I was reflecting with my Supervisor the other day about something I’ve observed in Australian Christianity in particular: the tendency to think of Christian faith primarily as a matter of interior disposition – trying to have kindly attitudes towards some people and to feel righteously angry about others, to feel warm devotion to God, to feel humble and grateful – and that if you’ve got that interior disposition down (if your “heart’s in the right place”), you’re pretty much doing what Jesus taught his followers to do.

It seems our Gospel passage for this week is a healthy antidote to that. Luke presents Jesus praying that God would forgive our sins “as we forgive everyone indebted to us”; in the Greek, this is clearly a request to God to treat our sins the way we treat monetary debts. The “forgiveness” we are invited to extend is not a personal well-wishing; it is about changing the material circumstances of the poor. We as Jesus’ followers are taught to ask God to extend mercy towards us in our sin, precisely to the degree that we extend mercy to others with our own wealth and power.

It is scary to pray that God would treat my sins as I treat debt and other burdens that keep the poor in poverty. Similarly, when I pray for God’s kingdom to come, and that we would each have our daily bread, I can’t help but feel nervous wondering whether my prayer will be answered as the rich man’s was (further on in Luke) – by a friend who exposes how shallow my prayers often are, if I don’t actually participate in God’s mission to answer them.

Perhaps this is the point. We pray, and we look for opportunities to participate in God’s answering of prayer, in God’s reconciling the rich and poor, in all of us breaking bread together at the Lord’s Table. We pray in words and song, and then in action. We pray with our lives as well as our lips.

Perhaps then our overarching prayer is that God might be more generous towards us in the way that we are generous towards others – and then we stand back, again astonished at the level of God’s abundant generosity of blessings bestowed on us. We are gifted not just with “our daily bread”, but a renewed vision for our world in which all are blessed and forgiven and loved and served, generously and abundantly – because how much does God already bless, forgive, love and serve us?!