all the more laughable.”
Another version, in Old English.
Þu, ure Fæder,* þe eart on heofonum, Sy þin nama gehalgod. Cume ðin rice. Sy ðin wylla on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. Syle us to-daeg urne dæghwamlican hlaf. And forgyf us ure gyltas,* swa swa we forgyfað ðam þe wið us agyltað. And ne læd ðu na us on costnunge. Ac alys us fram yfele. Sy hit swa.*
* This version was translated from the Latin by Elfric of Eynsham (955-1010) in his ‘Homily on the Lord’s Prayer’, collected in ‘Homilies of the Anglo-Saxon Church’ (Vol. 1), edited by Benjamin Thorpe.
* The Anglo-Saxon word ‘gylt’ is variously translated ‘guilt, crime, sin, offence, fault, wrong, debt, fine, forfeiture’ in the Bosworth-Toller Dictionary.