The Greatest Prayer by John Dominic Crossan

I had heard of John Dominic Crossan before, but first really dug into his ideas in Karen Armstrong’s St. Paul: the Apostle We Love to Hate. I was intrigued enough that when I saw his book The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer at a used/remaindered bookstore in Portsmouth a few weeks ago (Book & Bar) I picked it up. I started it the week before Holy Week and it took me a couple of weeks of reading it slowly to finish. It’s a book that requires some re-reading and thinking to digest.

Yes, this book is challenging, but only because it’s deep and rich and thorough. I grew up Catholic and have been Episcopalian for around 18 or 19 years. I didn’t grow up learning much about the bible, so I am still fascinated by the differences in the Gospels and their writers, which Crossan gets into. He also fills in historical context for both Jesus’ time and the writers’, and provides a good bit of literary analysis as to style, pattern, word choice, etc., honing in especially on the “key” words in the prayer: “Father,” “name,” “kingdom,” “will,” “bread,” “debt,” and “temptation.” And he’s a darn good writer himself. To be able to make clear some pretty heavy stuff, like whether God is a “God of nonviolent distributive justice, and restorative righteousness” or “a God of violent retributive justice and punitive righteousness” or both, is a gift.

Here’s what Crossan says at the beginning of the book that the Lord’s Prayer is ” . . . a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of Christianity for the conscience of the world . . . . a radical manifesto and a hymn of hope for all humanity in language addressed to all the earth.” He had me at that. Addressing the criticism that has been directed at him, he notes this is not “Liberalism, Socialism, or Communism . . . . We sometimes name that biblical vision of God’s World-Household as Egalitarianism, but, actually, Enoughism would be a more accurate description.”

Enoughism. Let that settle for a bit. Imagine it.

The book crescendos with a final short chapter addressing the aforementioned difficulty of understanding God, and concludes with Crossan’s brief but brilliant assessment of justice, comparing justice and love to the soul and the body — if you’re missing one of those, you’re dead. Just so, he says, “Justice without love or love without justice is a moral corpse. That is why justice without love is brutal and love without justice becomes banal.”

If you’ve come out of Holy Week into Easter fired up and ready to learn more, this is an excellent book about what it means to follow the Way of Love that Jesus taught his disciples and teaches us. If you’re just curious about the Lord’s Prayer as a hymn/poem, or about first century sociopolitical history in the Middle East under Rome, there’s something for you here as well. A great read.

Advertisement