What I would like to do is continue our exploration of prayer by looking at some of the prayers prayed by Jesus. The most famous among them is, of course, the Lord’s Prayer. So much has been written about this prayer and so many comments have been made that I will not go into that material.

However, I would like to focus on something else and that is that prayer is spoken by us but it also has to become incarnated in us by our actions and lives. The Lord’s Prayer gives us a very clear illustration of this and there is a lesson in there for us. We are familiar with words of the prayer and many have written on what they signify. But I would like to draw your attention to something that is not so frequently mentioned and that is that the Lord’s prayer appears twice in the Gospels.

The second time is in the Garden of Gethsemane when Christ prays before the passion which will result in his sacrificial death. It is almost as if the previous presentation of the prayer was like a script which was being now enacted in the final days of Christ’s coming suffering and death. The Lord’s Prayer begins with the famous words: “Our Father…”. The prayer in the garden begins with words akin to the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer but in a more intimate form – Abba – which is to say ‘papa’. This corresponds to the intimacy of Christ speaking to the Father in the private setting of the garden at a time of deep travail. He turns to his Father in earnest asking Him to spare Jesus the tribulations that are quickly descending upon him.

In the Lord’s Prayer, we pray that we should not be led into temptation, into testing. In Gethsemane Jesus asks that the cup be taken away from him so that the time of trial will pass away. He asks three times for this to be done. He asks to be delivered from the evil one because in that cup we have the accumulated evil of all the ages and underneath it, the looming nothingness from which creation came. Silence greets Jesus and he goes to the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer: ‘Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven’. Thy kingdom come is about to be fulfilled with the crucifixion and Resurrection as the New Creation is about to be ushered in. And the key that unlocks the door and allows the New Creation to come in is the cry “thy will be done.”

Prayer is not just a recitation of words, although it begins with that. It is also a call to ‘incarnate’ the words of the prayer so that they now become actions which enable God’s will to be accomplished. Christ realizes that it will be costly, as the Gospels talk about his struggle, but he aligns his will with that of God the Father so that the creation project can go ahead.

We cannot enter Christ’s mind to see what went on there but we have the evidence of the words that are uttered and from this we can get a sense of the mystery that was transpiring in Christ’s passion. Jesus asks for the cup to pass but we know that this cup represents some aspect of the struggle that was going on at Gethsemane and that was to continue on Golgotha. This was indeed a cosmic event, something, again, that can be seen with eyes of faith only. God the Father could not take away the cup that Jesus was to drink because if that had occurred then the creation project would have stalled at the level that it finds itself because of the sin that is there.

What is there at the bottom of that cup? There is the accumulation of all of the evil and wrongs that had been enacted in creation and undergirding all of this, the yawning emptiness and nothingness from which creation had come. This was the terrible divide that separated creation from God the creator, not in an absolute manner, but in such a way that humanity was estranged from God. Creation was still being upheld by God because if it weren’t, it would have vanished immediately. But it was still at an arms length away from God, it had not attained the final goal and purpose of creation which is union with God.

It is into this death-bringing void that Christ enters on the cross, and now there arises a ‘separation’ between Christ and his Father as Christ becomes, as St. Paul says, sin. What is happening here is a deep mystery and our words are feeble instruments in our attempt to describe what is occurring here. Here is where the language of poetry, the language of prayer comes to assist us in our attempts. Christ feels alienation from the Father because he has taken on the sins of humanity and through this, he has taken on the separation that existed between man and God. The Son still loves the Father, but the Father is ‘repelled’ by the sins that Jesus is now carrying. This is the mystery of Jesus’ descent into hell, into that place where God the Father has turned away His face. What makes it even more difficult for Jesus is that he still loves the Father and this torment feels as if it will continue into eternity. The separation seems to be so total and final that hope appears to evaporate as water in the hot sun.

It is the unbearableness of this moment that elicits the cry: ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” These words seem so defeatist – it seems as if it is all over and it has ended in failure. Before we go any further, we have to take a little excursion into the psalms.

The psalms are themselves prayers that have been used in Judaism and Christianity as a means of prayer. But there is another important aspect to the psalms for Christians. Many of the psalms are messianic – they talk about Christ. A lot of the psalms make sense when they are connected to Christ. Psalm 22 – ‘My God, my God why have you forsaken me’ – is one of those. It talks about dereliction, but, towards the end of the psalm, it ends on a note of triumph in the assuredness of God’s care and love and eventual victory. The death on the cross silences Christ but in the psalms, such as Psalm 22, his voice continues to reverberate and speak to the faithful and to the world at large.

What was going on on the cross was not a charade with the happy ending already in sight. Christ went to the cross being fully human and that means he had that uncertainty that we all have and that we battle and conquer through faith.

The importance of prayer is that it is through prayer that we are enabled to become truly human in that we build our union with the rest of humanity as we pray for those who have crossed our path. But it does not end there. We, also through prayer, build up and nourish our relationship with God, and it is through this relationship that we are renewed and saved, that we become new people. In a sense, we become people that we were always intended to be. The results are not always instantaneous and sometimes they are ambiguous but this is so that prayer does not become like some talisman or secret power that we exert over God and creation. We often ask why prayers are sometimes not answered, at least in the way that we want. We yearn for prayer that works instantly at our very demand. This is something that we cannot expect because God is sovereign and we cannot control Him through the words of our prayers as if we were the ones in supreme control.

I have already mentioned it, but it deserves repetition. Our prayers have to be married to actions which reflect our prayers. Prayer is not just a series of words but in addition to the words, it is a type of life that incorporates our relationship to God and to our neighbor. Our neighbor defines our ‘self’ and in a sense, gives us our being that places us closer to God. Without actions, our prayers can become mere rote words which have very little impact on our lives and on our selves.

The other thing about prayer is that it has to be consistent – not something that we do sporadically. We need to build a relationship with God – and that is the essence of prayer and that is something that will prepare us for life in the New Creation. We must develop a life of prayer that is constant and through which we grow in our love of God and our neighbor. There will be times when we do not feel like praying but we should put in the effort and it will pay off.

We pray because we are in the center of a love story. The only definition of God in the New Testament is that God is love and in the next letter we are going to explore the terrifying import of those words.

Sincerely,
Bar-Abbas