And he said unto them,
When you pray, say, Our Father who is in heaven, Hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. Your will be done, as in heaven, so on earth.
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Cornelius a Lapide
AD 1637
When ye pray, say, Our Father which art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name. S. Matthew adds this prayer to the sermon on the mount, whilst S. Luke places it at a later period. Either, therefore, Christ taught His disciples this prayer on two separate occasions, or S. Matthew added it to the sermon on the mount, in order to make that sermon a complete summary of evangelical doctrine.
Here we may observe, that S. Matthew makes this prayer consist of seven petitions, but S. Luke of five. The latter evangelist unites two, because they are contained in the others. Hence, because S. Luke omits the last petition, "deliver us from evil," the Pelagians argued that although we might pray against being led into temptation, we ought not to pray for deliverance from evil.
The prayer continues: your kingdom come. We pray that God’s kingdom will become present for us in the same way that we ask for his name to be hallowed among us. For when does God not reign, when could there be in him a beginning of what always was and what will never cease to be? What we pray for is that the kingdom promised to us by God will come, the kingdom won by Christ’s blood and passion. Then we who formerly were slaves in this world will reign from now on under the dominion of Christ, in accordance with his promise: Come, O blessed of my Father, receive the kingdom which was prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
However, my dear friends, it could also be that the kingdom of God whose coming we daily wish for is Christ himself, since it is his coming that we long for. He is our resurrection, since we rise again in him; so too he can be thought of as the kingdom of God because we are to reign in him. And it is good that we pray for God’s kingdom; for though it is a ...
