The first petition which the Lord would have us bring before Him is that His name be hallowed. This is not the first thing that is in the heart of the unregenerate man to ask for. But neither is the Lord's Prayer like the prayer which man, untaught, would offer in his personal distress. The Lord's Prayer is the prayer of the spiritual man, and furnishes an ultimate whereby man may inscribe the order of heaven upon his thoughts and confirm it in his natural life: The Lord's Prayer is, therefore, fashioned in the image of heaven, and in the image of the spiritual mind which is seldom aroused with man in this world.
The Lord's Prayer, being patterned after the order of heavenly influx, commences with the idea of the Heavenly Father as the supreme Source of all good; and then the effects of His inflowing life are unfolded in their series: first the Lord's name, then His kingdom, then His will as done in heaven and on earth. Later our heavenly nourishment is mentioned, and at last the birth of forgiveness or charity, and the deliverance from temptation and evil.
We can ask for none of these things unless we first pray that the Lord's name be hallowed in our mind. The Lord cannot hold us guiltless if we take His name in vain.
In the Scripture much is said concerning the name of God. The Jews, to whom the ancient name of Jehovah was restored, knew not its meaning, but—like other peoples of antiquity—believed that in the secret name of a god or spirit there resided a power for miracle or
conjury. And we may read with wonder about the times when the name of Jehovah caused water to turn into blood in the rivers of Egypt and to flow from a rock in the desert; when this holy name struck armies with disaster or caused the shadow on the sundial to move back. Those days, we are wont to say, are no more. Yet the name of Jehovah has lost none of its power, and is no whit less holy; although its omnipotence operates no more by mere "representatives"; for these have vanished before the reality itself—when the Lord was revealed in the flesh and took unto Himself all power in heaven and in earth—the power which had formerly lodged in representatives.
Yet He Himself bids us to "walk in His name" and to "ask of the Father in His name"; and speaks of "writing His new name" upon the redeemed of the New Jerusalem. He promises salvation to those who "believe in His name," and gave to His disciples the power of driving out demons and healing diseases in His name. And "into His name" were they to baptize all nations!
For He and the Father are one. The Divine Human
of Jesus Christ is the "name" of our Heavenly Father—the name we are
to hallow. Marvellous and holy is that name! For as the name of a man is a
symbol of his personality, the convenient index and summary by which we refer
to all his qualities; so the name of God is the sum of the Divine attributes,
of all the qualities and powers of the Lord. The Divinely Human essence of God
was manifested in Jesus Christ, which—after the incarnation and the
glorification—became the name of the Father, the form and quality of the
Divine love.
It is needful that we hold the image of His Divine Person before us, as He is made visible in the Gospels. For in the Divine character of His Person are revealed the spiritual and celestial virtues which are to be reflected in human life: compassion and zeal, love and selflessness, meekness and strength, justice and judgment, innocence and wisdom, patience and courage. Unless these virtues are seen as embodied in the one Lord whom we worship and whom we are to love with all our heart and all our soul and all our mind and all our strength, there is nothing spiritual in any of our uses and our prayers become empty and directed only to ourselves. For then our imagined goodness is thought of as a product of our own for which we demand homage and reward.
If our regenerate spirit is quickened into life, and we turn to our Heavenly Father with innocent, helpless hearts, asking His compassion, He will answer our prayer, as yet unformed, and do it by revealing His name. He comes before us as a Divine Man, as a Teacher offering us the protection of truth—a clothing for our naked spirit, lest the awakened spark of spiritual life be chilled and extinguished at its very birth.
Our Heavenly Father is not far away from His children, but is ever present by the sphere which proceeds from Him. All the true forms of finite human life are echoes of His life. He, too, is man, but Divine Man. He makes His "name" to dwell with men and in the finite world, being present and perceptible in His truth, His law, His order. And when this Divine law is represented in its own form—adapted as sacred story or prophetic command inspired as to every detail, and revealed as doctrine so as to be intellectually perceived by the minds of men—it is called the WORD of God. It is in the Word—the revealed Scripture of truth—that the Name of the Heavenly Father is ultimately manifested. We are to guard lest we take this His name in vain; we are to keep it holy.
If the Lord were now to appear to us as He did before the prophets, clothed in flaming light and majesty; if we should hear His mysterious voice as the peal of thunderbolts or see His power shown in manifest miracle: what could we do but to fall down in awe and add our whisper to the song of the cherubim, "Holy, holy, holy!" But we do not see Him thus. He comes no longer compellingly before the senses, but comes clothed in more subtle garb in realities, not representatives. In the laws of life, in the plain truths of revelation! We see Him only by glimpses within the confusing events of life, letting us sense a measure of His mercy or of His power of justice and judgment. We see Him revealed to our rational mind as we read of His provisions in the Word, and learn of His redemptions and His unceasing guardianship. Little by little His qualities, His purposes, are revealed, so far as our spiritual mind is opened and we learn to hallow His Name.
Inmostly, the Word is infinite and incomprehensible; for the Lord has a name written that no man knows but He Himself: "and His name is called the Word of God" (Rev. 19:12,13). Yet before angels and men He reveals that name in the spiritual sense of the Word so far as this name will not be taken in vain. He inscribes that name upon all things of the Church; it is breathed in every confession of faith and in every deed of spiritual charity. It is not difficult to stop our tongues from outward blasphemy, from denying the Lord or vilifying His Word. But the Lord is also present imperceptibly wherever men speak from innocence, or act from charity, or think from doctrine preached "in His name." Wherever two or three are gathered in His name: whenever faith and charity are present, whether in intention or in act; there the Lord is in the midst of them. And to these states of discipleship the Lord says, "He that receiveth you receiveth Me." And should we, from stubborn self-will, blind ourselves to the presence of His name, and offend innocence and violate charity and injure faith, instead of taking in the stranger and clothing the naked and ministering to needy states; then the eternal Judge must say, "Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to Me." (Matt. 25:45)
But to hallow the Lord's Name, to acknowledge His Divine Human in His Word and in the situations of human life, there must be not only the appreciation of good and truth wherever found, but there must also be a constant judgment, a renunciation of evil and falsity. Nothing is holy unless it is separated from evil and the falsities of evil. Natural life commences with a separation. And similarly spiritual life begins by a self-renunciation, and continues by a winnowing away of what is evil, false, and unworthy! That which is born of the flesh must be separated from what is born of the Spirit. The holy must be protected from the profane. The new will born in men's understanding from the truths of doctrine is at first so closely surrounded by the lusts and obscurities of the natural affections that the spiritual man within must struggle for its independence by casting off by degrees whatever does not correspond.
Yet it is not for man to claim to himself the holy things of the new conscience, or to take merit for what he does or thinks in the Lord's name, by the Lord's instruction and the Lord's power. The new life of Conscience is indeed felt as man's own, as a new "proprium". Yet this new and angelic proprium is from the Lord, and only the consciousness of it, the sensation of it, is man. Man's consciousness has only been transferred, by his consent, from among the profane and disordered things of self and the flesh, into the midst of the celestial and spiritual things of the Lord's kingdom. The angels therefore perceive that it is the Divine—not they which makes Heaven; and that they are in the Lord when in the things that are of His order and withheld as by a mighty force from the evils of their nature. And hence also Paul, in his teaching, called the Church "the Body of Christ" "in whom we live, and are moved and have our being" (Acts 17:28).
"Hallowed be Thy name!" Holiness with men can dwell only in ignorance that is innocent (AC 1557). This is true of the wisest angels who are not only constantly aware of the infinite extense of their ignorance, but who perceive that all that they do know is from the Lord. And with men, only the confession of their own spiritual ignorance and of the boundless wisdom of the Creator can lead them to a sense of the holiness of the infinite God and of the Word wherein He reveals His name. Our acknowledgment of the holiness of the Word rests upon our realization that in its form and structure, its words and expressions, there is to be found a meaning so inexhaustible, so perpetually new and profound, that human wisdom cannot vie with it. It pierces and enlightens the very depths of the human heart. We perceive the holiness of the Word in its literal sense because in its correspondential appearances, drawn from the things of nature, the genuine truths of heaven are held together in a connection and order which nothing but a Divine Mind could inspire and nothing but the Lord Himself could reveal. Yet this ultimate order, because it is the order of heaven, affects every innocent and pious man with a sense of holiness, because it was fashioned to image the order of heaven and has the power to conjoin man's mind with the angels (AC 3438e, AE 1088:4).
Because of this order within the letter of the Scriptures, it is said that the holiness of the Word is in its fulness in the sense of the letter as this exists on our earth. For therein all Divine truth of the spiritual Word and the celestial Word of the heavens, finds its focal plane. In it are collated all the infinite forces of salvation. Nothing is missing. Upon this Word, the interior wisdom of the heavens rests as on a secure foundation. The Lord is here approaching man in His Human, but shrouded in mystery as in His holy temple. And the earth is silent before Him.
Sanctity belongs to truth in its ultimates, in its static form as Divine order and unchangeable law. When the angels are sometimes called "holy," this has reference to the fact that with them heavenly truths are received into their life; and the highest of the angels are they who even as to their sensual degree have become forms of truth, so their very bodies not only represent, but correspond to celestial truth. Yet this holiness is not from them, but from the Holy One of Israel who was glorified and made Divine even as to flesh and bones and became the First and the Last, the Alpha and the Omega.
To hallow His name we must therefore admit ourselves into the sphere of His holiness, and come before Him reverently to receive the truths which can imbue us with new motives and subjugate and order our rebellious affections, clarify our thoughts, and induce upon our outward lives a correspondence with internal things. It is especially stated that when man is performing acts of sincere piety, and his externals are humbled, internal things are excited and "he is gifted with states of holiness" which later serve him in the after-life. (AC 1618)
Most men, from a common perception and an instinctive need, can at times feel something of a holy fear as of a near presence of God. The Jews felt this fear of His holiness, regarding their temple as the abode of Jehovah. But we must realize the omnipresence of the Lord. All sincere virtue, all Orderly joy; the innocent delight of the child hearing the stories of the Word at the family hearth, the states of the adults of the Church when some new truth dawns to spread its light over their life, or when the spirit of charity finds expression in a happy word or useful act, or friendship finds an echo in forgiveness, or when new understanding breaks the barriers of pride; or when love newfound blossoms out into the tender wisdom of the conjugial life: all these things are to be looked upon as sanctities, as holy to the Lord, as things accomplished in the name of the Heavenly Father.
All good things and true, even the lowest and the least in human life, are inscribed with the name of the Lord. Yet holiness does not pertain to man, nor to nature. Even the bread and wine of the sacramental Supper are not holy in themselves. The things of the Church are holy with us only so far as they can serve in our minds as the ultimate plane for the Lord's presence. And this they can do so far as we resist the polluting influence of evil, allowing the truth to reform our thoughts and purge our lives.
Therefore the Lord said, "He that overcometh, upon him will I ... write the name of My God, and the name of the city of My God, the New Jerusalem which cometh down out of heaven from My God, and...My new name" (Rev. 3:12). The "name" of God is Truth: this the Lord, in His Human, speaks of as "My God,"—His Truth, His Law. For His "new name," which is to be hallowed, is the law of human life that was glorified in Him and revealed in the holy structure of Divine Doctrine which is the New Jerusalem, where He is seen as the Divine Human, as Divine love in Human Form.
