The Essence of the Prayer of Jesus

The essence of the prayer of Jesus entailed dedicating every moment of every day to loving God with every part and with every fiber of his being (Lk 2:29. Jn 4:34). All his prayer was directed to this end. Pledging himself to love his Father, come what may, day in day out, might be simple, but it certainly wasn’t always plain sailing. In fact, on occasions it became close to hell on earth for a person of such a delicate and sensitive nature, and sometimes excruciatingly painful, both physically and mentally. What is interesting is that on two of these occasions, though he was alone in his prayer, Jesus took the trouble to tell others of how he prayed, and the inner anguish that this caused him, otherwise,, we would never have known.

Quite evidently he did this so that we could be in no doubt that prayer can be at one moment ecstasy, and at another moment agony, and all stations in between. That is why he told us, through his disciples, that at the prelude to his public ministry, when he prayed in the desert for forty days, it was not one long prolonged ecstasy, far from it. He encountered terrible temptations, as the power of evil threatened to divert him from his purpose. The sufferings that he experienced there were intensified later when, in three terrible hours in the garden of Gethsemane, he had to endure three hours of spiritual and physical pain and suffering. Here his prayer became so agonising, so excruciating, that he sweated blood, not just at the thought of the terrible ordeal that was ahead of him, but much more. It was at the thought of how little, what he was about to endure, would affect those for whom he would suffer and die.

Perhaps the most moving prayer that he ever made was while he was being hammered to the cross, when he prayed for forgiveness for his executioners and for those who had ordered his death, and for those who were pleased to hear that he had been executed. They were not pleased because – ‘it was necessary that one man should die for the sake of the people’ but for the sake of their power over the people and for the privilege positions that they had enjoyed before his truth had threatened to undermine them and expose their hypocrisy. The truth is not a dainty dish to set before the most dangerous animal on earth, particularly if they have political or religious pretention. They prefer Ambrosia to eat and Nectar to drink that have little appetite for humble pie! If a person insists on proclaiming the truth no matter what, it will make their enemies cross, very cross, and when they are very cross, they will crucify.

It would be naïve to think that the terrible temptations that Jesus endured were only experienced as isolated events that occurred at the beginning and at the end of his public life, for the evidence is that his prayer to his Father must have continually been interrupted. One of the main themes in the four Gospels is the opposition of so many of the ‘great and the good’ to him personally, as well as to his teaching. Needless to say then that, as he paused to pray at least five times a day, his prayer would have been continually disturbed with the thought of how to get through to the perverse and persistent hostility that greeted his every word. That it was backed up and reinforced by the sort of miracles that had never been seen before, nor would ever be seen again, in quite the same way, seemed to matter little. Remember Jesus saying that, ‘even if a man were to be raised from the dead they would not believe’. Nor would it be realistic to think that such distractions only arose in his prayer after he had made his first public appearance. As he grew up, his supersensitive human nature and sharp mind would have long since seen, the cant, the hypocrisy and the humbug that prevailed everywhere in the religion of his forbears that he had come to transform.

The perfection of human wisdom is love, and love does not just happen, it has to be learnt. So like any other human beings, Jesus had to learn too. He had to learn how to love his Father by repeatedly trying to love him with his whole heart and mind and with his whole body and with his whole strength. I say ‘trying’, because he was, as we have seen, not just distracted, but even tempted to do otherwise. Now having distractions in prayer is not a sin, nor are temptations for that matter, unless you give in to them. Jesus never gave in to them, but turned away from them continually to commit himself to his Father, to love him and to do his will, as can be seen so graphically in his prayer in Gethsemane. It was in this way that he had to do what other human beings would have to do, who wished to follow his example. They too would have to learn how to love day by day throughout their lives.

This is why many years later the Franciscan mystic and mother St Angela of Foligno said that prayer is, in fact – the school where loving is learned - (Schola divini amoris). And that’s why St Teresa of Avila said that you can’t actually pray without distractions! There are no distractions, if you fall asleep, because you are doing nothing, and if you are in ecstasy, you are also doing nothing, because God is doing everything. True prayer takes place between sleep and the ecstasy and there, there will always be distractions that enable us to learn how to love the Father, as Jesus did. Each time a person turns back to him in prayer they are, in fact, practising the repenting that St Peter said was the only way to receive the unique outpouring of God’s love on the first Pentecost Day.

St Francis of Assisi said, what Jesus knew only too well before him, namely that it is in giving that you receive, and it is in loving therefore that you receive love in return. As Jesus continually endeavoured to love his Father, not just despite the distractions and temptations that he experienced, but because of them, he began to receive His love in ever greater abundance. And what He received was the profusion of the infinite love with which his Father was able to fill His human nature through His divine nature that had bound Him to his Father from all eternity. This divine nature was to remain with him throughout His life on earth, as the means through which His human nature was progressively divinized. Imagine an hourglass filled with gold dust to symbolise the love of God. So long as the empty half, symbolising the human nature that Jesus chose to embody, remained open, then the process of receiving the love of God continued until it was not only full, but full to overflowing. We are heirs and heiresses to this supernatural superfluity of love that draws us up into the one the first Christians called Christ our Brother. Thence onwards, we will move in, with, and through Him, into our true and everlasting home, where we will experience to eternity, with all whom we love and hold dear, the ecstatic bliss of basking in the vortex of love unlimited, as it endlessly revolves to and fro between the Father and the Son.