Our Father 9: Lead us not into Temptation but deliver us from evil.

that there is plenty of evil in the world, but it’s uncomfortable to think about it too closely, even if, at the same time, it can sometimes have a somewhat hypnotic allure. We’ll return to all this at the end of this talk.   But, before this final petition there’s that other rather perplexing one: lead us not into temptation.

In the first session of this series of talks, a story was mentioned that has been doing the rounds for some years concerning Pope Francis’s alleged desire to “change the Lord’s Prayer”, and reflecting on what was at stake here might be a helpful way into thinking about all this.

As I think is perhaps rather often the case, some commentators read into what the then Pope was saying rather more than either the text or the context warranted, and certainly the claim, found in numerous click-baity headlines online, that he wanted to impose on the universal Church an entirely novel understanding of the prayer that Jesus taught his followers doesn’t – to say the least - bear very much scrutiny. Acknowledging this is important, partly as a matter of simple justice to the late Holy Father, of course, but it’s also important because Pope Francis was in fact doing at least one thing here that was anything but novel: namely, acknowledging the confusing complexity of this clause of the Our Father. And if we acknowledge that complexity too, it might perhaps enable us to find some unexpected riches, and even some new consolation, in our own praying.

From the earliest centuries of Christian history, pastors and theologians have noticed – and wrestled with - the oddity of this petition.  After all – to put it at its most crude – temptation is a bad thing, whereas God is goodness itself: surely, then, it’s rather hard to imagine that God might actively encourage us into temptation, and somewhat unnecessary to pray that he won’t. What’s more, we have an outright denial in the New Testament that God ever does or even could lead anyone into temptation: James 1 13-14 reads “no one experiencing temptation should say ‘I am being tempted by God’, for God is not subject to temptation and he himself tempts no one. Rather, each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire”.  

And yet this text – lead us not into temptation - is also there in the New Testament, given to us by the Lord himself as part of the pattern of all Christian prayer. There must be something these words can mean that is universally applicable to all of us, and that does not do violence to everything we want to say about God and his relationship with us.

To explore this a little more deeply, we need to consider first just what it is we are asking God not to do: what, in other words, does “lead us not into” mean Secondly, we need to ask just what is meant by temptation itself. 

So, lead us not into temptation. And this brings us back to Pope Francis.

In 2017, the Episcopal Conference of France produced a new translation of the Our Father to be used at Mass.

Pope Francis did not mandate the change even in France and certainly did not propose its global adoption. What he did do though, was note the French bishops’ decision and suggest that their counterparts in Italy, who were also thinking of a new translation of the liturgy at this point, might consider following their example, since it clarified a potential confusion that existed in the current Italian version but also in the English one. And if we ask what that confusion was, it was precisely the one that emerges if we lay the words of the Our Father with which we familiar in English alongside that quotation from the letter of James: God, surely, tempts no one -as Pope Francis robustly put it, that sounds more like what we would expect from the devil – so what can it possibly mean to ask him not to?  And the French bishops’ solution to this conundrum was to replace “lead us not into temptation” with “do not let us fall into temptation”; a plea for God’s protection from temptation, wherever it may come from. That sounds like quite a radical innovation, but in fact, it is in line with how speakers of other Romance languages, including Pope Francis’ native Spanish, as well as Portuguese, Catalan and Occitan, for instance, have long prayed the Our Father.

What’s more, it is also in line with how many of the Fathers of the Church understood this petition. St Augustine, for instance, in a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount, points out that “many interpreting [this petition] say “do not allow us to be led into temptation – for God does not of himself lead [into temptation”]  And, in a letter of spiritual direction addressed to the Roman noblewoman Proba, he indicates that this interpretation is the right one: “When we say: Lead us not into temptation, we are reminding ourselves to ask that his help may not depart from us; otherwise we could be seduced and consent to some temptation, or despair and yield to it”.

Meanwhile, St Cyprian, who died a few years after Augustine was born, alludes in his commentary on the Our Father, to a different, and older Latin version of the Lord’s Prayer, which actually says something much more like what is now the official version in the French liturgy: not lead us not into temptation  “ne nos inducas in tentationem” but “ne nos patiaris induci in tentationem” – suffer us not to be led into temptation. For Cyprian, the point that is being made here is that when we pray this clause of the Our Father, we are remembering our weakness, and our need for God’s help in withstanding temptation, remembering, too, that he will help us, if we ask.

So, far from being a questionable modern innovation, it turns out that Pope Francis’ comments stand in a venerable tradition, and one that is spiritually profoundly suggestive. God our Father is indeed goodness itself, so for God to want us to behave badly would be for him to behave scandalously out of character. And unpredictable parenting is notoriously traumatizing. We want – and need – our parents to be consistent, and, ideally, consistently to model for us good, rather than bad behaviour. So, as St James tells us, God tempts no one – at least in our most everyday understanding of temptation: God is never going to try to persuade any of us to sin. He is our good and loving Father, and this is not how good and loving fathers behave. They do, however, give us their support to strengthen and encourage us in face of temptation to do wrong.

But that brings us to another complexity about this petition of the Our Father. This is our everyday understanding of temptation, of course, that it’s a matter of luring us to commit sin– but temptation in this sense is not the only possible, or even necessarily always the best possible – translation of the Greek word used in the two versions of the Lord’s Prayer in Matthew and Luke. That word, peirasmos, occurs nearly 30 times in the NT, and it can sometimes quite clearly mean temptation in our colloquial sense (as for instance in 1 Timothy 6.9, where the desire for riches is described in these terms: here presumably Paul is getting at all the various morally dubious practices that avarice might lead us into);. But other times it might perhaps better be translated as “trial” We sometimes speak of “trying” situations, or the “trials and tribulations” of life, by which we mean experience of difficulty or suffering. Where “peirsasmos” is used in this sense in the scriptures, there is usually a sense of the trial in question strengthening and purifying the faith of the sufferer, with behind this the process of refining precious metals by fire, a dramatic image for the cleansing and fortifying of the believer, as for instance in 1 Peter 16 ff.

‘In this you rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer various trials,  so that the genuineness of your faith, more precious than gold which though perishable is tested by fire, may redound to praise and glory and honour at the revelation of Jesus Christ.’

 And trial can, of course, also imply an attempt to find out the truth of matters, find out what is really the case: a drugs trial in which scientists attempt to discover the efficacy of a new medication, a legal trial to determine the innocence or guilt of a defendant.

 We see a hint of this, perhaps, in the temptations of Jesus in the wilderness. Of course we generally read the description of how Our Lord is “tempted” to turn stones into bread, throw himself from the temple and finally to worship the evil one as precisely temptations in the sense of encouragement to sin – and it’s right that we should: as the epistle to the Hebrews puts it “he is  like us in all things except sin”, and thus we recognise him as our compassionate high priest, able to sympathise with our weakness when we face temptation, but also as the one who, in the words of Peter’s first epistle, leaves us an example that we might follow in his steps.

But perhaps there’s something else going on here too: maybe the devil is trying Jesus: putting him on trial, we might even say; pressurising him to reveal his true colours. He suspects that Jesus is God incarnate, but he wants to make sure. The very language in which Satan casts his challenges suggests this, after all: if you are the Son of God. The devil has his reasons for employing this tactic: he wants to make sure he knows his enemy, in order to give himself the best chance of defeating him. The irony is, of course, that there is no possibility, ultimately, of Satan being victorious in any kind of combat in which he engages Jesus, precisely because Jesus is God, and the devil, in Christian theology at any rate, is in no sense God’s equal, however much he is his opposite (a point we’ll come back to later).

And it is for both these reasons that some have advocated an interpretation of this petition of the Our Father as “do not bring us to the time of trial”, or “do not put us to the test”.  It is true, of course, that suffering can strengthen us spiritually, and in more than one way.  It can make us realize our dependence on God more fully; draw us closer to Christ as we unite our pain with his Passion; draw us closer, too, to our suffering brothers and sisters in compassion and understanding.   It is also, of course, in suffering that our closeness or otherwise to God is sometimes most clearly revealed – think, for example, of the Book of Job - our trials and tribulations can be trials in that sense too.

All of this is true and profoundly important. But that doesn’t mean that we should never ask to be spared pain: indeed, to do so can in itself be evidence of our humility and closeness to Christ: after all, surely one of the places where he most obviously left us an example was in Gethsemane, and in the garden, before he prayed that earlier clause of the Lord’s prayer, “your will be done”, he effectively also prayed this one, asking his Father that the cup of suffering might pass him by. Surely the best pray-er of the Our Father is the one who is most fully the Father’s Son, and surely the more closely our prayer resembles his, the more it will please his Father and ours. I think it is also worth pointing out that when we ask that the Lord not let us fall into the time of trial, the prayer doesn’t have to be made in a calm, serene tone of voice as we are used to reciting the Our Father in the liturgy.  If the Lord’s Prayer truly is the pattern for all Christian prayer, that must include those times when we can only whimper – or scream the words Jesus gives us.

Deliver us from evil.

I’ve quite deliberately decided to spend rather less time on this final plea to our Father in heaven. The word evil, like the word temptation, is what the philosophers call non-univocal: it doesn’t mean just one thing, but a range of related things. And one sense of each of these two words we have been exploring already.

Evil can sometimes be used as a near synonym of intense suffering, the kind of suffering we might well pray to avoid. To ask that the Lord deliver us from evil in this sense is to underline the request we have just made that he should free us from the trials and tribulations we have been thinking about as one potential meaning of peirasmos. It’s interesting to note, incidentally, that, in his version of the Our Father, Luke omits this final clause, deliver us from evil, whereas both are present in Matthew: many commentators believe that Matthew was writing for a predominantly Jewish audience, Luke for a Gentile one, and it is characteristic of Hebrew style to use repetition for emphasis.

But we perhaps most normally mean something rather different by evil, not least in the context of the Our Father. Most of the Church fathers, in their commentary on this clause of the Lord’s prayer took it for granted that it is the evil one, the devil, from whom we are praying to be delivered, and, when it comes to the devil, I think there is much wisdom in reflecting on the celebrated observation of C S Lewis in the preface to his Screwtape Letters

“There are two equal and opposite temptations into which our race can fall about the devils”,  Lewis tells us.  “One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them”.

In order to avoid the first temptation –a too easy dismissal of Satan and all his works- we have to say something. In order to avoid the second – an obsession with these things -  we should probably refrain from saying too much. So, just a couple of points, inspired by what Lewis says here.

First, it’s striking that Lewis speaks of “devils” in the plural. At first sight, this isn’t reassuring at all: surely one devil would be bad enough. But actually, it’s a reminder of something very significant, and very comforting. There are and have been religious traditions in the history of humanity which claim two opposite but equal spiritual forces – a good and an evil god, if you will. In such a system, it might make sense to be afraid that the evil deity might prove stronger than the good one.  But for Christians, there is only one God, who is almighty goodness itself, and nothing else that exists can ever be finally victorious over him. The devils are not competitor gods; they are creatures, powerful, certainly, but immeasurably less powerful than God: numerous spiritual beings created good by the good God, who misused their freedom and thus fell away from the friendship of God for which they were made. How this happened and why God permitted it is as mysterious in the case of the fallen angels as in the case of humanity. But it does mean that we can be sure that evil will not have the last word, that when we pray to be delivered from evil, the battle has already been won.

Secondly, if it’s possible to pay either too much or too little attention to the devil, it’s also possible, I think, to attribute either too much or too little power to him, especially with regard to temptation in its most obvious sense, the enticement to sin.  How should we think about the role of the evil one when we stray from the paths of righteousness?

If you remember that quotation from St James once again, part of his reason for rejecting the idea that God tempts us is that it is all too easy to use this as an excuse: “God is not subject to temptation and he himself tempts no one. Rather, each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire”.  It wasn’t my fault, guv, honest:  God made me do it – but no, we can’t say that.  There is of course a venerable tradition of human beings casting around to find someone – sometimes anyone - else they can hold responsible for their misdemeanours and failures. Such a strategy has been on display on the political level in the demonizing of any number of marginalised groups throughout history, but, if we are honest, it can also be found lurking in our own respectable hearts. And here it is perhaps more conventional, at least among those who acknowledge that such a being exists, to pin the blame on the devil rather than on God: it’s been going on since the garden of Eden, after all. Adam tells God that he only ate the forbidden fruit because Eve enticed him; Eve in her turn blames the serpent, traditionally identified by Christians with Satan.  But I think this understanding of temptation is itself a temptation: it can be remarkably convenient to attribute one’s wrath, envy, gluttony - or whatever one’s favourite besetting sin might be - to someone other than oneself.  

But there is a difference between being tempted – sin being suggested to us – and acquiescing with that suggestion -actually sinning.   And, while the devil will doubtless be delighted if we do comply with the temptation, it is still us, and not the devil, who is choosing to do so, and in so doing choosing to be other than who we most truly are, choosing to be the devil’s servants rather than God’s beloved children..   When, on the other hand, we refuse temptation, we are acknowledging – and showing – our true identity as God’s beloved children, made in his image. The devil does not make us sin and fall short of the glory of God: we do that to ourselves.

At the same time, however, we need to remember not only the strength we have to resist temptation, but also our weakness.  We do have free will, and the obligation to exercise it, as far as we are able, but that qualification is important.

Last time, for instance, we were thinking about how we are asked to forgive others for the hurt they have caused us – but we may be in so much pain and so diminished by what has happened to us that this is, at least for the moment impossible: we simply do not have the freedom - or the strength - of will. And  it is also worth saying at this point that the fact that extraordinary miracles of grace sometimes occur, like those that led St Maria Goretti to forgive her murderer and Gordon Wilson to forgive those who planted the bomb that killed his daughter, should not become a stick to beat ourselves with if we find that this is impossible for us.

And, then, of course, the person who hurt us might themselves have been acting from a place of their own woundedness: though, as I’ve said, suffering can bring about profound spiritual growth, it doesn’t necessarily do so: it can on the contrary brutalize the sufferer -  the hurt, hurt, as has rightly been said: those who have been bullied frequently bully, and so the cycle goes on. Acknowledging all of this is not excusing sin; it’s a humble acknowledgement that, however much we would like to, we can’t defeat it in our own strength.   And if we believe – and this isn’t optional for us as Catholic Christians – that the devil exists, alongside all those very human factors of nature and nurture, alongside those deep and festering wounds we inflict on ourselves and each other, it would not be at all surprising, that among the temptations we find impossible to resist in our own strength some come straight from – to use the name given him by C S Lewis in the Screwtape Letters, our father below.  All we can – and must do – sometimes is quite literally say and mean the words with which the Lord’s Prayer concludes: deliver us from evil – for we certainly cannot deliver ourselves.

And just one final point. The Screwtape Letters  is, of course, a funny book, in which devils beavering away at their destructive work are depicted as rather like civil servants in a government department, with the relationship between a senior devil, Screwtape, and his young nephew whom is mentoring being reminiscent of that between Sir Humphrey Appleby and Bernard Woolley. And in writing the Screwtape Letters, Lewis stood in a long tradition of laughing at the devil. In the late Middle Ages, a practice developed of including a joke in every Easter homily – not simply to grab the congregation’s attention, but because laughter is liberating, a sign of liberation from the grim reign of terror which the devil seeks to impose on the human race, and which has been definitively defeated by the death and resurrection of Christ. The custom, known as the risus paschalis, the laughter of Easter, was eventually banned, because, apparently, some of the jokes had become too lewd. But, without the lewdness, it might perhaps be worth reinstating something like this in our own lives of prayer We are delivered from evil, and that is something not merely to acknowledge, but to celebrate, not just at Easter but throughout the year.