By Father Thomas Esposito, O. Cist.
Special to The Texas Catholic
The two petitions that conclude the “Our Father” prayer form a single sentence. “And lead us not into temptation” is inseparable from “but deliver us from evil,” according to faith as well as grammar. And just as the word “temptation” needed to be mined for deeper insights, so too does the word “evil.”
We rightly beseech the Lord to rescue us from all particular evils, and we do well to trust that he will save us from evil in the abstract; but a strong case can be made that when Jesus invites us here to pray for deliverance “apo tou ponērou,” he has in mind “the evil one” — Satan himself.
The personal designation of “ho ponēros” as “the evil one” is found elsewhere in the New Testament. Jesus notes that “the evil one comes and steals away” the seed sown on the heart-path of one who hears the Word without understanding it (Mt 13:19). In the same chapter, Jesus explains the symbolism of the tares sown amid the wheat: “The weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sows them is the devil” (Mt 13:38-39). In John’s account of the Last Supper, Jesus prays to the Father, “I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one” (Jn 17:15). The Lord’s assurance that he protects us from the evil one is also found in 2 Thessalonians 3:3 and 1 John 5:17. Several early Church fathers preferred this personal understanding of “the evil one” to the generic “evil,” including Origen: “And so, through hearing God, let us become worthy of being heard by him. Let us beseech him when we are tempted, that we be not put to death and be not set on fire by the fiery arrows of the evil one when they are hurled against us (cf. 2 Cor 6:9; Eph 6:16).”
This final demand for deliverance requires a humble admission on our part: We do not, indeed cannot, rescue ourselves from the clutches of the evil one. We are too burdened by the concupiscent tendency that tilts our will downward to sin. Only through the prayer of Jesus and our trusting acceptance of the Father’s merciful love are we able to conquer the evil that ever lurks within and around us.
This final petition is a reminder that our conquest is not primarily a matter of winning the day-to-day struggles against the conspiring forces of sin, selfishness, and death. By concluding the prayer in this way, Jesus is alerting us to the supreme and awful battle in which we are pitched. These final two petitions are marked by an eschatological urgency: Our individual fight mirrors the ultimate war waged by Christ against Satan and his minions.
That war, of course, has already been won by Christ. Our Christian life is fundamentally an invitation from Christ to claim the spoils of his victory. The book of Revelation makes this clear, using the same word, “peirasmos,” that we find in the petition “And lead us not into temptation”: “Because you have kept my message of endurance, I will keep you safe in the time of trial that is going to come to the whole world to test the inhabitants of the earth. I am coming quickly. Hold fast to what you have, so that no one may take your crown” (Rev 3:10-11). To conclude the prayer with “Deliver us from the evil one,” then, is to express daily, even multiple times per day, the great hope that Christ’s victory is and will be ours today, tomorrow, and forever.
The prayer begins with the invocation “Our Father” and ends with the word “evil,” which implies the divine victory over “the evil one.” Each section of this prayer, then, is a mile marker lining our way to God and away from the one who wishes to thwart our passage to God who reigns in heaven and desires that we join him there.
Father Thomas Esposito, O.Cist., is a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Dallas and teaches in the theology department at the University of Dallas.
Cutline for featured image: People pray the Lord’s Prayer in Matera, Italy, Sept. 25, 2022. (CNS photo/Paul Haring)
