Lent Midweek (3/1/07) “Hallowed Be Your Name”

We are reflecting this Lent on the Lord’s Prayer. Last week we thought about the opening address, “Our Father in heaven.” Tonight we take up what is often called the “first petition,” which is, of course, “hallowed be your name.” Many commentators have found this the most difficult phrase in the prayer to understand. Start with the fact that “hallowed” isn’t really a word we use in every day speech. We know, if we think about it, that it means something like “holy”—still perhaps not a common word, but one that makes a little more sense to us than “hallowed.” But the deeper problem with the petition is that we just don’t get what it is asking—if it is asking anything at all. Are we asking God to make his own name holy? Why would we need to do that?

Luther’s Small Catechism, of course, answers that question directly. “God’s name certainly is holy in itself, but we ask in this prayer that we may keep it holy.” Luther wasn’t the first to interpret the petition in this way; thirteen centuries earlier the early Christian theologian Cyprian had said much the same thing: “We say this not wishing that God should be made holy by our prayers, but asking the Lord that his name should be hallowed in us. . . We ask . . . that we who are made holy in baptism should have the ability to persist in the way we have begun.” Sounds good—but what does it mean?

The idea here is that in baptism we have been given a new name—the name of “Christian.” This is now, we might say, a part of our identity—in the same way that our family name says something of who we are. To keep God’s name holy means simply to live in such a way that we do not bring dishonor on the family name. It is perhaps a bit like the parents who tell their children, “Now don’t do anything that would bring dishonor on the family name.”

Now something else Luther says is quite interesting. He remarks in one of his expositions of the Lord’s Prayer that this first petition really puts us in our place. “I know of no teaching in all the Scriptures that so completely destroys us as does this petition.” What he means is that the very fact that we must pray these words convicts us of the truth that our lives do not, in fact, keep God’s name holy. Anyone, Luther says, who is “wrathful, quarrelsome, envious, rancorous, unkind, unmerciful, unchaste, who curses, lies, swears, defrauds, and slanders”—that person is not keeping God’s name holy. It’s quite a list he has there—did he mention you? I suspect he did, as he mentioned me.

But then that is the purpose of the petition! If we were already perfectly living up to what God wants for us, then we wouldn’t need to pray the prayer. The fact that we must pray it indicates that it hasn’t yet been fulfilled in us. That is reality with which we come face to face in Lent. We said the words earlier this evening: We have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” In our thoughts, words, and deeds, our things done and left undone, we have made only too clear our failure let his name be kept holy in us.

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that so much of what the Bible presents as “holiness” has to do with how we treat other people in daily life. That marvelous passage from Leviticus tonight consists of a list of very practical admonitions: honor your parents, care for the poor, don’t cheat or steal or defraud—but punctuated throughout with “I am the Lord your God.” For the Bible, to keep God’s name holy means simply to live as God wants us to live.

But we know that we don’t do it. Helmut Thielicke put it this way: “There are certain monopolies which we are determined to keep away from God, areas of our life which we are stubbornly resolved to keep for ourselves and which we refuse to surrender to God, areas of which we know perfectly well that God could never sign his name to them and which we therefore hide away in the bottommost pigeonhole of our life. In every life there are these secrets, these dark documents that bear only our own name, and to which God could never put his name.” And so it is that this first petition is also an indictment of us, an admission that we have in so many ways dishonored the name of Christ and a plea that this name might in fact be kept holy in us.

And yet that second part—that plea—is also what this petition is about. Did you ever notice that the petition is in the passive voice? It isn’t, “Teach us to hallow your name” but more like, “Hallow your name in us, in our lives.” So often we human beings want to do it ourselves, and think we can do it ourselves. We are great believers in self-achievement! Just give us a program that we can work, an agenda we can follow! We’ll figure out how to do better!

The rich young man came to Jesus and asked, “What must I do to inherit eternal life”? Jesus replied by telling him, “You know the commandments,” and the young man insisted, “Yes, and I’ve done them all. I’ve kept them all. What else must I do?” Jesus, Mark tells us, looked at him and loved him—loved him not because he was so good but perhaps because he was so earnest and yet so far off the mark. “Sell everything you have and give it to the poor, and then come, follow me.” I’ve often thought that perhaps Jesus’ point wasn’t so much “Sell your material possessions” as it was “Get rid of the idea that you must do all these things, that you even can do all these things. Just follow me.”

And so it is that all our striving, all our efforts to hallow God’s name ourselves, to keep God’s name holy ourselves, are doomed to fail. Try as we might, we cannot be the people we’d really like to be. Every week we come back here and admit this to God, and to each other, and to ourselves.

But we don’t ask in this petition that we should hallow God’s name; we ask God to hallow his name in us. We do not ask that we might, by our own power, even believe in Jesus Christ our Lord; indeed, we confess that we cannot do it, by our own understanding and strength. But we ask God to hallow his name in us.

Luther once put it this way: one doesn’t need to command a stone which is lying in the sun to become warm; it becomes warm from the sun. When we live in the warmth of the all holy God, we become warm—not by anything we do, or by any effort of our own, but simply from the rays that pour so graciously and generously upon us.

And so, the Catechism goes on to say, “God’s name is hallowed whenever his Word is taught in its truth and purity and we as children of God live in harmony with it.” When we live in God’s Word—when we worship, when we pray faithfully and regularly, when we come with thanksgiving to the Lord’s Supper—then God does his work in us, and his name is hallowed.

Or, to quote Helmut Thielicke once again, Jesus is saying this to us: “It doesn’t depend at all on your own exertions and your own inner progress; you can never set yourself up as your own goal. Everything depends on your being willing to honor God and let [God] work in your life, simply to stand still and let [God] be the ‘holy one’ who will actually have first place in your life, above . . . all things. Then the other will come of itself.”

So if indeed you want to be a Christian—if you want to be more loving, more holy, more like Jesus—then this is the petition you pray: “Hallowed be your name; let your name be hallowed in me, in my life. Help me to live in the sunshine of holy name. Help me to give up myself, my strivings, my self-important efforts, and simply live in your light. Help me to give up myself and follow you.”

Thielicke quotes are from Helmut Thielicke, Our Heavenly Father: Sermons on the Lord’s Prayer (Harper & Row, 1960).