The Lord will rescue me from every evil attack and save me for his heavenly kingdom. To him be the glory forever and ever. Amen. – 2 Timothy 4:18 (NRSVUE)
Over the past two months, these weekly devotions have worked through the Lord’s Prayer, generally relying on Martin Luther’s Large Catechism as a guide for making sense of what we are praying for when we pray this prayer. As we move into the autumn and the new program year, we come to the last petition. A quick note is that there is a closing or doxology (praising God) that we generally say at the end (for thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory forever and ever.) This closing is not part of the biblical text of the prayer. Instead, it was typical that prayers would be ended with this sort of praise, and so we include it because it is in line with the intention of the prayer even though it is not strictly speaking part of the received prayer.
The final petition or request that we make of God in the Lord’s Prayer is that we be delivered from evil. I am not sure that most of us spend much time contemplating the presence of evil around us, let alone worrying about its effect on us. Yet, the desire to be delivered from evil may well be our deepest prayer. In Luther’s explanation of this petition, he discusses all kinds of evil that might befall us. He includes things that affect our body, our soul, our property, and our reputation. In this sense evil is that which seeks to tear down our lives, our communities, our relationships, and our well-being. It seems to me that we encounter such forces every single day, even if we do not always recognize them as being evil. So much of our world pulls us apart and breaks us down, but we get used to it and assume that is simply the way that life is. Yet, if we think of the earlier petitions of the prayer, what we have prayed for is God’s name, God’s kingdom, and God’s will to be manifested in our lives, and that we be given all that our body and soul needs. We pray that through the Holy Spirit these things come into our lives, and through that Spirit our bodies, souls, relationships, and communities might thrive and be blessings. Evil, then, is that which undermines or contradicts the work of the Holy Spirit. This petition, then, is a summary of everything else. We need God’s protection because the world is full of things that will try to pull us away from him.
There are debates over whether evil is a thing with its own existence or not, or whether it is something with its own will. I follow the tradition of Augustine that sees evil not as a thing but as the absence of goodness. That absence becomes a force in the world that causes great trauma. Yet, it is not something that acts with its own intelligence. It is the accumulation of failures to act with compassion, care, and with the reign of God as a guide. To pray that we be delivered from evil, then, is not just to pray that we are protected from bad things. It is also to pray that we are filled with the Holy Spirit so that we care about the needs of others and what happens in the world. It means to pray that we be delivered from self-centered thinking so that we desire and
seek the common good for all people and all of God’s creation. To pray that we be delivered from evil means to pray that we might be empowered to live as Jesus’ disciples.