  Foundations of the Faith
Foundations
of the Faith explores
and explains Hallowed be thy name By Robert P. Mills, The Presbyterian LaymanVolume 34, Number 2, Posted January 24, 2001 |
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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).
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. |
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