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The ironic thing about this is that more people have heard about the advert than ever would have without the ban! Many of the national newspapers have linked to it on their websites. This is a great victory for the advertisers. Being a cynic I can’t help wondering if this was the plan all along! However the news story is still a puzzling one. If there is a part of the Bible that many people can recite off by heart surely it is the Lord’s Prayer?

However, before we get too outraged, there is a sense in which those cinema chains are claiming something very true about this familiar part of Scripture. The motive for the ban may simply be a desire to keep religion out of the cinema - but it reminds us that if we have never recognised how radical the words of Jesus are, it may be that we have never truly understood them. Children may still grow up learning the Lord’s Prayer at school, Cliff Richard may have had a number 1 single at the turn of the millennium combining it with the tune to Auld Lang Syne - but rightly understood the Lord’s Prayer will be offensive to us all when we first hear it, as we live in a fallen world having rebelled against our creator.

Who does Jesus say we are to pray to? “Our Father in heaven”. These words of address - combining both staggering familiarity with a recognition of power and authority - are shocking to any view of a God we may have in our head that is not the God who is there and has revealed himself. Yet, the even more shocking fact is that by this first sentence Jesus is limiting prayer to those who can address God this way. The Lord’s Prayer is not a prayer for everyone, it is just for disciples. This is my main criticism of the advert. In an important sense prayer is not “for everyone”. It is only for those who can call God “Father” and can do that because of their unity with God the Son by faith. You cannot get a more exclusive a claim than that.

The next few lines trip off the tongue easily, but the requests are radical. We, as son’s of the Father are recognising his holiness and authority, and declaring that he has the right to reign. As someone I read this week put it “The Lord’s Prayer is a declaration of loyalty to a different kingdom in the midst of enemy occupied territory”. We cannot pray “your kingdom come, your will be done” without recognising the absolute authority of Jesus Christ over every aspect of our lives. As we pray this we are saying no to the absolute calls that secularism, materialism, and even our own desires make on our lives.

The requests that Jesus tells us to bring challenge any thought that we are in charge of our lives. “Our daily bread” - everything we need to live - does not come from our hard work, our bank balance or the state, rather it all comes from the hand of our loving father. Our greatest need is to have our “debts” forgiven. The only way for that to happen is if God himself does that. Our greatest problem isn’t the fact we let ourselves or even other people down, it is our rebellion against the God who created us. It is a debt we need to pray, but that we do not have the resources ever to pay. The greatest danger in our lives isn’t illness or tragedy, it is sin, and so we need God to help us and to “deliver us from evil”. Added to all this is the challenge for us to “forgive others their sins” - which is certainly not a virtue encouraged by our society, nor is it an easy thing to do.

The Lord’s Prayer is so familiar in our culture that we miss the radical nature of Jesus’ words. We can be thankful that generations of children still know it off by heart. It is right to be puzzled, indeed to ridicule the decision of the cinema chains to ban an advert featuring it. But the ban is a helpful one if it makes us think again about the prayer itself - and encourages others to think about what it is that Jesus is saying as he teaches his people to pray.  Jesus did not give the Lord’s Prayer as a magic charm, or a bit of religion to learn to inoculate us from the real thing. No he gave it to teach his people what we most need as we live in a world with him as King, as we wait for his return.

For a similar response to the whole incident, along with the original advert see this article -

http://thinktheology.co.uk/blog/article/the_lords_prayer_advert_has_been_banned_for_being_offensive_which_it_is