The Hiddenness of Prayer

At a glance

The chapter heading text (KJV)

“And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men… But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.”

Matthew 6:5–8 KJV

Summary

Bonhoeffer treats the private, shut-door prayer Jesus commends as one more instance of the hiddenness running through the whole of Matthew 6: prayer performed to be admired by onlookers has already stopped being address to God and become a kind of theatre. But he goes further than simply repeating the warning against showiness, using the passage to ask what actually entitles a disciple to pray in the first place, and to expect that prayer to be heard at all.

His answer is thoroughly Christological. It is not that prayer is a universal human capacity that Christians happen to practise more sincerely; it is that Jesus Christ, and Christ alone, stands in unbroken communion with the Father, and disciples are granted access to that same communion only because they belong to him. Praying ‘in secret’ to ‘thy Father’ presupposes a relationship the disciple did not create and could not have earned — it is a fellowship opened up entirely from Christ's side.

Turning to the Lord's Prayer itself, Bonhoeffer reads each petition as flowing out of this same dependence: the hallowing of God's name, the coming of his kingdom and the doing of his will are asked for, not assumed, because the disciple's own faithfulness cannot secure any of them. Requests for daily bread, forgiveness — explicitly tied to the disciple's own forgiveness of others — and deliverance from temptation are treated as covering the whole of ordinary human need, addressed to a Father who already knows what his children require before they ask.

The chapter closes on the prayer's doxology, ‘for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,’ which Bonhoeffer reads as the disciples' assurance rather than their achievement: whatever they lack in confidence or constancy, the prayer's outcome does not finally rest on them but on the Father whose kingdom, power and glory were never in question. Prayer, in other words, is simply the disciples living out, in words, the same total dependence on Christ that the rest of the Sermon has been describing in action.

Key points

• Private, shut-door prayer is one more instance of the hiddenness theme — prayer performed for an audience has already become theatre rather than address to God.
• Bonhoeffer denies that prayer is a natural human instinct Christianity simply refines; disciples can pray at all only because they share in Christ's own unbroken communion with the Father.
• Each petition of the Lord's Prayer is read as an admission of dependence, not an assumption of the disciple's own spiritual competence.
• Forgiveness of others is bound directly to the request for one's own forgiveness — the two cannot be separated.
• The prayer's closing doxology places the outcome in God's kingdom, power and glory rather than in the disciple's own faithfulness or constancy in prayer.

Related Scripture

• Romans 8:26–27
• John 14:13–14
• Matthew 6:9–13
• Hebrews 4:16

For reflection and discussion

1. Where has prayer, for you, ever slid from address to God into performance for an audience — even an audience of one, your own self-image?
2. Bonhoeffer says prayer is possible only through Christ's own access to the Father, not as a natural human skill. Does that change the confidence, or lack of it, with which you pray?
3. The Lord's Prayer ties forgiving others directly to being forgiven. Is there an unforgiven debt in your own relationships that this connection puts in a different light?