Why do they keep publishing new and improved dictionaries? Why do we wait breathlessly for language specialists to tell us which is the new term of the year? Will it be COVID or “fake news”? While not breathless, I think it is because all languages evolve. They are living, breathing organisms admitting new members and disposing of outdated ones. It even happens in our prayers.
In the Lord’s prayer he spoke a prayer that probably he did not himself pray. That is because he has them ask for forgiveness of their sins. He was sinless. His baptism by his cousin John the Baptizer qualifies as history’s least necessary baptism. He had no sins to wash away in the Jordan but he received it for the benefit of his onlookers there.
In that prayer we ask the Father to lead us not into temptation. Why would he? Why would we ask him as though we worried he would?
We remember that Jesus is teaching his disciples in answer to their request about how they should pray. He the sinless one instructs his sinner friends how they should deal with the reality of their sins. But speaking of languages, we remember that he was speaking Aramaic to them. Jews at that time used Hebrew in worship but a cognate language of it outside the synagogue. His prayer was quoted in the New Testament’s original language of Greek by Matthew and Luke. And then these were translated into English in our Bibles, all of which undergo new translations as English evolves.
We still use the outdated “thees” and “thous,” when we pray “…thy kingdom come…,” and “. . .the Lord is with thee.” When the council fathers of Vatican II issued the wording of the new liturgy in the mid-1960s, they consciously made accommodation to the traditionalist conservatives in the church by allowing these older forms to remain since many felt there was already so much to which they had to adjust. I think that was very gracious of them. But in an ecumenical spirit they added the Protestant conclusion, but they did it in modern and not in the familiar archaic terms. We say “. . . for the Kingdom and the power and the glory are yours now and forever.” That was gracious to our sister and brother Christians, the whole idea of ecumenical outreach.
Maybe that is why the council fathers did not update the further petition in the Lord’s prayer about being led into temptation. We know well that the Father would have us avoid temptation, so why do we pray that he not make things harder for us, leading us into it?
I suggest that the translation needs updating to say “. . .and do not put us to the test, or temptation, or do not test us.” In this way, we hear Jesus counseling his friends that they are weak and they would do well to admit it. We are saying that God already knows how we would perform if tested. The only thing a test would show would be to let us know we are weak. We would crumble because we are weak and we know it. And since we are, our prayer’s conclusion is that we throw ourselves on the mercy of the All-Merciful. We ask that he deliver us out of compassion for us who admit we would fail, not because we passed a test. We have no mistaken notion that we could avoid evil by our own power. For English-speaking people, what we meant with the old format has to correspond with the new.
Psychologists could better explain why adapting to something new is so hard. We all face it the older we get. Psychologists have been at work explaining why some Catholics find it so hard that they resist the authority of even Pope Francis. The National Catholic Reporter quoted the pope in Austin Ivereigh’s “Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future,” saying that “Those who declare that there is too much ‘confusion’ in the church and that only this or that group of purists or traditionalists can be trusted, sow division.” When the birth control encyclical Humanae Vitae was issued in 1968, left-leaning critics found fault with it. But I do not remember critics challenging Pope Paul VI’s very authority to teach an unpopular mandate. Language and people’s understanding of the faith that they express in language can and should adapt.
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