LITURGY LESSON: OUR
FATHER #1
(Given:
One
of the superficial things that appeared to make Catholics and Protestants
different is the great prayer, The Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer. It is all because of the ending. The
so-called Protestant version ends, “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and
the glory forever. Amen.”
Everyone
noticed that after the Second Vatican
Let’s look at a summary of the history. . . . The
Our Father, as Catholics say it, is found in Matthew’s Gospel.[1] There is another version in Luke’s Gospel.[2] The more familiar liturgical version appears
in Matthew’s Gospel , (Chapter 6) where Jesus offers the prayer as part of his
Sermon on the Mount.
Neither biblical version has the Protestant ending,
although you will find it in the King James version of the bible because that
translation was partially based on an early Greek manuscript which did not
represent sound scholarship.[3] However, that ending did exist in early
church liturgy over a thousand years before the Protestant Reformation
and is found in such early Church documents as the “Didache,” from the Second Century.[4] Also, the Byzantine Catholics have been using
a similar ending for over a thousand years. So we can conclude that it is unfair to call
it the Protestant ending.
Why
was that ending added so early in the history of the Church? The speculation is
that communities were uncomfortable that the prayer ended on a negative note,
“deliver us from evil,” and just naturally added an act of praise, “for thine
is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever. Amen.”[5]
Actually early manuscripts have several other, positive endings.
Why
spend so much time on this? Because it really is one of the symbols that
historically divided Catholics and Protestants. We actually should be
comfortable with either version. Next week we will talk about why the Our
Father appears at this point in our Liturgy.
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