Both begin with, "Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name." We might notice straightaway that the petitioner does not refer directly to the name of the Father as being "hallowed," but rather to the voiced aspiration that the holy nature of God's name be kept inviolate. Of course no being not God can truly approach God's name as it deserves, and so an indispensable predicate of the petitioner's request is the inherent shame of Creation before the name of God, as before God himself.
Then we have (in the more familiar version of Matthew), "Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven." The petitioner does not anticipate the goodness of God's rule on the earth, and neither does the petitioner anticipate a raising of his or her status or fortunes as a result of the requested imposition of God's will on earth. The person who says the Lord's Prayer is declaring an openness to the realization of God's will--and we might wonder if any degree of prudence would exist in a petitioner forgetting the possibility of personal shame when God's proper ordering of Creation be made evident.
What God will find upon the earth, it would seem unnecessary to say, is a world of needs and wants underscored by a near-total failure of humanity to follow up on Jesus' admonition that all of everything that is wholesome is available to us if only we ask in faith. Obviously, we are perennially incapable of mustering up even the mustard-seeds of faith that would move mountains. Jesus would not command stones to turn to bread, but surely Jesus must lament our faithless inability to request that such things happen, thus to provide for others and ourselves. And so we must ask, shame-facedly, "Give us this day our daily bread," even as we scratch like true children of Adam to draw our livelihoods from the soil--one way or another.
The situation gets even worse. The prayer says, "And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors"--which, taken in full force (and taken with the straightforward notion that unforgiven debts bring damnation) would amount to us asking for the most horrible of unending ends. The last thing that any human being should want is to be judged (and the judgment must be on the order of perfection, not on any sophomoric "more righteous than sinful" scale.)
To this point, the Lord's Prayer in both Matthew and Luke amounts to a conceptualized realization of God's sovereignty--but this realization is couched in terms of a tension between positive anticipation and negative apprehension. The undiluted fulfillment of the requests of the prayer would result in a torrent of shame for the petitioner. The God who demands that we show mercy to others if we are to hope for divine mercy for ourselves, is the God to whom we must appeal for mercy in regard to the abovementioned, proceeding aspects of the prayer.
Shame is the undeniable, persistent counterpoint of mercy. A person ashamed of his or her actions before some earthly authority might ask for mercy, as something undeserved. So also might we ask mercy from God. There is, however, another chief application of the concept of mercy. An unoffending victim of a looming earthly authority might hope for mercy (or, that is, might hope that a glimmer of responsibility for mercy exists in the mindset of the oppressor) so that the victim might be spared the worst of it. Perhaps the oppressor might be shamed into displaying some semblance of mercy.
When the looming authority is God, of course, the notion that God will be shamed into displaying mercy is a shameful notion in itself. (Though, it must be noted, the Scriptures do not flinch from nearly scraping against such a notion. God is reminded by certain of the prophets that he will be mocked--as if he should care--by the surrounding nations if Israel is left bereft before the world, and Jesus says that he will be ashamed of unworthy followers of his.) Undeniably, the very notion of "mercy" as it can be assimilated by any human being is a notion attended by shame, and it is often a whirlpool of shame-after-shame--we are ashamed of that we have done, and we find ourselves asking for mercy from God simply because he is all-powerful and could grant such mercy, and then we are ashamed of ourselves for thinking of God as one who would decide arbitrarily to extend mercy, or not.
It is the very fact that God cannot be thought of as ineffable without being thought of as arbitrary that forms the very nucleus of the conundrum. In every aspect of our considerations of the divine, we are driven here and there between at least two objects of contemplation. That we are driven by virtual necessity to see things backwardly--that is, in terms of cause preceding effect--is one of our chief limitations, and this limitation is of difficulty to us not merely as a result of the fact that we can see things in only one way, backwards. We are also limited in that we can only "arrive" at the resolution of some such issue by flitting back and forth between the concepts with which we frame it. When confronted with issues about the divine, or with issues of substance about our status in the world of divine creation, such as in the Lord's Prayer, we do not "arrive" at any conclusion. We enclose the conclusion (as though that were not a shameful presumption in itself) within the framework of our understandings. And then the moment passes, and we find ourselves seemingly at a great distance from that which we thought we understood.
In short, when thinking about the divine, we are in an analogous situation to Nicodemus, being told that we do not know where we come from (or where anything else comes from.) That the "John 3" theological camps would turn the mind-melting implications of Jesus interview with Nicodemus into, rather, supposed simple building-blocks of a "salvation economy," is a tragedy for the ages.
And so at last we read of how the petitioner in the Lord's Prayer is to say, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." Some more modern translations will render the key phrase as "do not put us to the test." While "test" is the application that I find most revealing, it is proper first to make clear that, in terms of my thesis, "lead us not into temptation" and "do not put us to the test" are of equal import. A person saying "lead us not into temptation" could be rendering a petition in the most plaintive tones (as a tormented victim's plea might often be characterized, without proper punctuation or fair context, as an order to the tormentor.) Or a person saying "lead us not into temptation" could be fulfilling a duty that might be expected to lead to a lessening of the strictures of obedience on the petitioner (as though God cannot assess perfectly a person's response to temptation in direct proportion to the magnitude of that temptation.) In all of the applications in this paragraph, "test" might be substituted for "temptation" with negligible adjustments.
Where "do not put us to the test" shows itself to be preferable to--and, I assume, more in line with modern scholarship than--"lead us not into temptation," is that the idea of "test" resides more comfortably with the notion of God as the agent of assessment, rather than the scatterer of "temptations," and the relative immediacy of "test" to the sovereignty of God is the important point here. Jesus has his followers ask, in the Lord's Prayer, to be spared "the test." And then, in Gethsemane, Jesus bids his few companions to ask to be spared "the test." The "test" in Gethsemane (if it is to be compared to the awkwardness of "temptation") is for Jesus' followers to courageously declare their allegiance to him. They are supposed to be the equal of this temptation (and of the multiple foreseeable temptations to forswear Jesus under torture), though Jesus knows they will fail, as he told them. They are to invite the temptation--for to confront it is their duty--while they are to ask to be spared the test. Inescapably, the test is God's ineffable countenance (or lack thereof) to any person.
The test is not some "salvation economy" or some sacerdotal or even intensely personal devotion. The test is that which we will never know or understand about God's relationship to us. What we can know (or strive productively to know) about our relationship to God, in every vein in which we might confront that relationship, is ever and always framed in convergences (backward, as we view them) of individually insufficient concepts. This is the origin, which we will never understand, to which Jesus alludes in his conversation with Nicodemus. The most important thing about our confrontation with the test, both in terms of how we will flaccidly meet it and almost-as-flaccidly beseech to be spared it, is our attention to the most central of our responsibilities before God--our recognition of shame.
Take the Lord's Prayer as a whole, and as driving to a central point, and that central point will be revealed to be shame. In shame we confront (and usually fail to confront) our misdeeds, and in shame we appeal to God to dispense for us, out of his limitless reserve, the mercy that we--in our typical shameful predispositions--imagine he ought to give us, as though we are "close enough" to be asking for it with pure motives. Shame is the framework not merely of the Lord's Prayer, but of Jesus' ministry as a whole.
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