One of the most familiar Bible passages is the "Lord's Prayer," which occurs in both the "The Sermon On The Mount" in Matthew 6:9-13 and "the Sermon on the Plain" in Luke 11:1-4. Although it is not immediately obvious to most people who pray this prayer, economic issues are at the heart of the prayer.
Even though every Christian church uses the Lord's Prayer, following Matthew's version rather than Luke's, there are variations in the exact wording.
Some churches retain the archaic English "thy" and "thine." Protestant churches typically end the prayer with the phrase, "For thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory." Roman Catholic practice omits this phrase.
The most significant difference between various churches is that some churches use the language of "debts," some use "trespasses," and some use "sins."
When Jesus taught his followers to pray for daily bread and forgiveness of debts, it was more than a prayer for spiritual sustenance and forgiveness of sins. He was first of all referring to real bread and real debts.
The most basic meaning of the Greek word for "debts" is financial. This meaning is consistent with the approach of Jesus to the social and ethical injustices of his society against the poor and dispossessed. In the prayer, he makes explicit the need for real bread and for payment of debt.
The prayer cannot be understood without also seeing it in terms of the Kingdom of God, which does not refer to an afterlife in Heaven. It refers to the expectation of the rule of God, in which God will end oppression, poverty, and suffering on earth. "Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven."
A prayer with the words: "Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors" loses the economic foundation of the prayer when "bread" and "debt" become spiritual metaphors, with no connection to real food and economic debt.
For Jesus's audience, bread and debt were much more than metaphors. Hunger and debt were constant realities of life for an underfed, overtaxed population. Much of the misery of the peasants and beggars in Palestine resulted from debt. The peasants had to turn over much of what they grew to the king or other members of the urban elite class who claimed proprietary rights to whatever the peasants grew on the land. As a result, many of the peasant farmers were hopelessly in debt. Many of the beggars had been forced off their land by failure to pay their debts.
Throughout the gospels, Jesus spoke about the real human needs of people in a society divided between the haves and the have-nots. He saw the vast gap between the rich and the poor, and criticized the rich for their exploitation and oppression of the poor. He also condemned a religious system which excluded whole categories of people from God's blessing, by labeling them as "unclean."
He saw firsthand the extent of hunger, poverty, sickness, and suffering endured by most of the population. He saw how the rich landowners grew rich at the expense of the poor. He saw people who were homeless because they had been driven off their land by high rents and taxes. He saw people living in poverty because the largest percentage of what they grew or made or caught was confiscated by taxes. He knew what it was to live under Roman occupation, where Roman soldiers could force people to do almost anything. He saw how the Temple system collaborated with the Roman occupiers to bleed the people of their money and their power.
It is also true that the words of Jesus reflect Aramaic tradition, which used "debt" as a metaphor for sin. Jesus spoke Aramaic. Aramaic writings show that the language of "debt" and "debtors" was used regularly for "sin" and "sinners." Matthew's version of the Lord's Prayer preserves this Aramaic idiom. Here and elsewhere in Matthew, Jesus is clearly using the double meaning of debts to refer to both real money debts and sins.
In Luke, the prayer uses the word "sin" rather than "debt." This loses the financial reality behind the metaphor and obscures the underlying concern with real bread and real debts.
To pray as Jesus intended, Christians need to retrieve the original meanings of words that have been treated as spiritual metaphors. The cost of daily bread is especially significant in an era of global food shortages and rising prices for basic staples such as wheat, rice, and corn. And forgiveness of debts has particular meaning for those facing foreclosure and bankruptcy because of debts they cannot repay.
Jesus intended his words to refer to suffering and injustice in his own society. His prayer for bread and debts referred to real bread and forgiveness of real financial debts.
Kalinda Rose Stevenson, Ph.D. What if most of what you believe about Jesus and money is not true? Don't let Bible study lessons based on mistranslations and biblical urban legends fill you with guilt and confusion about money. I have written a book about 8 sayings of Jesus, Going Broke With Jesus:How Heroic Stories Intended To Liberate The Poor Become Biblical Urban Legends About The Evils Of Money to show how often Christian teaching misunderstands the true intentions of what Jesus said about money. Get your copy at www.GoingBrokeWithJesus.com.
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