Hello, and welcome to another blessing Sunday. Traveling with me on this path are
Abbie Johnson Taylor

and

Lynda Lambert who shared the idea with me.

I’ve been praying the Lord’s prayer for many many years. Saturday morning as I was thinking about how to go about writing this post, I realized something. Jesus was praying in the pleural! He used words like ‘us’ and ‘we’ and ‘our’. I guess I glossed it over because who better than Jesus to use the “royal we?” But then I began to wonder to myself: might there be more to it than merely an editorial turn of phrase? I didn’t even know how to go about searching, so I asked Gemini, Google’s AI. I learned much to my surprise and delight, that our church fathers had been pondering this question long before I ever entered the world, particularly Cyprian and Augustine. Cyprian wrote what is perhaps the most famous early treatise on the subject, De Dominica Oratione (On the Lord’s Prayer). Writing during a period of intense persecution and internal Church division, he argued that Jesus intentionally designed the prayer to prevent self-centered individualism:

“Before all things, the Teacher of peace and the Master of unity would not have prayer to be made single and individually, as for one who prays for himself alone. For we do not say ‘My Father…’; nor does each one ask that only his own debt should be forgiven… Our prayer is public and common; and when we pray, we pray not for one but for the whole people, because we the whole people are one.” — Cyprian, Treatise 4.8

For Cyprian, the plural phrasing is a mandate for solidarity:

One Body, One Voice: He pointed to the three young men in the fiery furnace (Daniel 3) and the Apostles in the Upper Room as examples of praying “with one accord”.

Writing over a century later, Augustine picked up Cyprian’s torch in his Sermons on the New Testament, but he placed special emphasis on how the plural pronoun radically flattens human social hierarchies:
“How great a condescension! This the emperor says, and this says the beggar: this says the slave, and this his lord. They say all together, ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ … You have begun to belong to a great family.” — Augustine, Sermon 8 & 9

For Augustine, the plural pronouns acted as a theological reset button:

• Radical Equality: In Roman society—steeped in rigid class structures, slavery, and imperial privilege—forcing an emperor and a slave to use the exact same possessive pronoun (“our”) before the Creator was revolutionary.

• No Private Monopolies: Augustine emphasized that no individual, regardless of rank or piety, can claim a private monopoly on God. By forcing every believer to say “us,” the prayer abolishes human pride.

Both Cyprian and Augustine concluded that when Jesus gave us this prayer, He didn’t just teach us what to ask for—He taught us who we are when we ask it: one indivisible body.

Who knew? Certainly not me.

The other thing is that in 1st century Judaism, prayer was communal. The Jewish sages argued that a purely singular prayer was spiritually vulnerable to self-centeredness or accusation, whereas a plural prayer carries the spiritual weight and merit of the whole community. Jesus’ model prayer aligns squarely with this core rabbinic principle.

When we pray the Lord’s Model prayer, therefore, we’re joining all Christians throughout the entire world in a prayer for all believers. “Give us our daily bread” is a petition that’s not answered if I’m full but someone else is hungry. “Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors” is a prayer that can’t be ansered if we ask forgiveness from God but hold a grudge against another–or won’t forgive ourselves.

Maybe if we thought more about this prayer, we’d realize that we really are all united in God–Father, Son, and Spirit.

Lord, thank you for the insight you gave that you weren’t just using the “royal we”, that you had a purpose for doing so, which was to unite all Christians w/you & w/each other. Help us look beyond our individualistic thoughts and find consolation that we are truly all brothers and sisters in your family. Amen.