Fr. Richard Maxwell

Jesus at prayer.

Jesus is praying over his disciples in today's Gospel passage. This prayer is the conclusion of Jesus' long discourse at the last supper; it is the last thing he will say to his gathered friends before he is arrested. When he finishes his prayer, Jesus will go off to the garden .... to pray again, but this time alone, before he is arrested.

Jesus at prayer. We know that Jesus prayed a lot. He taught US how to pray, giving us the Lord's Prayer. He is, in his very being, an example of prayer ... a model for us to follow. Nevertheless -- despite having the example of Jesus before us in the Gospels -- I'm often asked by people for help with their prayers. What IS prayer, anyway? Oh yes, there are lots of official categories of prayer ... like petition, and thanksgiving, and intercession ... But when people ask for help, they're not usually asking for guidance about how to ask for things or how to say thank you ... they're asking about how to deepen their prayer experience ... how to strengthen their connection with God.

So, what is prayer? Well, first of all, it's a conversation with God. And like any good conversation, there are two-sides to it. If we spend all of our time yammering away at God, and not giving God any time to speak back to us, our prayer life is pretty one-sided. Just think of all those times you've been trapped by someone talking endlessly about himself ... isn't it dreadful? Isn't it a little bit of hell on earth? Don't you want to get away from that person as fast as possible? And yet, isn't that what we do to God an awful lot? ... yammer away about our complaints, and needs, and desires ... and not give God room to get a word in? Thank heavens our God is a God of love and patience! In our prayer lives we need to allow God a little space in which to speak.

Prayer is not just nattering at God. It's letting God's presence be known to us. In any good conversation, don't we, at least to some degree, enter into the reality of the person we're speaking with? We share their world with them, so far as we can, so that we can understand what they're talking about. Prayer is like that, too. In prayer, we enter God's world. And when we do THAT, our sense of scale is recalibrated ... everything shifts. Our tiny place in the vastness of creation becomes clearer. And our priorities begin to shift ... we begin to be transformed. It begins to be easier to say, "THY will be done." We may even discover that God is such a charming conversationalist that we'd prefer to just sit back and listen.

Jesus at prayer. Perhaps THE quintessential prayer is Jesus' prayer in the garden after his final dinner with his friends ... Jesus prostrate on the ground asking for release from what he can see is coming ... but finally being able to say, "Yet, not what I want, but what you want." Echoing the prayer he taught us, the Lord's Prayer ... "Your will be done, on earth as in heaven." As we are transformed through our conversation with God, we will gradually yearn to be more and more like God ... we will yearn more and more for our desires to coincide with God's. Jesus is a model of prayer for us because his will and his Father's became one.

And that's the goal of all prayer ... union with God ... to become one with God. For some this may seem very esoteric ... very "spiritual" and unworldly ... and not really the thing for them. But the remarkable thing about prayer is that it does NOT remove us from the world, it embeds us more securely in it. We often think of our prayer life as somehow being separate from the world, from our secular lives, if you will. But if we somehow actually manage to carry off this separation, we aren't really praying. Because, you see, we can't separate our prayer from our lives -- from the world -- any more than we can separate our spirits from our bodies. Oh yes, I know that many people think that a separation DOES exist between the spiritual and the physical ... but I firmly believe that they're wrong.

This point of view is traditional Jewish spirituality ... the spirituality that Jesus was soaked in ... an embodied spirituality. We are PHYSICAL beings ... just as we are SPIRITUAL beings ... and our physicality and our souls are enmeshed. We can't separate them from each other. This is why what we DO with our bodies is so important ... our sexual lives, for example, are not separate from our spiritual lives. Now, if you think I'm straying from the subject of prayer ... remember Jesus' admonition that we are to pray ALWAYS. He MEANT it. And he didn't mean that we should stop living our lives ... He meant that all life is a prayer. That as we live, so we pray ... as we pray, so we live. Our prayer embeds us in the world.

Perhaps some of you are struggling with these ideas ... let me give you a simple example of the unity of the physical and the spiritual. When you prepare to say a prayer, what do you do? In church you may stand or kneel. Perhaps you bow your head if you're seated. In a group, when someone says, let's say a prayer, have you noticed how everyone shifts position? ... sits up a little straighter? ... probably uncrosses their legs and puts their feet on the floor? And, of course, there's the clasping of hands ... that gesture of appeal. Even at home, alone, I bet that most of us -- all of us? -- have some stance we adopt, some physical way we signal to ourselves that we are about to say a prayer. Why? Oh yes, I know about years of Sunday School training, and social custom and conditioning ... but I think it's more than that. I think we know instinctively that our bodies and souls are united. Prayer is a conversation with God that involves our entire being.

I said earlier that the goal of all prayer is union with God. Seeking this union with our whole being, we are made whole ... we are not fractured into component parts ... we are made whole, united, body and soul. We are transformed and sanctified in our ENTIRETY. Just this last Thursday we celebrated the feast of the Ascension, our remembrance of the moment when Jesus left his friends to return to his Father. Medieval representations of this event often show the disciples gazing up at a cloud ... and two little feet hanging out of the bottom of the cloud ... Jesus disappearing ... going to his Father. Many of us have trouble with the idea of Jesus "ascending" to be with the Father. But as I told some of you last Wednesday, the people who wrote about these events in the Gospels were not striving to record history ... they were not striving to give us the cold, hard facts that we crave ... no, the evangelists were trying to share the MEANING of these events with us. And the MEANING of the Ascension is that Jesus and God are ONE. And not just some spiritual aspect of Jesus ... but ALL of him ... his spirit, mind, and BODY are one with God the Father.

This has important implications for us. The union with God that we seek is a union of our entire being with God, just like Jesus ... soul, heart, mind, AND body. Do you see where this begins to take us? If my overweight, aging carcass is holy unto God ... if it -- if I -- am meant to be transformed and united with God, then so, too, are you ... and all other people ... and what's the difference between our physicality and the rest of creation's? Not much, my friends ... ALL creation is holy and meant to be united with God.

And there's more! In the prayer Jesus is praying over his disciples in today's Gospel, he prays that they may be one, just as he and the Father are one. Jesus is not only praying that each disciple -- each of us -- find the unity of being with God that he has found, he is praying that they -- that we -- find unity of being with each other! What is prayer? Like our very existence, prayer is not simply an "up and down" relationship between us and God. Prayer includes the "horizontal" ... our relationships with each other and the rest of creation. Unity with God involves recognizing and participating in the unity of creation. And so Jesus tells his disciples -- tells us -- to go into the world ... to heal and transform it. Our conversation with God is one that includes all of creation.

Jesus at prayer.

Jesus at prayer, is Jesus LIVING ... breathing, eating, walking ... in unity with God, in unity with creation. Jesus is a walking prayer. That's what we're meant to be: walking prayers, healing and transforming the world.

Go forth, to the work you have been given to do.

Amen.