The most popular reading of the
Lord's Prayer reads as follows:
Our
Father, who art in
Heaven,
Hallowed be thy
Name.
Thy
kingdom come.
Thy
will be done,
On
Earth as it is in
Heaven.
Give us this day our daily
bread.
And forgive us our
trespasses,
As we forgive those who trespass against us.
And lead us not into
temptation,
But deliver us from
evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the
power, and the
glory,
for ever and ever.
Amen.
I find the most
interesting
line in the whole thing to be the one where the
supplicant is
begging of
God to "lead us not into temptation" -- not to prevent some
other entity from leading them into temptation, not to prevent them in some
generic sense from being
led into temptation -- but as a direct appeal, "please, God, don't
you lead us into temptation"....
There's a
strange subtext to this, as though God just might decide to trick us into defying him if we don't properly go about begging him not to. As if God might
drop us in a garden, and also drop in this garden a
tree with
fruit of forbidden
knowledge, and a
serpent which is (oddly enough) particularly designed with the ability to persuade us to
eat that fruit. Or, as if God might 'harden our
hearts', so that
just at the moment when we are about to
do the right thing, we are forced to choose the wrong path by a power beyond our ability to
resist. Or, as if God might allow us to do some acts without ever before having set down a
prohibition against them, and then condemn us, kill us, drown the
world even for such uncautioned acts.
Does it seem odd to imagine that we
must make such a
prayer to an entity with the raw
power to cause us to act against our own
inclination, and the
intellect to
trick us into falling into
error? That we must plead with a God to avoid having that very God
cause us to do things that it is supposed to have commanded that we don't do? At the very least, though, it would seem that a God who was a really
good dude would give us a pass on those particular trespasses into which it had opted to lead us.