Christian
Readers,
Recently I spent
an afternoon reading John Dominic Crossan’s book, The Greatest Prayer. Let me start by saying; John has a real appreciation
for linguistics, parallelisms, and rhetorical effects. He spends a great deal of
the book describing his views and analogies on how the Lord’s Prayer was
written using these metaphorical techniques.
The Lord’s
Prayer, according to John, is Christianity’s greatest prayer. He believes the
Lord’s Prayer is one; a prayer from the heart of Judaism on the lips of
Christianity for the conscience of the world. Two; a radical manifesto and a
hymn of hope for all humanity in languages addressed to all the earth.
He feels the
Lord’s Prayer was written using synonymous and crescendo parallelisms.
John asks the
question, If the “Our Father” is prayed by God’s Spirit within and through us,
to whom and for what is that prayer uttered? Are we praying for God’s
intervention, or is God praying for our collaboration? If Paul can summarize
the entire prayer in its opening cry, “Abba, the Father!” how is the rest of
that prayer contained in its inaugural address?
He feels Matthew’s
version of the Lord’s Prayer is a well-crafted, carefully organized, and
poetically structured hymn—poetic parallelism. The primary and fundamental name
of God is a verbal paradox just as the burned-but-not-burned bush is a visual
one. In effect, John states, “My name is
the unnamable one.”
John Crossan
describes Daniels vision of the kingdom of God coming down from heaven to earth
as a eschatological vision. He describes it as God’s Great Divine Cleanup of the
World; worldwide peace, banquet, and equality.
He believes this
divine cleanup does not begin, cannot continue, and will not conclude without
our divinely empowered participation and transcendentally driven collaboration.
He also believes it will be nonviolent.
Why is God’s
Will more difficult for us than God’s name or kingdom? John writes, God’s Will
is an anthropomorphic or human word.
In the chapter;
Your Will Be Done on Earth, John sights, 1938 Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the holocaust,
Dr. Martin Luther King JR’s assassination, and the execution of Jesus. These
are examples of catastrophic events that he asks how it could have been God’s
Will. As Christians, we understand that Jesus’ crucifixion was God’s Will. He
asks, how could other cataclysmic events be God’s Will as well? John offers no
hypothesis for this question after posing it.
He also states,
the question is not whether God will forgive this or that sin, but whether
there is anything God will not forgive, even-or especially-our lack of human
forgiveness.
John Dominic
Crossan’s book, The Greatest Prayer,
was interesting to read. He believes strongly in the topic with a love for
linguistics.
He raised the
timeless question; how can a loving God allow such evil in this world as the
holocaust, assassinations, etc. Sadly,
he raised the question without offering his opinion of a possible answer.
If you have a
heart for Bible analysis, like I do, and can allow for John’s frequency of linguistics,
parallelisms, and rhetorical effects, his book will probably be at least
somewhat interesting for you. I will admit to skimming through many redundant areas;
John tends to overstate his points.
Blessings,
Shepard Cross
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