The first time I went to Mass, there were things I was expecting and didn’t find, like incense and Latin. There were also things I wasn’t expecting, that caught me by surprise. One of those is the prayer that is inside the Lord’s Prayer, which is also known as the “Our Father.”

At Mass, when we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we finish the prayer with an embolism, that we will look at today, and the doxology we studied last week.

An embolism is an insertion, a prayer within a prayer. This week, we will Lectio the Liturgy with that prayer. This is not a new prayer as it can be found in Greek Eastern liturgies, as well as Latin Western liturgies, dating it back before the 600s.

The prayer picks up right after we ask God to deliver us from evil and emphasizes our request:

Deliver us, Lord, we pray, from every evil, graciously grant peace in our days, that, by the help of your mercy, we may be always free from sin and safe from all distress, as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ. 

This prayer is found in Titus 2:11-14. In verses 11-12, we read, "For the grace of God has appeared, saving all and training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires and to live temperately, justly, and devoutly in this age…”

So often when we ask God to deliver us, we may tend to expect Him to pick us up and move us somewhere else. I’m not going to be one to tell God what He can't do, because He could do that, but He could also deliver us from every evil by “training us to reject godless ways and worldly desires.”

The Christian life is about surrendering to the will of God, however, it is also a call to co-partner with Him to strengthen our faith and our ability to not lead ourselves into temptation.

In the prayer, we ask God to give us what we don’t deserve, which is the definition of grace, when we ask Him to grant us peace in our days. 

We also ask for His mercy, or to not give us what we do deserve, when we ask Him to help us be free from sin and safe from distress. 

In verse 14 of Titus, chapter 2, we hear the same: [He] "gave himself for us to deliver us from all lawlessness and to cleanse for himself a people as his own, eager to do what is good."

Sometimes it seems like it’s easier to find sin and distress than it is to live free from it. Perhaps the key to peace is found in where we keep our eyes focused, on the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ.

In Titus 2:13, we learn that the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior are not two things: “as we await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our savior Jesus Christ…”

This is an example of an epexegesis, where a noun is used to describe another noun. Our blessed hope is the coming of our Savior, and for me, here is where the power of this hope comes, because this is a both/and. 

Hope is not something we will achieve in the future. We have hope now for the future. Not only will Jesus come again in the future, He is here with us now. We have an enemy that wants us to forget that. The enemy wants us to live a life of fear and do you know why? Because our blessed hope is his demise.

If you are looking for a way to change up the last couple weeks of Lent, I encourage you to meditate on these prayers, the Our Father, the embolism, and the doxology. Treat them as one prayer instead of three. Our Father does not want us to live a life of distress; He wants us to be filled with His peace. In these words we find everything we need and everything that God wants to give us.