Jesus is our model for prayer, and he shows us what it looks like to pray as a child of God. The Lord’s Prayer has been called the perfect prayer and the summary of the whole Gospel.
It is interesting to me that in St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer near the end of his Sermon on the Mount.
The Sermon, beginning with the Beatitudes, gives us the picture of what it means to be a Christian, and how we should live as a child of God. So it is fitting that here he teaches us to pray — because prayer is the language of our relationship with our Father.
In a way, we could say that this prayer gives us the “spirituality” of Jesus at prayer. When we pray the Our Father, we are praying as Jesus did — as a child of God, with love and confidence; with the desire to be obedient and to serve our Father’s will.
Jesus gives us his own words to pray with — but far more than that. He gives us the gift of his own intimate prayer to God. When we pray these words we are praying with Jesus. We are standing alongside him as his brothers and sisters, sharing in his own personal prayer of self-offering to the Father. We need to remember that when we pray. [Excerpt from the Archbishop José H. Gomez “Praying the Our Father” April 2016]
