6:1-6: Ostentation: Public fasts were announced by the blowing of trumpets. And alms were thought to increase the efficacy of the fasts. This may be origin of the warning here. Of course this could be also a case of Semitic exaggeration, like that of the camel and the needle's eye. Those who made a display of almsgiving were really aiming to get praise from people. They would get it - but that is all, nothing from the Father in Heaven. The words "Let not your right hand know what your left hand is doing" is a fine Semitic device again. Hands know nothing. The sense is that we should not dwell mentally on the goodness of anything we do - we may at least subconsciously be taking undue credit for ourselves.

Next there is the warning about ostentation in prayer. In the synagogue someone might be asked to pray publicly standing in front. This does not contradict 14:16 - please see the comments on that verse.

6:7-8: Repetitious prayer: Jesus Himself prayed at length ( Lk 6:12) and repeated His prayer (Mt. 26:44). He even urged them to keep up praying if they did not at first get what they asked : (Lk 18:1). He objects to babbling prayer, mechanical repetition, which the pagan gods were said to love. He objects to saying useless things, or long formulas thought to have an almost magical efficacy. The priests of Baal went in for such things : 1 Kings 18:26ff. There are lists of Babylonian hymns and formulas and magical incantations. The Roman philosopher Seneca said that such prayers "weary the gods" (Epistle 31. 5. Cf. Horace, Odes 1. 2. 23 and Livy 1. 11. 2 and Apuleius, Metamorphoses 10. 26.

This is no objection to the Rosary, in which the chief thing is not the repetition but the meditation - we are not asked to pay attention to every word of 50 Hail Marys in 5 decades, but to think on the mysteries announced. The words could be compared to background music.

The word St. Matthew uses is a rare one, battalogeo, which may come from Aramaic battal, useless, idle.

6:9-13: The Our Father: It is only in this prayer that Jesus speaks of our Father. Elsewhere He may say my Father or your Father. In Rabbinic sources the words "Our Father who art in Heaven" are found often enough but the Jews did not have a great perception that God was the Father of all people. They tended to think of Him as only their Father. An introduction to some prayers was Avinu malkenu; Our Father, Our King." This was good to bring out the two major aspects of love and closeness on the one hand, and a sense of majesty, infinite greatness on the other.

We gather the sense of "hallowed be thy name" from such texts as Isaiah 5:15-16: "Man is bowed down, and men are brought low. But the Lord of Hosts will be exalted in right judgment [mishpat] and the God, the Holy One, will show Himself holy [niqdesh - root of qadosh, "holy"] by moral rightness [i.e., by doing what moral rightness calls for." Similarly in Ezekiel 28:22:"They shall know that I am the Lord when I inflict punishment on her [Sidon], and I shall show myself holy in her [niqdashtil]. The gods of Mesopotamia, Greece and Rome were thought to be amoral, not just immoral. If immoral, they would know what is right but could get away with violations. Amoral means they act as if there is no such aa thing as morality. In contrast, the true God is holy: cf. Psalm 11:7: "For the Lord is righteous, and He loves things that are righteous." So, the sense of this petition is that God's moral rightness may be recognized by all.

Within the covenant, God shows His righteousness by giving benefits or punishment according to the response of the people to the covenant. Hence Deuteronomy 11:26: "Behold, today I am putting before you a blessing and a curse. The blessing, if you obey... and the curse if you do not." Romans 3:24-26 says God has actually shown Himself righteous by fully rebalancing the scale of the objective order by the death of Jesus. For sinners take from one pan of the scale what they have no right to have: the scale is out of balance, and the holiness of God wants it rebalanced. A human can begin to rebalance after stealing by giving it back, or after stealing a pleasure by giving up some other pleasure. But the imbalance from even one mortal sin is infinite. So, if the Father wanted full rebalance -He was not obliged to that - it could be done only by sending a Divine Person, who could really generate an infinite value to fully rebalance. (Cf. The Doctrinal introduction to Paul VI, Indulgentiarum Doctrina, Jan 1, 1967 and Wm. G. Most, Our Father's Plan, chapters 4 ff).

About the words "Thy kingdom come": "kingdom" in the Gospels often, though not always, means the Church in this world or in the next or both, as we can see readily from the parable of the wicked tenants, and parables of the mustard seed, of the net etc. Even. R. E. Brown, in The Churches the Apostles Left Behind (Paulist, 1984, pp. 51-52) admits this, and in Responses to 101 Question on the Bible (Paulist, 1990, p. 12) he says that the editor of the NAB made a bad choice in changing kingdom to reign.

So "thy kingdom come" can readily be a prayer for the spread of the Church. It could also, however, be a prayer that all will accept the will of God, His reign. Then this petition would mean the same as "Thy will be done."

May it be done on earth as it is in heaven. The only free thing in a human is the free will. If one could make that will entirely in accord with the will of God, that would be perfection. That perfect accord is found in heaven. But on earth it is difficult to achieve fully. One might be tempted to think it possible to kneel down and say a prayer of acceptance, such as that of St. Ignatius, "Take O Lord and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding and my will...."

There are two reasons why instant perfection is not possible. First, at this time we cannot foresee all that God will will us to do before the end of our lives. Second, although perfection is found in the spiritual will, in this life the development of that harmony of will is tied to development in what psychologists call somatic resonance. The explanation is simple: since we are made of body and spirit , and since the two are so closely joined as to add up to one person, the result is that for normal running, a condition on either one of the two sides should have a parallel on the other side, That parallel condition is called a resonance. When the resonance is on the side of the body, we call it somatic (Greek soma = body). For example, love is in the will, willing good to another for the other's sake. The resonance could be anything from the nonsexual response of parents to their own children to explicitly sexual responses in marriage. Sadly, some young people mistake the resonance, which is really chemistry, for the love. They sometimes have a lot of chemistry, no real love. They marry on the strength of that, and find out later! The only way to assure real love is developing is to follow our Father's rules, moral rules. To violate those is to put each other in a state such that if death came, one would be wretched forever. Real love could hardly develop in that atmosphere. (For further data cf. Wm. Most, Our Father's Plan, chapter 16).

Now somatic resonance, since it a bodily thing, must grow according to the laws of growth of bodies. Bodies of people, animals, plants, all grow in a sort of step graph - long plateaus, with occasional short rises in between. The rises are normally short, unless something happens - such as a severe trial well accepted as the will of God - to loosen up the resonance so a large rise will be possible.

We need to note too that there are some things God positively wills, some He merely permits. We cannot always know for certain which is the case. Further, we may often know His positive will only partly. The goal is to positively will all that He positively wills, and to take an attitude of pliability, being ready to take that which has not yet become clear when it does become clear. (Picture the tremendous suffering of Our Lady at the cross: She knew the Father, and the Son too, positively willed that He die, die then, die so horribly. So she was called on to will that, and to do it going counter to a love beyond our understanding - for Pius IX in 1854 (Ineffabilis Deus) said her holiness (in practice same as love) at the start was so great that "none greater under God can be thought of, and no one but God can comprehend it!

In praying for our daily bread, we ask for all needed for sustenance. For Hebrew lehem was used broadly for all food. The word commonly translated as daily is Greek epiousios, which is very rare in and out of Scripture, and hence there is room for difference. From Lk 11:3 it seems likely that the translation daily is the best. Some have proposed translating "for tomorrow" but Jesus urges us not to be solicitous for the morrow: Mt 6:34. Some of the Fathers of the Church thought it could refer to the Eucharist. But Jesus had not yet promised the Eucharist at this point.

Next we ask forgiveness for our debts. St. Matthew uses Greek opheilemata. The concept that sin is a debt, which the Holiness of God wants paid is common in the Old and New Testaments, and in intertestamental literature. Please recall our explanation of the rebalance of the objective order in the commentary on Mt 3:4.

We ask to be forgiven only according as we forgive those who have offended us. So one who refuses to forgive when the other apologizes is really asking God not to forgive him. However, God Himself does not forgive without repentance.

What does it mean to forgive? As we saw above on the holiness of God in the Our Father, and in Supplement 2 after 3:7-10, all sin is a debt. It is the Holiness of God that wants the debt paid, that is, wants the objective order rebalanced. He went so far as the terrible death of His Son to rebalance that order. But part of that restoration of the order includes that we also forgive others. To forgive means to be willing to overlook the offense. Often, even though not here, the New Testament uses Greek charizein, which means to make a present of what was owed, of a debt. Here the word aphienai is used, which means to let go.

Forgiveness is basically an attitude of our will, not of our feelings. Our will decides to let go the debt, to not demand that it be paid, even though we would have a right to call for that. But since God does not demand that we repay the immense debt of our sins, we too ought to not demand what we might claim from another.

But we also have feelings, and ideally, they should track with our attitude of will. But feelings are not on as it were an electrical switch, so we can turn hem off or on at will. We work indirectly, by turning attention to something else. Unpleasant feelings toward the offender can coexist with real forgiveness. In difficult cases, we might even interiorly pray for the offender when these feelings arise: for real love, in the will, cannot coexist with hatred. As we said, this is a matter of the attitude of our will - our feelings might continue to be averse even if our will is right. We need however to try not to dwell on the feelings, although intellectually we may continue to disapprove of what is really a moral fault.

Further, forgiveness does not require that we take the offender back into the same degree closeness as before. Yet, with marriage partners, this really needs to be done or the marriage may be spoiled.

There is also the side of the mind: From the offense one may learn about the character of the other, and see that he/she is not capable of being trusted. So one can be careful in handling them in the future. This does not contradict what we said above about the attitude of will and of feelings.

If we really have forgiven, we will not, when there is a new offense by the same person, recite the list of all the past faults of the offender. One reasonable translation of 1 Cor 13:5 is: "Love does not keep a record of faults", to bring them up on later occasions. That exacerbates the difference, makes real reconciliation much more difficult.

Further we can get some good advice from the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote (Agricola 42): "It is characteristic of human nature to dislike the one you have offended", so it is even best to try not to let the offender know very strongly that we are offended - then he is psychologically inclined to think we are not good, for if we are good, he would have to face that fact that he has done wrong. Easier for him to think we must be not good, and so he is right in doing what he has done.

"Lead us not into temptation... ." Two kinds of temptation could be on mind here. If we think of tempting to sin, of course God does not lead us into that, though He may permit it. There is however a Hebrew pattern of speaking which says God directly does something He only permits. Thus in 1 Samuel 4:3 after a defeat by the Philistines, the Jews asked: "Why did God strike us today before the face of the Philistines?" And in the account of the ten plagues in Egypt, a few times Pharaoh was near to letting them go, but then the text may say, "God hardened his heart" or, less often, "Pharaoh hardened his heart."

The other type of temptation is of the sort God used on Abraham, to bring out Abraham's obedience. This line seems not to refer to it, for that type of temptation is an occasion for merit, cf. James 1:12: "Blessed is the man who endures temptation, for when he has been proved he will receive the crown of life."

Luke's version of the Our Father, in 11:1-4, is shorter. It is very possible Jesus gave this prayer more than once in different places. We note Luke has the setting in which the disciples ask Him to teach them to pray.

Some ask: Why do we pray at all, for God knows in advance what we will ask for? St. Thomas says (I. 19. 5. c) that God in His love of good order likes to have a title or reason in place for giving something, even though that reason did not move Him. So as to prayer, He could give things without prayer, but He prefers to bind Himself in this way. Does this mean prayer counts for nothing? No, in making His decisions, He can take into account the fact that someone will pray for it in the right way.

At the end, in v 14, He adds that if we forgive, God will forgive us. If not, He will not forgive us. This something to ponder when we are tempted to refuse forgiveness. The thought really was contained in the earlier words in which we ask Him to forgive our debts as (same as "if") we forgive our debtors.

6:16-18: This is a repetition of the theme given earlier in 6;1-6.

6:19-21: We are urged to store up treasure in heaven, where it cannot be lost, rather than on the earth, where thieves may get it.

The sense is easy: Instead of being intent on storing up money etc. be intent on merit in heaven. Now as to merit. Merit is a claim to a reward. Our most basic claim is justification = first sanctifying grace. That makes us children of the Father, who as such have a claim to a place in their Father's house. But after becoming His children without merit, then, the fact that we are such, gives us a great dignity, which gives a basis for a claim to a reward for further things we do. But even then, we must remember that everything good we are and have and do is simply His gift (1 Cor. 4:7). Further, we are saved and made holy only if and to the extent that we are members of Christ and like Him. We do not generate any claim (merit) on our own) but we merely get in on the claim He generated when we are His members and like Him. (Cf. DS 1532 and 1582).

Verse 21 suggests an important train of thought:

"Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also)."Please recall the comments made in the treatment of the asceticism of St. John the Baptist in commentary on 3:1-12 (special comment on 3:4).

6:22-23: The sense is this: just as the eye guides the whole body, so an understanding of the above principles of Christ should guide one's spiritual life. If they do, it will be full of light, goodness, and the person will know where he is headed.

6:24: One cannot serve two masters - the imagery comes from slavery as it was practiced then. A slave obviously could not serve two. So we should make up our minds whether we mean to serve God or the things of this world. They lead us in opposite directions. Please recall again the special comments on 3:4 above.

Could a person avoid all mortal sin, and many venial sins, and still go after the things of this world? Yes, he could reach final salvation, but his pursuit would be less successful of the spiritual goods, and his life less happy even in this world.

6:25-35: The message is: avoid all excessive care for the things of this life. It does not mean to make no provision for the future. (If we compare Lk 14:28-33, that passage speaks of giving up all to follow Christ- not of worldly provision).