Christ Lutheran Church
Cleveland, Ohio
May 12, 2024
by: Rev. Dean Kavouras

Easter 7
The Other Lord’s Prayer

Every Christian knows the Lord’s Prayer, the one Jesus taught the disciples in the Sermon on the Mount, but in today’s gospel we find another Lord’s Prayer.

The original Lord’s Prayer is one that we pray over the Communion elements because it is the perfect consecratory prayer: for as scripture says, “They are sanctified by the Word of God and Prayer.” (1 Tim. 4:5)

In the first, we address our God. Not any old god that people might imagine. Not “the man upstairs.” Not the “supreme being.” Certainly not “god our mother.” But the church addresses the one True God. The God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ whose children we become in baptism. “God the Father Almighty” who is the “Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible.” Living, as we do, in post Christian society we need to specify these things.

We go on to pray “Hallowed be thy name,” which means more than the English translation implies. When we pray this petition we pray that we may “sanctify” God’s name, which is a liturgical act! Indicating the highest possible reverence and awe. Hallowed is the English version of the Latin “Sanctus” that we sing three times over, as we join the very angels in heavenly worship. But there is more.

May your kingdom come, that is precisely what happens when we enter this Eucharistic assembly, where God’s miraculous will is done. It is the place and time where we offer ordinary bread and wine to our God, which he returns to us as the Body and Blood of Jesus, for us Christians to eat and drink: for the remission – not of cancer – but of sin. For Life. For salvation. So that we might be the “Blessed man” of today’s Psalm whose delight in the Gifts of our God.

This is the daily bread that we pray for in the Lord’s prayer, a Unique and Divine Bread that restores us to purity, sanity, health, happiness and peace.

Additionally we pray that this Supper may strengthen us to forgive the sins that others perpetrate against us; so that we too can be forgiven by God.

Let us not forget that important caveat.

And above all we ask of our God that he would deliver us from evil – which he did by delivering his Son into evil. And lastly that once we have been purified by the blood of Christ, that we might remain so, and not be led into temptation again.

But what of the Other Lord’s Prayer, the one that we have as our gospel reading for today?

“Holy Father! keep them in your name, which you have given me, so that they may be One even as we are one. While I was with them in the world I kept those you have given me in your name. I guarded them and none of them was lost, except the son of destruction, so that the Scripture might be fulfilled.

But now I am coming to you and I speak these things in the world so that they might have my joy, fulfilled and overflowing, in them. I have given your word to them and the world hates them, because they do not proceed from the world, just as I am not of the world.

I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not from the world. Consecrate them in your truth, your Word is Truth. As you sent me into the world, I also send them into the world. And for their sake I sanctify myself so that they might be consecrated in the truth.” John 17:11b-19 (DKV)

If the original Lord’s Prayer is the perfect Consecration prayer then this “other Lord’s Prayer” is the perfect Post Communion Collect.

Why?

Because now that the First Holy Communion, the First Divine Liturgy, had been completed Jesus prays a Post Communion Prayer in which he explicates all that happens in this Supper.

By this Supper the Holy Father keeps us safe within his name, his identity, his Trinitarian being and no one can touch you here. Remember that dear Christians, no one can touch us when we dwell inside him who is our Refuge and Strength, when by this Sacrament we are welcomed into the Love of the Father the Son and Holy Spirit.

We learn from this prayer that Jesus was sent into the world to accomplish the will of his Father, that we should be saved from the hands of all our enemies, and those who hate us. (Luke 1:71).

We find here, too, that when we partake of the Blessed Sacrament that we are filled with the Divine Word. Not only the spoken Word – that to be sure! But also with the Word made Flesh. So that when we leave the altar we are weightier than when we came because we have taken on the weight of God. The condensed glory that filled Isaiah’s temple now fills us. Someday we will see this with our own eyes, and it will launch us into the 7th heaven.

But that is for later. For now the will of the Father is not to take us out of the world; but for us to stay here to be his church in the world. An assignment perfectly feasible because our Lord first consecrated himself by the blood of his cross. “Christ the victim, Christ the priest.”

As such we are sanctified and consecrated by him, and able to be his church here in time, and there in eternity.

Glory be the Jesus Christ!