Recently I was asked to do a short podcast on the Lord’s Prayer. The Our Father or the Lord’s Prayer is the prayer that identifies the followers of Jesus, yet there is nothing Christian about it. There is no mention of Jesus, the Church, the sacraments or creeds and yet it is universally recognised as the distinctive Christian prayer.
This is not surprising because Jesus was a Jew, he lived as a Jew, he worshipped as a Jew, he prayed as a Jew so any prayer that he would have left to his disciples would have been a prayer that came from the heart of his faith, the Jewish faith but also expressed his own understanding of that faith.
The prayer is divided into 2 parts. The first part addresses God and honours His name

• Our Father who art in heaven
• hallowed be thy name thy name
• thy kingdom come
• thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven

The second part is a prayer of petition

• give us this day our daily bread
• forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others
• lead us not into temptation but
• deliver us from evil

The two phrases I reflected on are in the first half of the prayer
Our Father who art in heaven and Thy kingdom come.

As 21st century Christians we understand this prayer differently from Jesus who was a 1st century Jew. For Jesus the world would be seen as a 3-tiered universe with heaven above, hell below and earth in between. We now know from modern cosmology that in fact we live in a vast universe made up of billions of galaxies which has evolved over time. So where is the  heaven where God dwells. It’s reported that in 1961 when the Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin—the first human launched into space—returned to Earth he had a simple, Soviet-style message: “I looked and looked and looked, but I didn’t see God.” I don’t know if this story is true but if it is Yuri Gagarin was looking in the wrong place.

The catechism, that many of us were brought up on tells us where God is – everywhere. In the Acts of the Apostles St Paul in a debate with Greek philosophers tells us that “God is the reality in which we live and move and have our very being” and in the gospels Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of God, the dwelling place of God is within and among us.
So, when we say Our Father who art in heaven, we are not suggesting that God is in some distant place but rather recognising God’s mystery and otherness, the source of life of all of us, the bond that unites us with one another, here amongst us.

 This is a prayer we that we never say as an isolated individual. For some people the ‘our’ represents the Christian community but if our God is the God and Source of all life then the ‘our’ applies to all beings. And today we know so much more about our interconnectedness and interdependency with the natural world so that the ‘our’ in fact includes all sentient beings, all of creation including the stars and the planets.  

From this prayer we know that for Jesus ‘Father’ was a favourite image of God. But it is only an image and shouldn’t be taken too literally. An image is like a finger pointing at the moon; if you look only at the finger, you will miss the moon. So too with the image of father. If we take it literally, it can obscure the mystery and greatness, the otherness and closeness of a God who does not reside in heaven but amongst us and within us.

Addressing God as father does not mean God is a big man, certainly not with a white beard, and yet that is a dominant image of God.  I only learned recently, when I went to see the Sistine Chapel exhibition, that Michelangelo’s depiction of God in the creation of Adam and Eve was the first time that the human form was used and, as in the depiction of the creation of Eve, the first time and perhaps the only time that God has been depicted  standing on the earth. But this male human image has come to dominate our imagination.

And so, we come to the second phrase, Thy Kingdom come. For me this is the heart of Jesus message. According to the Gospel of Mark Jesus begins his ministry with the words, repent, believe the good news for the Kingdom of God is among you. Scholars have debated what Mark meant by these words. Is he suggesting that the Kingdom has come in Jesus or with Jesus? Whatever, this kingdom is not to be found in another dimension such as heaven but amongst us. I once heard someone say that Christians should be Kingdom spotters; then cooperate wherever they find the Kingdom. Today we live in a world where everything seems to be falling apart and unravelling - climate change, wars, a global pandemic, the rising cost of living. How easy it is to be depressed.

But this is not the whole picture. There are many people working for justice and peace, struggling to live a good and honest life, desiring, praying for and working to make our world a better place for our children and succeeding generations, spreading goodness around them in all sorts of ways. The kingdom of God is all around us - if we have eyes to see it. And sometimes, it’s to be found in the most unexpected places - outside the church, outside religion. 

There's more to be said and perhaps there will be a later blog on that but this reflection shows that there are many ways of understanding the Lord's Prayer and further study on a familiar prayer could be a good thing. 
 

Today, 26th June, Professor Amy-Jill Levine will be awarded the first ever Seelisberg Prize set up by the International Council of Christians and Jews and the Centre for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion at the University of Salzburg. It is to be given annually to “a person who has contributed to Jewish-Christian understanding through their academic excellence and the outstanding communication of their research and insights to a wide audience.” The establishment of the prize marks the 75th anniversary of a conference that took place in the small Swiss village of Seelisberg in 1947 to consider the roots of an antisemitism that had led to the Holocaust but still survived in Europe. The conference faced the 1900 years of Christian antisemitism, and its famous 10 points laid the foundation for future Christian – Jewish relations and saw the beginning of the International Council of Christians and Jews.

The ten points of Seelisberg were in fact a distillation of eighteen points put forward by the Jewish historian Jules Isaac whose conversation with Pope John XXIII fifteen years or so led eventually to the Vatican II document ‘Nostra Aetate’ which while focussed on the church’s relations with non- Christians had begun its life as a statement on the Church’s relationship with the Jews. The ten statements stress that it is the same God that speaks in the Old and New Testaments; that Jesus, his mother and the first disciples as well as the first martyrs and members of the Church were all Jews; that the fundamental command to love God and neighbour, found in the Old Testament and confirmed by Jesus, is binding on all Christians and Jews;  that Jews are not responsible for the death of Jesus and the Passion of Jesus should not be presented as though they were; that language which  uses the word Jews in an exclusive sense of the enemies of Jesus or any suggestion that the Jewish people are reprobate or accursed should be avoided. These are elements that eventually did find their way in to Nostra Aetate and further catholic teaching such as the document based on Rom. 11: 28 – 30:  They are beloved for the fathers' sake. For the gifts and the calling of God are without repentance.

Professor Amy-Jill Levine is a worthy recipient of the prize. She is Jewish and a recognised scholar of the Christian New Testament. Her CV is impressive. She is University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies, Mary Jane Werthan Professor of Jewish Studies, and Professor of New Testament Studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, Graduate Department of Religion, and Department of Jewish Studies; she is also Affiliated Professor, Woolf Institute, Centre for the Study of Jewish-Christian Relations in Cambridge UK. In 2019 she was the first Jew to teach New Testament at Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute. Her list of publications is also impressive including the co-editorship of The Jewish Annotated New Testament, the editorship of the 13-volume Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings. She is also the New Testament editor of the new Oxford Biblical Commentary Series and sits on the editorial board of the Encyclopaedia of Christian-Jewish Relations.

 I have read some of her books and been privileged to hear her speak on several occasions, all made possible because of zoom. I have learned such a lot about the Jewishness of Jesus, how the Gospels could be seen as a kind of midrash, that is a reflection in the light of the early disciples’ experience of Jesus on traditional Jewish teaching and stories.  I have learned that Jesus lived as a faithful Jew. He kept the law, he ate kosher food, he was circumcised like all Jewish boys, he went to the Temple in Jerusalem, he attended the synagogue, he read the Jewish scriptures and would have prayed and even sung the psalms. He would have prayed three times a day wearing phylacteries, he would have worn fringes on his outer cloak. He kept the Sabbath. And like other Jews of his time, he would have debated what it meant to be a good Jew. In fact, if Jesus set out any guidance it was how to be a good Jew, rather than a good Christian.

Professor Levi loves the New Testament and is fascinated by it. She also loves Jesus. I have heard her say this often while admitting that she doesn’t have faith in him in the way Christians do. For Professor Levine Jesus is a faithful Jew and nothing in the New Testament would contradict this. And she wants both Christians and Jews to recognise it. Speaking of Prof. Levine’s nomination for the prize Prof. Gregor Maria Hoff of the University of Salzburg said, “Her astonishing productivity stems from her lifelong commitment to bringing the fruits of her scholarship to the general public and to promoting positive interactions between Jews and Christians.”
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As she receives the first Seelisberg prize at a ceremony in Frankfurt today Prof. Levine will deliver an address entitled, “Learning about Jews by Reading the New Testament,” reflecting her conviction that in studying the New Testament she enriched her own Jewish identity. I look forward to reading it.
here to edit.

 It’s all about story. It’s the story we tell ourselves that determines how we see and respond to the world in which we live. And it’s story that often divides us. We can see this in the present conflict in Ukraine. Putin has one story about Russia and its claims on Ukraine and Zelensky another. At the moment we are in the run up to local elections in Britain and each candidate has his or her own story, usually that they are better than other candidates or other parties. Sometimes there’s not much about the good each might do and could do together with cooperation between parties. Competition not cooperation is the order of the day. Many people think this is so with religions – each with its own competing truth claims. Others who are involved in interreligious dialogue see cooperation as the way forward, respecting the belief of others, while not assenting to them but refusing to let that difference divide us.
 
This week there will be plenty of storytelling in religions. For the first time in over 30 years several religions are celebrating significant festivals this week.  Christians are celebrating Easter, Jains are celebrating the birthday of one of their founders, Baha’is are remembering the day on which their founder Baha’u’llah declared his mission as a Manifestation of God, Sikhs are commemorating the birth of the Khalsa in the festival of Vaisakhi while Muslims are observing Ramadan.

For Christians religious services will focus on the last three days in the life of Jesus. On Holy Thursday the story is about the Last Supper Jesus shared with his disciples before going to his death. This Last Supper has become ritualised in eucharists/communion services celebrated in some denominations daily. On Holy Thursday there is an extra element – at least for Catholics. While the story of the Last Supper is read the priest will wash the foot of 12 parishioners in imitation of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet. Being conservative, the Church has in the past stipulated that the parishioners should be men, but Pope Francis has shown by example that not only can women have their feet washed but even people who are not Catholic. As has become his custom the Pope will say Mass in a prison outside of Rome and wash (and kiss) the feet of prisoners, displaying in action, the meaning of the story which is that service, compassion and love of others is at the heart of faith. For Christians this story should be the motivation for how they live and had this been the case throughout history a lot of conflict between religions and a lot of religious wars could have been avoided.  But for some people the washing of the feet was limited to followers of Jesus – leading to rejection of others and even denying them salvation. It depends then, not so much on the story but how you hear that story.

Good Friday focusses on the death of Jesus at the hands of the Roman authorities. Yes, he was brought to those authorities by some of the Jewish ruling group but not by ‘The Jews’. Unfortunately, many churches will read the account of Jesus passion from the Gospel of John, and it talks about ‘The Jews’ and if the person leading the service doesn’t explain that this does not refer to the whole Jewish people of which Jesus was a part, the listeners can come away with the wrong idea. This idea was so prevalent in the Middle Ages that Jews were unsafe during these three days as many Christians would attack them to avenge the death of Jesus, charging them with deicide. This reading of the story has been declared wrong by the Catholic Church in its document on its relationship with other faiths, Nostra Aetate as has any form of antisemitism. 

The story of Good Friday has been and can be read in different ways – focussing on how necessary it was for the salvation of the world. Another way of reading it is to see it as the first step in an integrated action that includes the Resurrection on Easter Sunday. In this way death and resurrection are taken together and reflect the reality of life. We live in a world where death in nature happens for new life to develop and evolve. Death and resurrection can be read as a spiritual practice – letting go of each moment, old ideas, to embrace the next and respond to what life calls us to.

While all this is happening in Christian churches the Jewish community will be celebrating Pesach/Passover with their families at home. It will take place at a family meal where the story of the People of Israel’s escape from the slavery of Egypt will be told and symbolically acted out through the readings and food that is eaten. Some Christians think this is the meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples before his death, but it isn’t the same. The order of the service is one that developed in the first century of the common era and would not have been the one celebrated by Jews in Jesus’ time. Some Christians like to Christianise it and link it to Jesus Last Supper, but this is to deny it and Judaism its own integrity. As a story of redemption and salvation Jews will be remembering the injustices and conflicts, the crises from which humans need to be saved and praying that this might happen now as it did in the past to their ancestors. But to do this is also to commit to working to make this salvation a reality in so far as we can.

And the other festivals of new year and the story of religious founders that are being told at the same time as the festivals of Pesach and Easter, as well as  the intensive prayer and fasting of Ramadan, must surely give this week a powerful spiritual energy which I believe we can tap in to and harness in our own lives in our hopes and actions for a better world. 

 “We see things as we are not as they are” is an often quoted saying. Today it’s clearly illustrated in the story being played out by Vladimir Putin and the war in Ukraine. President Putin has an idealised view of what he calls ‘Rus’, a Russia of the first millennium that included Ukraine, Belarus and Crimea and he seemingly wants to return to that and set himself up as Czar of all Russia, even if he doesn’t use the name. For him this is a sacred task and the land of Russia, as it was, is a sacred land. Those nations that disrupt this unity are not legitimate and are to be crushed. Ukraine on the other hand sees itself as a thriving democracy, with a strong sense of its own identity, wanting to be associated with the European Union and part of NATO. For them this present conflict is a war of aggression, and the world is looking on with horror at the destruction of cities in Ukraine, the wanton killings and the millions of women and children fleeing the country – women and children mainly because the menfolk are staying to fight and defend their country. Putin won’t even acknowledge that what he is doing is war – rather he calls it a special operation to rid the country of anti-Nazi elements and restore Russian unity. What’s to be done about it.

Protests, demonstrations, prayers, sanctions, show the breadth and depth of opposition to the war but this makes no difference to Putin who knows that his threat of using nuclear weapons and the fear of other nations that this present conflict could escalate into a third world war keeps the rest of the world looking on powerlessly. One of the saddest things about this war for those of us who are Christian is that the Russian Orthodox Church of which Putin is a member supports him wholeheartedly. Well, maybe that’s not quite true. An orthodox priest in Russia was arrested and fined for criticising the war; there have been anti-war protests in some cities and many of those protesters will belong to the Orthodox Church; the  Russian Orthodox clergy Amsterdam have separated themselves from the Moscow Patriarchate and asked to join the ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; more than 280 Russian Orthodox priests and church officials from around the world have signed an open letter, expressing their opposition to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is the head of the Church, Patriarch Kirill who is firmly standing on the side of Putin. Kirill is Ukrainian and believes in the one nation of Russians, Belarusians, and Little Russians (Ukrainians). In a reply to the World Council of Churches he blamed NATO member states for what he sees is a strategy for undermining and weakening Russia which must be protected at all costs. We see things as we are not as they are. What’s to be done about it.

I don’t think I have felt just as despondent about the world as I do at the moment. We’ve come through, or hopefully are coming through, a pandemic which revealed to us our global fragility and need for cooperation. We have faced the growing threat of climate change, particularly at the last COP gathering in Glasgow, and our responsibility for the future well-being of our planet. We are now facing a war which could easily escalate into a world war and even lead to the use of nuclear weapons and the end of the world as we know it. There seems to be a desperation among people at government and local level to show Putin and Kirill how much they oppose the war and call for peace. No wonder people are afraid of the future which, at the moment, seems so very insecure. What’s to be done about it.

There are of course things that can be done – protesting, letting our voice be heard, supporting charities working on the ground to care for the people of Ukraine, welcoming refugees into our societies, making sure that Russians and Ukrainians citizens in our own land feel supported and respected for it happens so often that conflicts abroad can easily spill over to violence at home. Many people are doing this. What about prayer? Will that help? Will it change President Putin’s heart? Perhaps it can send good energy and hope to the peace talks that are taking place at the same time as the bombing and destruction continue. I’m not too confident about that but for many of us it may be the least we can do to feel we are doing something.

Perhaps the prayer that needs to be prayed is that which feels the pain of this suffering, the pain of the inability of our human family to live together in peace, the pain that those suffering and those perpetrating the violence are our brothers and sisters and because of this we are all implicated. And this is not the only war being waged by our brothers and sisters.  This war in Europe is at present dominating our media but there is also conflict in Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ethiopia and elsewhere. Perhaps these conflicts are more easily forgotten as they are further afield and don’t touch us in the same way. So too with refugees. Thousands of people in Britain are opening their homes to Ukrainian refugees but there are thousands of refugees from other parts of the world all trying to find safety and deserve equal treatment. Taking time to pray is to open ourselves to this pain. Will this then help us  to see our human family as one and commit ourselves to friendships and relationships that extend beyond definitions. Without that I doubt peace is possible. 

On 17th February Glasgow City Council announced its budget for the forthcoming year and plans for post-covid recovery. Included in that budget is the statement “ As well as confirming the funding to keep all local libraries open, it will also allocate more than £1 million to reopen community centres and public halls, and £650k to reopen the much-loved St Mungo’s Museum and Provand’s Lordship”  This feels like a victory for all those who campaigned tirelessly for the council to keep local libraries, museums and community centres open. Was this part of the budget the result of that campaigning, did Glasgow City Council listen to the voices of its citizens and realise how committed people were to their cultural and community centres, recognising the value they have in the ethos and development of a city.
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I was involved in the campaign to save St Mungo’s Museum or Religious Life and Art so that it would keep its interfaith and multifaith focus. Glasgow Life had indicated that its plan was to enter into an agreement with Historic Environment Scotland who own Glasgow Cathedral to revamp the Cathedral precinct to attract more visitors to the historic centre of Glasgow. This revamp would include St Mungo’s Museum and could mean a change in its focus to link more clearly with the history of the Cathedral. This has not yet been resolved but it is surely in keeping with the Christian origins of Glasgow to show its growth as the multifaith city, committed to social and interfaith harmony, that it has become.

The idea of a Museum of Religious Life and Art was the brainchild of Mark O’Neill, at that time Senior Curator of History with Gl. Museums. From the outset it was developed with a socially driven purpose, expressed in the mission statement:
to explore the importance of religion in people’s everyday lives across the world and across time, aiming to promote mutual understanding and respect between people of different faiths and none.  Mark and his team were convinced that if the museum was to live up to this vision stakeholders would have to be consulted and included in the museum’s development – even in the decision to call it The St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art. The stakeholders were the various faith communities in Glasgow as well as the Glasgow Sharing of Faiths, the first and, at that time, only interfaith group in Scotland.  All these groups were approached and involved – donating artefacts and giving suggestions about the layout. Once opened the museum became a centre for interfaith celebrations and dialogues and because of the involvement of faith communities from its inception the Museum felt very much like a home from home. It did indeed become a much loved venue and the thought of it closing was like a bereavement and loss of what was considered a safe and neutral space to conduct what were sometimes difficult dialogues.    

The Museum opened on 4th April 1993, one of only two Museums of Religion in Europe. Now there are more and many of those setting up similar museums came to Glasgow to learn from the St. Mungo experience. For these interfaith friends the thought of St Mungo’s closing or even changing its focus seemed incredible and many of them added their voices of protest to those of Glaswegians and the thousands of people who signed the petition instigated by Interfaith Glasgow. 

This is not the first time that there have been plans to close St Mungo’s Museum, nor the first time it has been saved. It’s as though Glasgow Council needs to be reminded from time to time of its significance and the important contribution it makes to good community relations. Hopefully that no matter what future developments there might be stakeholders from Glasgow’s diverse religious communities, interfaith organisations, and anti-sectarian organisations will be consulted.