When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, the first
thing he said they were to ask was that God make his own name
holy.
That, as Donald Williams notes, “is an amazing request,
like asking for a circle to be round or a square to have four
sides.”
And yet, while “hallowed be thy name” may seem the
least likely and least necessary of the six petitions in the
Lord’s Prayer, it is perhaps the petition that teaches us
the most about prayer. For it teaches us about the One to whom
we pray and how to live in response to his claim on our lives.
God’s
holiness
“Hallow,” a verb we rarely use anymore, means “to
make holy.” In both the Old and New Testament, the words
for “holy” come from roots meaning “separate,
set apart.” That which is holy is thus different from
ordinary things; it belongs to another order. For example,
Scripture teaches that the Sabbath day is holy because it is
set apart from the other six and that the temple was holy
because it was devoted to God-ordained functions.
God, in the essential nature of his being, is holy. God is
absolutely holy because he is totally different from every
aspect of creation. The heavenly hosts and the people of God
praise God’s holiness (Ex. 15:11; Isa. 6:3; Rev. 4:8). In
fact, it is only those who belong to God who can recognize his
holiness. Creation declares to all people the majesty and
glory of God. But only God himself can reveal his holiness.
And that revelation must be received by faith, which itself is
God’s gift.
Just as we do not define God, so we cannot fully comprehend
God’s holiness. However, we can know God truly because he
has revealed himself to us. Similarly, God has made known to
us what it means to be holy.
Hallowing God’s
name
The Greek word translated “hallow,”
hagiazein,
has two basic meanings. First, it may mean to set apart an
ordinary, secular thing for sacred service. Its second meaning
is to treat as holy, that is, to hold sacred. To hallow is
thus to regard and to treat as holy and sacred.
The name of God, which stands for the character of God, must
be treated as holy, for God himself is holy. Nothing we can
say or do can add to or detract from God’s intrinsic
holiness. Yet, our prayers and praises do matter to God. “Bless
the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me bless his holy
name” is the psalmist’s self-exhortation (Psalm
103:1). “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,”
cry the living creatures who surround the throne in heaven
(Rev. 4:8).
These and similar praises modeled for us in Scripture are to
be our grateful response to the God who has revealed himself
to us, entered into a covenant relationship with us, and
restored us to a right relationship with him. We pray “hallowed
be thy name” not because our prayers change God but
because our holy God delights in our worship and, in turn,
invites us to glorify and enjoy him forever.
Moreover, write William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, by our
prayer and worship “we discover not just who God is but
also who we are. We are daily reminded that we are not our
own. … Each of us has been named by the God whom we name
in prayer, commandeered, elected, chosen, ordained as priests
to the world.”
Chosen to be holy
Paul tells “the saints (
hagiois, ‘the holy
ones’) in Ephesus” that God “chose us in him
before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in
his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons
through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will”
(Eph. 1:4-5).
In these verses, holiness, blamelessness and love are
complementary terms. From a negative perspective, holiness is
seen as the absence of moral defect or sin, that is, as
blamelessness. Positively, holiness, seen as moral perfection,
displays itself in love, which is the fulfillment of God’s
will.
Here, Paul helps us see that our lifelong progression toward
holiness, historically called “sanctification,” is
our response to God’s election of us “before the
creation of the world.” Paul repeatedly emphasizes that
those whom God has called to be his people are therefore to
separate themselves from unclean things and be perfectly holy
(II Cor. 6:14-7:1; I Thess. 3:13; 4:7), a theme also sounded
in the Old Testament:
“I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves and be
holy, because I am holy. … I am the Lord who brought you
up out of Egypt to be your God; therefore be holy, because I
am holy” (Lev. 11:44-45).
Cultural
accommodation
Leviticus 11-16, a section of Scripture likely less familiar
to most Christians than Paul’s letters, deals with
purification laws, commands concerned with Israel’s
relationship with God. For the Israelites, impurity could be
physical, ritual or moral. The unclean (not to be confused
with modern notions of unsanitary) was incompatible with the
holy and could defile the clean. Thus, the holy was to be
protected from impurity, and cleansing was required to restore
a contaminated person or item to a state of purity.
Of this cleansing, James L. Mays writes, “When an
unclean person washed himself, he showed his own will and
hunger to be clean, to be ready for communion with God.
Moreover, because the rituals of cleansing were ordained of
God, they were doors opened from the side of holiness; they
were help which God provided to maintain the purity of his
people. The ritual could be seen as a grace … ”
For the people of God in the Old Testament, the motive for
maintaining purity was not the fear of violating ancient
superstition, but the desire to glorify God. This
understanding, setting ourselves apart as a way of honoring
the God who called us, often seems lost in contemporary
Christianity.
Christians in the apostolic era were painfully aware that
they had been called apart from their Jewish contemporaries
and from the Greco-Roman culture in which they lived. Indeed,
prior to Constantine’s legalization of Christianity in
313, many Christians suffered martyrdom rather than
accommodate their beliefs and practices to the reigning
cultural imperialism, which insisted that Christians treat
their God as but one deity among many, including Zeus, Baal,
Diana and the emperor.
In contrast, as Gary W. Demarest points out, the modern
church has “tried to minimize the ideas of difference and
separateness. We have stressed the importance of being
identified with the world in order to make the Christian faith
more attractive to the world. Church membership is offered and
encouraged with little or no demands to be different from
others and separated to God.”
He continues, “I’m convinced that renewal is not
going to be experienced among today’s Christians and
within our churches until we recover some sense of holiness.”
‘We imitate
whom we adore’
Recovering this personal and corporate sense of holiness will
require of us nothing less than offering up our whole lives to
God. All we think and say and do will need to come into
conformity with God’s holy character and standards, which
stand in opposition to the attitudes and values of the world
(Rom. 12:1-2).
In Augustine’s memorable phrase, “We imitate whom
we adore.” In praying “hallowed be thy name,”
we offer adoration of God the Father in, and through our
imitation of, God the Son.
For
Discussion
1.
What does it mean to say that God is "holy?"
2. Why does God
command his people to be holy?
3. How does God's
holiness differ from ours?
4. What can we
learn from praying "Hallowed be thy name?"
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Additional Resources
Gary W. Demarest, Leviticus
(Dallas: Word, 1990); James L. Mays, Leviticus/Numbers
(Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1963); Donald T. Williams,
The Disciples’ Prayer: An Intimate Phrase by
Phrase Journey through the Lord’s Prayer (Camp
Hill, Pa.: Christian Publications, 1999); William H.
Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas, Lord Teach Us: The
Lord’s Prayer and Christian Life (Nashville:
Abingdon, 1996).
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