Why did the Lord Christ bid us to pray the Lord’s Prayer in the plural?

God bids us to love our neighbor, so we pray for fellow believers the same way we pray for non-believers. In so doing, our will is in harmony with the will of God, who wills all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth (1 Tim. 2:4). Even in his private room, the believer ought to pray in the name of the entire Church, because he is a member of the Church.

St. John Chrysostom says, “He teaches, moreover, to make our prayer common, on behalf of our brethren also. For He says not, ‘my Father, which art in Heaven,’ but, ‘our Father,’ offering up his supplications for the body in common, and nowhere looking to his own, but everywhere to his neighbor’s good.”¹⁶⁵

St. Augustine says, “You have begun to belong to a great family [by being baptized]. Under this Father, the lord and the slave are brethren; under this Father the general and the common soldier are brethren; under this Father the rich man and the poor are brethren. All

163 St. Augustine of Hippo, Sermons on Selected Lessons of the New Testament 8.1 (NPNF I/6:284) amended.

164 St. Cyprian of Carthage, Treatise 4: On the Lord’s Prayer 3 (ANF 5:448).

165 St. John Chrysostom, Homilies on Matthew Homily 19.6 (NPNF I/10:131) amended.

Christian believers have various fathers on earth, some noble, some obscure; but they all call upon one Father which is in heaven … Therefore do they understand that they are brethren, seeing they have one Father. Now let not the lord disdain to have his slave for a brother, seeing the Lord Christ has vouchsafed to have him for a brother.”[166 ]

In a similar vein St. Cyprian says in his commentary on the Lord’s Prayer: “Before all things, the Teacher of peace and the Master of unity would not have a prayer to be made singly and individually, as for one who prays to pray for himself alone. For we say not ‘My Father, which art in heaven,’ nor ‘Give me this day my daily bread;’ nor does each one ask that only his debt should be forgiven him; nor does he request for himself alone that he may not be led into temptation, and delivered from evil. Our prayer is public and common; and when we pray, we pray not for one, but the whole people, because we the whole people are one. The God of peace and the Teacher of concord, who taught unity, willed that one should thus pray for all, even as He bore us all in one. This law of prayer the three children observed when they were shut up in the fiery furnace, speaking together in prayer, and being of one heart in the agreement of the spirit; and this the faith of the sacred Scripture assures us, and in telling us how such as these prayed, gives an example which we ought to follow in our prayers, so that we may be such as they were: ‘Then these three,’ it says, ‘as if from one mouth sang a hymn, and blessed the Lord’ (Hymn of the Three Young Men, Dan.3:51 LXX). They spoke as if from one mouth, although Christ had not yet taught them how to pray … Thus, also we find that the apostles, with the disciples, prayed after the Lord’s ascension: ‘They all,’ says the Scripture, ‘continued with one accord in prayer, with the women, and Mary who was the mother of Jesus and with His brethren’ (Acts 1:14).”[167 ]