[ p. 76 ]
JESUS derived his strength from his unfaltering trust in the Fatherhood of God. If God is our Father, we also can trust ourselves to His care, without anxiety for the morrow. [1]
For thirty years Jesus, whose life was lived out-ofdoors, had been watching nature, marveling at the plan and care he saw behind its course. The birds make no provision for the future, and yet there always are birds. Flowers do no work, but the gorgeous purple and scarlet Palestinian anemones [2] outshine any Oriental potentate in his richest robes. Why then do men destroy their peace of mind and waste their energies in fretting about a future which God will direct when it comes? [ p. 77 ] Are there not troubles enough today? Why look for new ones about tomorrow? Can we not trust God?
Not for a moment, however, did Jesus think in terms of a shallow optimism. He did not mean that trust in God will smooth out all life’s difficulties, insure abundant food and clothing, do away with sickness, and prolong existence to a serene old age. He knew better. In every village market he saw the birds for whom God cares—dead, stripped of their feathers, hanging pathetically, and to be bought for a trifle. The grass that God clothes in beauty he saw, every summer, brown and withered, gathered into heaps and used for fuel. [3] No, Jesus never interpreted the Father’s care as something that must rid this world of suffering. He was far too familiar with suffering as a fact.
How, then, did he reconcile this fact of suffering with his doctrine of a loving Father? Many Jews found an easy explanation in declaring that we suffer because we have sinned. This way out of the difficulty Jesus rejected decisively. An incident related in the Fourth Gospel states Jesus’ attitude perfectly. One day, accompanied by his disciples, he saw a man who had been born blind. The disciples, puzzled at the inadequacy of the current teaching, asked him to solve the dilemma. Where was the sin that caused this punishment? Not on the man’s own part, for no one can sin before he is born, [4] and surely it would be most unjust to make the poor man bear the penalty of any other person’s sins, even his parents’. All such logic [ p. 78 ] Jesus brushed aside: “Neither did this man sin, nor his parents.” Then he gives the true reason, as he had come to see it: “This man was bom blind, that the works of God should be manifest in him.” God’s great plan uses every means, including human pain and pleasure alike, to transcend them all in a higher purpose. Our part is to accept this purpose, whether we understand it or not, and to cooperate with it to the best of our ability; in this way only may we share in it. Pain and discipline have their place in the school of effective living. They can be utilized as steppingstones to spiritual heights. In this way we learn to trust God. As long as we have work to do for Him— we may firmly believe—so long will God give us all that is needful for that work, just as He gives the birds and the flowers everything necessary for the part they have to play. If means for any task are not forthcoming, we must conclude that the task in question is not one that God wills us to perform.
No one was to hold to such trust more heroically than Jesus himself. He suffered hardship after hardship, disappointment after disappointment. His very call to the Messiahship brought with it hunger, weakness, and temptation. His appeal to God’s chosen people met, for the most part, with only a shallow enthusiasm or with obstinate resistance; sympathetic response came seldom and from a small group. He was to see hatred swell until it became murderous, involving his disciples as well as himself. He was driven out of his home, treated as unbalanced by his own family, had no refuge except Jerusalem, where certain [ p. 79 ] death awaited him. And at the end of it all stood the cross. It was from such a background, not with buoyant thoughtlessness, that he taught the heavenly Father’s care for His children.
The Father’s care Jesus saw as an unceasing love that may carry men into sorrow, suffering, and death; but such misfortunes, bravely accepted and bravely endured, lead into a life whose fullness is infinite.
How could such faith be kept alive? Only by constant prayer. Jesus prayed, therefore, because prayer is the most real source of strength for human kind. Prayer was the breath of his life. It was the only means by which he could be “in tune with the infinite.” He must preserve fellowship with the Father if he would know the Father’s will and be strong to do it. All his life long he lived in spiritual communion. We read of occasions when he “spent the whole night in prayer,” of others when “he rose a great while before it was day,” or “while it was yet dark,” to begin the day in converse with the Father. He spent such a night in prayer before he chose the twelve apostles; and again before he asked the momentous question of Peter, “Who do you say that I am?” He prayed in an agony of supplication in the garden of Gethsemane. On the cross he prayed for his executioners. Dying there as a criminal, suffering intense physical pain, deserted by friends and surrounded by taunting enemies, he died in deepest and fullest communion with God, breathing a prayer to the Father of whose love he was always certain and in whose presence he felt safe.
[ p. 80 ]
There was very little of petition in the prayers of Christ. He rarely asked anything for himself, though occasionally he did make such requests. His prayers were such as took him into his Father’s presence for something more than petition—for worship. “Show thou me the way that I should walk in, for I lift up my soul unto thee.”
There was very little of self in his prayers. The great prayer which he taught his disciples is all in the plural:
Father
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy Kingdom come.
Give us day by day our daily bread;
Forgive us our debts, for we forgive our debtors;
And lead us not into temptation. [5]
The prayer is made up of two little sections, one devoted to God and one to ourselves. Each section contains three clauses. At the beginning stands Jesus’ supreme title for God. The second clause, “Hallowed be thy name,” is by all Jewish precedent not a petition but a thanksgiving; we express our gratitude to God for all that he has done for us; we acknowledge that his “Name” [6] is holy. And we pray that God will fulfill his purpose for certain and bring the great consummation in his Kingdom. [7] For ourselves we ask [ p. 81 ] only the simplest of blessings, sufficient food, forgiveness, and deliverance from temptation.
At a very early date—perhaps actually by Jesus himself—the prayer was slightly enlarged by explanatory additions. In Aramaic the opening word was Abba, which could mean “Father” or “Our Father” indifferently. [8] “Thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven” makes the meaning of “Thy Kingdom come” somewhat clearer; an earth on which God’s will is perfectly done is the Kingdom of God. At the end, “Deliver us from the Evil One” expands “Leads us not into temptation”; temptation may perhaps be God’s will to strengthen us—even as Jesus was strengthened by enduring temptation—but, if God does will us to be tempted, we pray that we may not fail under the test.
At some very early period in church history it became customary to close the prayer with a typical Jewish thanksgiving: “For thine is the Kingdom and the Power and the Glory, forever and ever.” Although this ending was probably not given by Jesus, it is perfectly in accord with the spirit of the whole.
The prayer, Luke tells us, was taught by Jesus on an occasion when they came upon him at his devotions. Seeing him, they realized what prayer could be, and asked him to teach them how to pray. They wanted, too, some form of prayer, as John had given a form to his disciples. The prayer that Jesus gave them must have astonished them by its brevity. It is a model, rather than a formal or set prayer, yet it may [ p. 82 ] rightly be used as a form, provided the form be filled with the spirit of devotion. The prayer is simple, brief, spiritual, clear in meaning. Above all, there is so little of self in it! It is all in the plural. One cannot use it for oneself alone. Once more: this prayer is spiritual, full of God, the longing for His glory, the coming of His Kingdom, the fulfillment of His purpose; full of the desire to acknowledge His Name as sacred. All of Christ’s recorded prayers were of the same spirit.
He prayed, so far as he himself was concerned, for direction, guidance, and strength. The purpose of prayer is not to bend God’s will to our own will, but to bring our wills into submission to the divine purpose. In Gethsemane, Christ uttered a prayer which seemed not to have been answered; the answer really came in the gradual disclosure of the Father’s will. One sees this as the prayer continues: First: “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me”; then, “If this cup may not pass from me except I drink it, thy will be done”; three times, “Nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.” Then “there appeared an angel from heaven strengthening him.” It was prayer which made God’s will clear and gave strength to submit to it.
What about prayer for ourselves? We remember our own prayers as children, when we asked God for anything and everything: good weather for a holiday, the gifts we wanted at Christmas, all the simple desires of childish hearts. We had the childlike spirit which [ p. 83 ] Christ asked of his disciples, because we had not yet grown out of childhood days.
Then one day we waked up—waked to the disappointment of unanswered desire. After that, the blows came thick and fast. In time of danger we prayed, but the danger did not pass; in time of impending sorrow, but death came none the less certainly; in time of mental or spiritual distress, but the heavens were closed and God did not answer. We began to understand that God rules by laws which He cannot or will not break: that there are laws of health, and they work with inevitable regularity; laws of economics, and financial ruin follows their violation; laws of nature, and though slow of operation they are always sure. We gave up. Prayer could not do what we had, in childhood days, believed that it could do.
How, then, can we continue to pray, and what can we make of prayer, if we do continue? The answer is simple for one who believes in Jesus Christ as divine; or, for the matter of that, even for one who thinks of him as the best man that ever lived. Whatever one may believe about him, his conception of God is richer than any other man has ever known. Why not try it out? The Christian believer goes further. He believes that Christ came from the bosom of the Father. He believes that Christ knew. He prays because Christ prayed. It is a right instinct that drives us to God. We take it on the word of Jesus himself, who “taught us to pray.”
Our prayers, if we do pray, teach us something. The common conception of prayer is that it is an effort to [ p. 84 ] bend God’s purpose to our wish, and the sadness of the awakening is due to the discovery that the facts do not warrant the assumption. Thinking more of God, we find that He does rule the world by law and that to grant our prayer sometimes would, it is true, be to break a link in the chain of cause and effect and throw the universe into ungoverned disorder.
What then? Does it mean that a great range of petitions has become unlawful? Of course not. As there are laws of nature and laws of health, so there are spiritual laws, and our prayer may set in motion forces that will counterbalance other forces, just as by mechanics we can overcome the law of gravitation. What do we know of the spiritual world? May not God have laid down its laws so that much of His giving shall be dependent upon our asking, exactly as the rich treasures of the earth—the grain in the fields, the fruit on the trees, the wealth of the mines—are all of them ours only when we have done our part to earn them?
Shall we give up prayer in sickness, for example? The laws of psychotherapy are beginning to show us that more things are done by prayer than this world dreams of. Perhaps, after all, our faith has never been very great, and our prayers for a sick friend have been offered with no decided belief of expectation. “All things that you ask, believing,” was the way Jesus put it, and we have been praying always with the thought in the background that the prayer could not avail. Of course it may not. In the face of facts —bitter facts of experience for others as well as for [ p. 85 ] ourselves—we know that there are laws which no prayer will ever overcome. But we pray on, nevertheless, and when the answer does not come, sometimes at least we see more clearly.
One thing we see is that God often answers prayer through human agents and in human work. The skill and understanding of the physician, the new health laws which medical science is constantly discovering, above all, the deeper sympathy with the world’s pain and the quickened desire to help which have lightened to such an extent the world’s burden—who knows what part prayer has had in all this? The spirit of social service which has brought light into so many dark places and made human life so much less hard to endure—who can say how much prayer had to do with the enlightenment? The new sense of corporate responsibility, with its education toward a better industrial order—has prayer had nothing to do with opening our eyes there? There is indeed an “intercession which is cooperation with God ”; and God has been showing us many things of late of which the world has long been ignorant. The growth of the social spirit as a late fruit of Christianity may “make possible the rebirth of a Christian community which can become the strongest force in the world.” Prayer pointed out the path of progress.
So we pray because Jesus Christ prayed, and we try to pray as he prayed. In the garden, “the Son of Man feels the hour at hand; shrinks from it, flees from human society—feels the need of it again, and goes back to his disciples. Here is that need of sympathy [ p. 86 ] which forces us to seek for it among relatives and friends; and here is that recoil which forces us back to our loneliness again. In such an hour they who have before forgotten prayer betake themselves to God, knowing that only with Him can perfect understanding and sympathy be found.”
Owing to the changes in the meaning of English words in the last three centuries, the King James’ Version of the Bible often conveys the wrong sense to modern readers. A most unfortunate instance of this is the familiar rendering, “Take ye no thought for the morrow.” To us today this implies a command to disregard the future altogether, but in the year 1611—when the King James’ Version was made—the phrase meant “Be not anxious for the morrow”; this is the correct translation.
Jesus himself took very careful thought for the morrow, on one occasion even withdrawing from his teaching work lest his plans for some months later might be disturbed. In financial matters, particularly, we read that one of the twelve was regularly appointed the treasurer of the band, and that he carried funds enough to be worth stealing. ↩︎
“Lilies” hardly gives the sense. ↩︎
In Palestine firewood is scarce and costly. ↩︎
The Jews knew nothing of doctrines which teach that suffering is due to sins committed in an earlier existence. ↩︎
For this, the simplest form of the prayer, see St. Luke XI : 2-4, in the Revised Version. ↩︎
To Jews God’s “Name” sums up his nature and his being. ↩︎
Compare the next chapter. ↩︎
Paul, however, in Roman viii: 15 prefers the simpler form. ↩︎