Christ Teaches Us to Pray – Cyprian on the Lord’s Prayer

This post on the Lord’s Prayer comes from one of the earliest treatises on the Our Father, written around AD 240 by Cyprian of Carthage.  It discusses one of the three pillars of Lenten penance, namely, the importance and power of prayer, and shows us how Christ teaches us to pray.

Dear brothers, the commands of the Gospel are nothing else than God’s lessons, the foundations on which to build up hope, the supports for strengthening faith, the food that nourishes the heart. They are the rudder for keeping us on the right course, the protection that keeps our salvation secure. As they instruct the receptive minds of believers on earth, they lead safely to the kingdom of heaven.

The Word who spoke through the prophets

God willed that many things should be said by the prophets, his servants, and listened to by his people. How much greater are the things spoken by the Son. These are now witnessed to by the very Word of God who spoke through the prophets.

The Word of God does not now command us to prepare the way for his coming: he comes in person and opens up the way for us and directs us toward it. Before, we wandered in the darkness of death, aimlessly and blindly. Now we are enlightened by the light of grace, and are to keep to the highway of life, with the Lord to precede and direct us.

The Lord taught us to pray

The Lord has given us many counsels and commandments to help us toward salvation. He has even given us a pattern of prayer, instructing us on how we are to pray. He has given us life, and with his accustomed generosity, he has also taught us how to pray. He has made it easy for us to be heard as we pray to the Father in the words taught us by the Son.

He had already foretold that the hour was coming when true worshippers would worship the Father in spirit and in truth. He fulfilled what he had promised before, so that we who have received the spirit and the truth through the holiness he has given us may worship in truth and in the spirit through the prayer he has taught.

 

The Lord’s Prayer

What prayer could be more a prayer in the spirit than the one given us by Christ, by whom the Holy Spirit was sent upon us? What prayer could be more a prayer in the truth than the one spoken by the lips of the Son, who is truth himself? It follows that to pray in any other way than the Son has taught us is not only the result of ignorance but of sin. He himself has commanded it, and has said: “You reject the command of God, to set up your own tradition.”

A Family Prayer

So, my brothers, let us pray as God our master has taught us. To ask the Father in words his Son has given us, to let him hear the prayer of Christ ringing in his ears, is to make our prayer one of friendship, a family prayer.

Let the Father recognize the words of his Son. Let the Son who lives in our hearts be also on our lips. We have him as an advocate for sinners before the Father; when we ask forgiveness for our sins, let us use the words given by our advocate. He tells us: Whatever you ask the Father in my name, he will give you. What more effective prayer could we then make in the name of Christ than in the words of his own prayer?

For the next part of Cyprian’s treatise on the Lord’s Prayer, read OUR FATHER NOT MY FATHER.

For more great resources on the Lord’s Prayer and more broadly how to pray, see the PRAYER SECTION of the Crossroads Initiative Lenten Library.

This excerpt is the beginning of a treatise on the Lord’s Prayer by Saint Cyprian of Carthage, bishop and martyr (Cap 1-3: CSEL 3, 267-268).  It discusses how Christ himself teaches us to pray.  It appears in Roman Office of Readings for Tuesday of the first week of Lent.  The accompanying biblical reading taken from Exodus 6:29-7:25. 

Banner image of Jesus Christ preaching the Sermon on the Mount by Cosimo Roselli, 1481, public domain