- “Our Father”
- Jesus teaches us to call God Father — and in the plural: no one prays alone. It is the same trust as “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15), lived in a family.
- “which art in heaven”
- The Father is near, but he is not small: he is above all. He is the one we hand what slips out of our hands.
- “Hallowed be thy name”
- The first request is not for us: that God be honored as holy — in our lives, in our words, in the world.
- “Thy kingdom come”
- Asking for God to reign: now, in the heart of the one who prays, and fully when Christ returns.
- “Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven”
- Yielding our will to God’s, as Jesus did in Gethsemane: “not as I will, but as thou wilt” (Matthew 26:39).
- “Give us this day our daily bread”
- Asking for what we need today, like the manna God gave day by day (Exodus 16:4), and leaving tomorrow with him: “the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself” (Matthew 6:34).
- “And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors”
- Sin appears as a debt we cannot pay. Jesus ties the forgiveness we receive to the forgiveness we give — the one request he comments on right after the prayer (Matthew 6:14-15).
- “And lead us not into temptation”
- Asking for strength and protection in the hour of testing. God tempts no one to evil (James 1:13); whoever prays this asks not to be left alone in it.
- “but deliver us from evil”
- The Greek can mean “from evil” or “from the evil one”: both readings are possible. It asks to be rescued from all evil and from the one behind it.
- “For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen”
- The prayer ends in praise. This last line is not in the oldest manuscripts of Matthew, so some Bibles place it in a note; it echoes 1 Chronicles 29:11 and was already used by the early church.
