The Lord's Prayer in the Liturgy

The bread and wine have been offered and consecrated in the Anaphora; Communion is minutes away. At just this point the priest gathers the preceding litany into a remarkable request: that God would count us worthy "with boldness and without condemnation" to dare to call upon the heavenly God as Father. Then the whole congregation — this prayer belongs to everyone, aloud, together — prays the Our Father. The Liturgy takes the prayer seriously as a daring: sinners are about to address the Almighty by the most intimate name there is, and they can do it only because the Son taught them to (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:1).

The early Church guarded the prayer accordingly. It was taught to catechumens late — in many places only at baptism itself — because, in the Church's understanding, only someone made a child of God in baptism and chrismation can honestly say "Father." It is the family prayer of the household of God, which is exactly why the Liturgy places it at the family table.

The placement is among the oldest fixed points in the Liturgy. In fourth-century Jerusalem, St. Cyril — walking the newly baptized step by step through the services they had just entered — describes the Lord's Prayer exactly here: after the great prayer of offering, immediately before Communion. The logic the Fathers drew out has three strands. First, adoption before inheritance: Communion is the Father's table, and one approaches a table as a child of the house. Second, the bread: many Fathers heard in "our daily bread" — the Greek word epiousios is rare and strange, something like "bread for the coming day" or "bread beyond substance" — a reference not only to earthly provision but to the Bread about to be received from the Chalice. Third, forgiveness: the petition to be forgiven as we forgive is the one clause with a condition attached, and the Church will not let anyone approach the Cup with it unsaid — reconciliation before offering is the Lord's own rule (Matthew 5:23-24).

The prayer ends, heads bow for a blessing, and then an ancient invitation rings out as the consecrated Lamb is lifted: "Holy Things are for the holy!" The people's answer concedes nothing to false modesty and everything to Christ: "One is Holy! One is the Lord Jesus Christ! To the glory of God the Father, Amen." Communion follows.

It matters that the prayer never says I or my. Even prayed alone at home it is "Our Father," our bread, our debts: the one praying stands inside a family, whether or not he feels it that morning. St. Paul's name for the boldness the Liturgy asks is adoption: "ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father" (Romans 8:15). The Lord's Prayer appears in nearly every Orthodox service — it closes the Trisagion Prayers that open the daily prayer rule, and it punctuates the Hours — but the moment before Communion is its native soil, the place all its other uses echo. Bodily customs at this point vary, as they do everywhere: in some traditions the faithful make a prostration as the prayer begins on ordinary days, in others they simply bow. The posture that matters is the one St. Cyril named: a pure conscience, calling God Father.