What Did Jesus Change? Prayer

"This, then, is how you should pray:
" 'Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name,
your kingdom come,
your will be done
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today our daily bread.
Forgive us our debts,
as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from the evil one.
For if you forgive men when they sin against you, your heavenly Father will also forgive you.
But if you do not forgive men their sins, your Father will not forgive your sins.
-Matthew 6:9-15

You may not think of prayer as something that Yeshua/Jesus changed and it may even seem mysterious to think that his Jewish disciples needed him to teach them to pray. After all, Jews had been praying to God for thousands of years. Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob prayed. Why would John the Baptist need to teach his disciples to pray and why, seeing this, would Yeshua's disciples ask him to teach them to pray?

I don't have a specific answer for all that, but the clue may be found here:

And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you. And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him. -Matthew 6:5-8

It may well have been, in an age where the Holy Land was occupied by a harsh, Gentile ruler, and much of the religious hierarchy was in the control of Rome, that some of the focus of how to live a holy life had been interrupted or even influenced negatively by outside sources.

Why do we pray?

There are a wide variety of reasons, the most common being to ask for what we want and what we need. Sometimes prayer more resembles Aladdin's relationship with the genie in the lamp than man's relationship with the One God of the Universe.

A detailed analysis of the meaning of prayer is beyond the scope of this blog and frankly, many more worthy individuals have written chapters and even whole books on the subject, so what could I possibly contribute?

That said, it seems as if Yeshua helped to address the specific components of prayer that are most important to human beings. After all, God doesn't need us to pray because he requires a source of information from us. He already knows our needs. Prayer changes us, not God. So what does "the Lord's Prayer" mean?

In simple language, God is holy, we ask that our world more resemble His Heavenly Court where the only will that is done is His will. We get hungry and have other needs and God wants us to rely on Him for those. This next part's really important. We ask for God's forgiveness relative to how we forgive others. We're really big on being forgiven by God but forget that we're supposed to pass that along to everyone around us, whether they deserve it or not (because after all, we don't). After that, we ask to be delivered from harsh testings and from the evil one. This doesn't mean bad things won't happen to us, just that God is with us and will deliver us from them.

Was this revolutionary to the original Jewish disciples? Maybe and maybe not, but based on what Yeshua said in Matthew 6:5-8, it was probably revolutionary to the Gentiles who would later be brought "into the fold" as disciples of the Jewish Messiah.

Yeshua described the prayers of the Gentiles (pagans) as "...do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words". The form of Yeshua's prayer isn't very long at all and he makes a point of saying that it's not for imparting information or getting God's attention (we've already got it). It's for developing and maintaining a relationship with a personal God, which may well have been something the early Gentile pagan converts had no idea how to deal with. While teaching his own Jewish disciples how to pray was important, teaching the Gentiles how to pray would have been vital. Of course Yeshua wasn't teaching Gentiles how to pray then, but we have his words now, don't we?

There's another important component to prayer that we don't get in the Gospels:

Therefore, since we have a great high priest who has gone through the heavens, Jesus the Son of God, let us hold firmly to the faith we profess. For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are — yet was without sin. Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need. -Hebrews 4:14-16

Now a strict MJ/BE interpretation might say the book of Hebrews was written to...Hebrews, but how can these verses be applied differently to a Gentile believer? Our High Priest is able to sympathize with our weaknesses and was tempted in the same ways we're tempted. We know that when we pray, we won't be looked down upon from the heavens for being "only human". The writer of the book of Hebrews also says we pray to "receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need." Again, while this may not have been any sort of conceptual change for Jewish disciples, I'm willing to believe it was an earth-shattering revelation for Gentiles who formerly worshiped "gods" who "behaved" just as badly as human beings behave and who had a tendency to be very capricious, sometimes granting mercy, sometimes granting wrath (and they were fictional anyway, but that doesn't mean the pagans weren't afraid of them).

While we are encouraged to pray to God unceasingly with our needs and our hurts, prayer serves as the means to spend time with God, and God asks that we approach our time with him the way we would with a beloved spouse, someone who we love deeply, and who we want to spend as much time with as possible, and with whom we want to share the moments and cares of our lives.

While Yeshua may not have significantly changed the nature and character of prayer for the Jewish people, he introduced the Gentiles to a way to pray to a personal and caring God who desires that all humanity draw near to Him.