Posted on: 5th February 2026

Jesus lived the prayer before he gave it to his disciples, and so to us. Your will not mine be done, Jesus cried in Gethsemane: Your will be done on earth, says the prayer. Give us today our daily bread, says the prayer: Jesus sees the crowd hungry and leads the disciples in giving them bread and fishes to eat.  Forgive us as we forgive: so Jesus prayed, Father forgive the crucifiers who didn’t know what they could have known, for, as Pilate said, This man is innocent.

To pray this prayer, is saying the words enough? Does it not call us to live it, and thus to be shaped by it? Living the prayer takes us on the road of being stirred, reformed and informed by Jesus’ living of it. Are we praying to get things, or is our praying an apprenticeship of living, learning with and from Jesus to be givers, sharing the self-giving generosity of the Father and the Son?   

Some of us say this prayer, rote-learnt from childhood, so often, so easily, that it has no critical bite, so we hear no reiteration of Jesus’ call to deny self and take up our cross to follow him.  

Take very seriously this prayer’s first word – Our. It invites, even commands us, to live the generosity of the Father. I may find myself in a private spiritual place even when a people all around me are saying the words together in church – but the prayer itself, with its clear initial ‘Our…’ speaks against any retreat into ‘solitary Christianity’. There is no ‘I, me, mine’ in this model prayer, rather it is all along, ‘We, us, our’ – because the one God is Father of all.    

We pray, Give us this day’s bread, and, feeling peckish, adjust it to, Give me… So the nagging stomach undermines the ‘us’ and selfishness deafens us to our Father’s call, which is voiced by the seriously hungry  (Isa 58.7)

The name of ‘Our Father’  is to be hallowed, that is, respected and made credible in the eyes of all. When we retreat into the self, religiously, or materially, we contribute to making the world as it largely is, a world where it is hard to believe that we all have one Father, or that his will is really to be done ‘on earth as in heaven’. Faced by this God-unhallowing world, the hopeful wise way forward is to pray, Forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us. Not forgive my sins and get me to heaven, but bring us into receiving and passing on the Father’s forgiving, responding to its being as wide as the sea, and as powerful as new creation, so that we are given a share in the hard work of forgiving as much as the freedom of finding forgiveness. Enjoy the power and glory of life, living this We-Us project, with and because of Our Father.