Saturday 29 August 2026
A Meta-Meditation On The Lord's Prayer (And DNA)
In my previous post I wrote down some thoughts I had about the Lord’s Prayer and noted:
It’s amazing how the Lord’s Prayer, so short, so simple and so old, just keeps on giving.
It reminds me of DNA. Like DNA, this Biblical text itself is short, and in some sense, simple, compared to the vast complexity of its unfolded application. To me, this expansion — this decompression — is bewildering. No doubt in both cases the richness of the unfolding is partly due to the context. For DNA, that’s the cellular machinery that annotates, transcribes, and interprets the codons. For scripture, it’s the work of believers and of the Holy Spirit interpreting and applying the words.
In the case of scripture, it’s tempting to be skeptical and think the context is everything — that to the bare bones of the text, believers add the meat of their own wisdom, like the fable of the stone soup. But that’s not fair; as with DNA, if the text was different, the results would be very different.