“And when you pray, you are not to be as the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners, in order to be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, and when you have shut your door, pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will repay you.

“And when you are praying, do not use meaningless repetition, as the Gentiles do, for they suppose that they will be heard for their many words. Therefore do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need, before you ask Him.

“Pray, then, in this way: ‘Our Father who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy name…’” (Matthew 6:5-9)

The Lord’s Prayer is divine tonic – spiritual medicine for the soul. It is our Lord Jesus Christ’s heavenly prescription against distorted expressions of religious activity. It is both the remedy against religion-as-acting (appearing pious and devout to impress others) and religion-as-magic (attempting to manipulate the divine through technique). In contrast to these two spiritual diseases, the Lord’s Prayer calls us to religion-as-relationship.

The immediate context of the Lord’s Prayer sheds insight into its divine purpose. Before Jesus calls us to “pray, then, in this way” (Mt. 6:9a), he exposes two erroneous ways of praying – one Jewish, one Gentile. He offers his prayer – the Lord’s Prayer – as a remedy to wrong praying. Before Jesus teaches us how to pray, he teaches us how not to pray.

Religion-As-Acting

Jesus exposes hypocrisy as a distortion of true religion. Jesus was particularly hard on this sin throughout the Gospels. He despises religion that is only skin-deep.

A hypocrite is an actor and not a practitioner; his religion is merely external. A hypocrite hopes to misrepresent himself by appearing to be something that he is really not. He possesses no integrity – there is no real connection between his inner and outer life. By being untrue to others, he is also untrue to God and to himself. Tragically, his attempt to present a false front in order to deceive others ultimately leads his own self-deception.

The hypocrite’s motive is simple: he plays a role “in order to be seen by men.” The goal of his religion is not to produce authentic piety but to establish a pious reputation. The hypocrite desires the approval and affirmation of others, and if he plays his cards right, he will receive what he seeks – for God will give him what he wants, the applause of men.

His external actions may win him a godly reputation among other people, but they do not fool God, “who is in secret” and “who sees in secret.” Ultimately, the hypocrite demonstrates that God’s evaluation is not nearly as important to him as human affirmation.

According to Jesus, this expression of twisted religion was a particularly Jewish problem. He refers to the Jewish custom of pausing from one’s work at 3:00 pm to offer prayers in conjunction with the evening sacrifice in the temple. Jesus does not condemn this practice of set prayer. Instead, Jesus condemns those who practice this prayer in an extraordinarily visible way to attract human attention. People who used this public prayer time to enhance their personal reputation for piety abused the very purpose of prayer. “Prayer, supposedly the most intimate expression of love to God, has turned into its very opposite, preoccupation with oneself.”[1]

The hypocrite not only distorts the purpose of prayer, but, in the process, presents a distorted and demeaning view of God. The hypocrite’s God is superficial, concerned only with externals. The hypocrite’s God is not the mysteriously wondrous God “who is in secret” and “who sees in secret” but a shallow God who is interested only in outward performance.

Religion that is only skin deep may seem beautiful for a time, but if its beauty fails to penetrate below the surface, it is soon exposed as superficial and fading. If the human heart remains untouched by religious practices, then the practices have failed to produce their intended result. Honoring God with our lips while our heart remains far away is vain worship (Mt. 15:7-9). Jesus does not applaud (or even tolerate) such a distortion. Indeed, he reserves his greatest words of condemnation for religion-as-acting.

The Cure for Religious Posturing: Solitude and Stillness

Like a good physician, Jesus does not simply diagnose the disease; he offers a cure. In order to prevent the spread of hypocrisy, Jesus calls us to seek solitude and stillness. Learning to seek God in this way distances us from religion-as-acting. Through solitude and stillness we learn to bask in God’s approval rather than human praise. We come to know God not by what we do, but in who we are. Over time, this practice transforms the heart.

When Jesus speaks of “your inner room,” his emphasis is not on a place but on the qualities provided by the place he mentions, most notably, solitude and stillness. Since “most Galilean homes had one or at the most two rooms”[2] his “contemporaries could only have understood Jesus’ injunction to enter one’s own room and shut the door as meaning solitary prayer: almost no one but emperors, noblemen or the very rich had anything but a one-room residence.”[3] Jesus’ emphasis on “the inner room” “graphically conveys the extreme measures one should go to seek God’s presence, rather than the admiration of others.”[4]

In a world full of continually busy and harried people whose frenetic pace of life is so-called “proof” that they are successful and important people, Jesus calls us to set apart time for our soul. This is not unique to Jesus. Every great spiritual teacher has called for this time of withdrawal. Time alone with God is a way of honoring God’s work in our lives.

Solitude begins with a time and place for God, and God alone. If we really believe not only that God exists but also that God is actively present in our lives — healing, teaching, and guiding — we need to set aside a time and space to give God our undivided attention.[5]

The “inner room” is not simply a place of solitude, but a place of stillness and quiet.

It was… the understanding of early Christians that Jesus referred to the “room” symbolically as a kind of private withdrawal, the prayerful solitude on which his own interior life was based. “We pray in our rooms,” observed a 4th-century teacher, “when we withdraw our hearts completely from the tumult and noise of our thoughts and our worries and secretly and intimately offer our prayer to the Lord. We pray with the door shut when, without opening our mouths and in perfect silence, we offer our petitions to the one who pays no attention to words but who looks hard at our hearts.”[6]

Withdrawing from the world’s noise does not necessarily free us from our own inner chatter. The external quiet often exposes our own inner disquiet – disquiet so alarming that we make every excuse to keep busy in order to neglect it.

As soon as we are alone, without people to talk with, books to read, TV to watch, or phone calls to make, an inner chaos opens up in us. This chaos can be so disturbing and so confusing that we can hardly wait to get busy again. Entering a private room and shutting the door, therefore, does not mean that we immediately shut out all our inner doubts, anxieties, fears, bad memories, unresolved conflicts, angry feelings, and impulsive desires. On the contrary, when we have removed our outer distractions, we often find that our inner distractions manifest themselves to us in full force. We often use the outer distractions to shield ourselves from the interior noises. It is thus not surprising that we have a difficult time being alone. The confrontation with our inner conflicts can be too painful for us to endure. This makes the discipline of solitude all the more important.[7]

Alone, in solitude and stillness, we abide with an audience of One. It is the desire for the sole approval and delight of this audience of One that solitude nurtures within us. An unhealthy regard for outward appearance and human approval is squelched by our time alone with God. We no longer perform for a human audience. We seek to be present to the God “who sees in secret” and “who is in secret.” We pray “for God’s eyes only.” Like the intimate moments shared between married couples – moments not meant for public disclosure but simply treasured exclusively by two – the moments between God and the seeker are deeply intimate and personal.

This solitary focus on God leads to deep inner transformation. The Lord’s Prayer is intended by Jesus to be an aid to this process of heart renewal. It is to be prayed individually, personally, intimately, and transformatively – with sustained reflection rather than quick recital. Used in this way, the Lord’s Prayer is not simply a rote prayer that one mechanically chatters off, but a prayer of the heart. It is for this reason that the Didache – the earliest extra-biblical document of Christian practice, circa 90 AD – calls Christians to pray the Lord’s Prayer three times daily (Didache 8:3).

In order for a faith community to resist hypocrisy it must become “a community of solitudes.” Our personal and corporate lives overlap. Corporate worship is empty without personal piety. Likewise, personal piety is barren without corporate expression. Our worship together must be an overflow of our personal worship. When we individually pursue inner transformation and corporately affirm and express this transformation, we become a community of solitudes. As we individually draw closer to God through “inner room” worship, we discover that we are simultaneously drawing closer to God and one another in corporate worship.

James Finley provides a beautiful picture of this movement:

A helpful image in understanding the monastic notion of solitude and union with others is that of a large group of people formed in a circle. As each individual in the circle simultaneously begins to walk slowly toward the center of the circle, he or she discovers that all are inevitably drawing closer to one another. Physically it is impossible for them all to stand at once in the precise center. But in prayer this is possible.[8]

Religion-as-Magic

Jesus exposes religion-as-magic as another distortion of true religion. Jesus forbids us from patterning prayer according to pagan prayer habits. Many Gentiles used complex magical formulas and incantations to gain the attention of distant, unpredictable, and petty gods. Through their arcane techniques they hoped to compel the gods to act on their behalf. Never certain of a favorable response they anxiously offered an endless stream of chatter – hoping the right words and the right amount of words would be spoken to produce their desired result.[9] The perceived pettiness of the gods stirred the pagans to invoke “with meticulous care so as not to offend them… one had to be sure to utter the right name to get the response one wanted.”[10]

Jesus forbids us to prayer like this for one simple reason: God is a gracious and loving Father, not a remote and petty deity. We don’t have to twist God’s arm with meaningless repetitive prayers. An emphasis on right formulas and endless verbosity dishonors the God who is love. We simply need to prayer with simple words (which characterize the Lord’s Prayer) to our heavenly Father who cares for us.

Prayer is not primarily about right technique (the right words said in the right way), length, or repetition. Prayer is primarily about addressing God as a Father who deeply loves us: “your Father knows what you need, before you ask.” We need not worry about right technique; we need to focus on resting in faith and expressing this simply to God. That is why, at its heart, the Lord’s Prayer is a masterpiece of simplicity. It incorporates ordinary language so that we can approach God with “straightforward simplicity, filial trust, joyous assurance, humble boldness, [and] the certainty of being loved.”[11]

Religion-as-Relationship

Before Jesus teaches us how to pray, he teaches us how not to pray. We are not to pray as boastful sons more concerned for our pious reputation than intimacy with God. Likewise, we are not to pray as abandoned orphans who are uncertain of God’s lovingkindness and compensate through feverish appeals for divine aid. Instead, we are to pray as dearly beloved children to a holy loving father. “The efficacy of prayer is therefore not grounded in technique or formulas but in a relationship with God as Father.”[12] We resist these errors through praying the Lord’s Prayer – the positive model Jesus offers to oppose the two errors.

The Lord’s Prayer is an expression of filial trust that is intended to lead to inner transformation. We do not pray out of fear, but as an expression of trust. God knows our needs. God cares more than we do. Through the prayer, we learn how to pray and at the same time are brought into direct contact with God by aligning ourselves with God’s desires.

Contrary to the hypocrite’s desires, it is not our glory that is important. God’s glory and honor must be our chief desire. The first half of the Lord’s Prayer forces us to confront the priority of God’s glory in all things. Hypocrites put their glory first. The Lord’s Prayer calls us to seek God’s glory first.

The pagans are right in one aspect: we are desperately dependent upon divine aid. Yet, contrary to their feverish attempts to compel the divine to action, we can rest assured that God knows our needs and will provide for us – physically, spiritually, and directionally. Out of desperation, the pagans sought their own needs first. The Lord’s Prayer calls us to seek God’s kingdom first, and then all we truly need in life will fall into place: “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you” (Mt. 6:33).

Summary

Prayer is not an external ritual to gain human applause but an intimate occasion with God for personal and holistic transformation. Neither is prayer a technique or formula to manipulate God, but an expression of confident filial trust to a loving Father.

The Lord’s Prayer is Jesus’ heavenly prescription against twisted expressions of religious activity. It is our responsibility to take the medicine our Lord provides. In order for the prayer to be most effective we must not simply recite the words, but slowly and carefully allow each phrase to shape our souls, so that, ultimately, the prayer is a true expression of our hearts.

© Richard J. Vincent, 2005