Member-only story
Why hallowing the Name of God is so confounding
The fourth in the series on the Jesus Prayer, also known as the Lord’s Prayer. Was Jesus a political revolutionary, a great moral teacher but purely human, or was he the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity? We are looking at this famous teaching prayer through these three prisms. This focuses on the words “hallowed be thy name.”
After his followers asked Jesus to teach them how to pray, he told them to pray to “Our Father” and designated that God, the object of prayer, was located in a created realm called heaven. He then told his followers to tell this Father-God, that his name was to be hallowed.
Hallowed is simply not a word we use very often in our daily lives. Probably Halloween comes closest, and if anything, that raucous event filled with ghouls, demons and zombies parading as little children is quite opposite of what hallowed means.
But, we will see the problem of understanding what is being taught here runs much deeper than our most common translations using an ancient word. Ancient words used in modern contexts often lose their meaning. But, in this case, we moderns don’t have much of an understanding of what lies beneath any word that might be used for the idea of being hallowed.
