The Prayer in which We Share
Seventh Week of Easter
Of all the liturgical responses that the Church knows and practices, perhaps the most ubiquitous is the one that follows these words of a celebrant or other clergy: “And now, let us pray to the Father in the words our Savior has taught us…” As is perhaps the case for many others, the first text I committed to memory was the response to this liturgical prompt, beginning with the words “Our Father.” This, my Sunday School teachers and VBS volunteers and parents drilled into me, was the way that Jesus taught us to pray. What a relief, I thought, to my anxious, calculated, and self-sufficient mind, to know exactly what God expected from me when I prayed. Such transactional prayers are often a soothing balm to our limited imaginations. And wouldn’t it be at least a little ungrateful to look for something more than what the Great Teacher taught us to do?
Of course, it doesn’t take long living in a broken world to realize that the faithful recitation of the Lord’s Prayer does not sustain one’s spirituality. If we, the body of Christ, understand our souls to be in some way bound up with each other, we quickly realize that we are sustained just as much, if not more, by the prayers others pray for us, or, perhaps even better, the prayers we share. Our reliance on the rote recollection of the Lord’s Prayer is a gift, to be sure, but it is necessarily something different than the kind of participation in the order of grace that we can experience when we pray with others. In this week’s text, the Teacher prays to the Father not just for the sole purpose of instruction and imitation, but rather for invitation and participation.
It will be helpful to identify what is different when Jesus prays to God in this text. As the teacher to the disciples, Jesus usually tells us what the Kingdom of God is like, giving customary and contemporary images and metaphors to talk about this profound mystery. However, in this prayer to the Father, our Savior goes beyond telling us what it is like, and instead, speaks directly to the Father in a way that cuts through those images, thus speaking not on what the Kingdom is like, and rather what the Kingdom is. Jesus, in mystical union with the Almighty, confesses that the same kind of union will be eternal life for the disciples. This would be enough, that God With Us would engage in prayer, the same prayer in which he will ask for his glory to be made known to the world, on behalf of his children, that they may know eternal life. But, of course, Jesus is up to more here than first meets the eye.
While the prayer of Jesus to God is effective on its own, we are not surprised to find out that Jesus’ prayer here is about far more than what it accomplishes, again, in a transactional sense. A limited imagination of this prayer from Jesus may lead to a conclusion that, while certainly not wrong, does not constitute the full story. In the field of quantum physics, the idea of a superposition has long held the interest of many curious minds. Made popular by the famous thought experiment involving Schrodinger’s cat, the idea is that any situation is more than just the actions and elements involved. They are always in some way modified by the observation of the event. While the scientific field may not be what Jesus had in mind, it seems to be the case that Jesus, while praying to God, was at least acknowledging, if not fully inviting, those disciples within earshot. The nature of that invitation, we later see, is expressed in the very same prayer offered up by Jesus.
In short, that invitation is to participate in what was (and is) happening in the eternal and cosmic unity of God and Jesus. If the disciples of Jesus are to truly embrace eternal life and true intimate knowing with God, they will be “one as (we) are one.” In other words, the Jesus is indirectly revealing to the disciples that, by the grace and power of God, they will, in their communities, bear witness to the divine reality of God’s Kingdom, by living in and practicing unity. By doing so, they will transcend what the Kingdom is like, and instead inhabit that space in which our limited imaginations ultimately fail us. No longer are metaphors useful. The practice of community as an imitation of the unity of the Trinity is far richer than anything imaginable. This is eternal life: to participate with each other in the deep knowledge of the Almighty God.
Friends, we are not present to observe the prayers of the human Jesus to the God of Creation, but we are surely no less capable of making those observations, to acknowledge that there are transcendent activities in the world that go beyond our comprehension, but are no less real. Those realities are often less something from which we learn something but rather a place to experience and practice something. They are, in the truest sense, an invitation. And this invitation, it seems, might have some impact on the ways in which we live together, not least of which being the way we understand our bodies as bodies of prayer and sacrament. The living Jesus today makes invitations to us through these expressions of revelation through which we come to be reminded of his full humanity and divinity. The One who shares in God’s divinity invites us to share in that divinity by truly and fully knowing the divine. We know that this is possible, by the power of the Holy Spirit, as we become God’s witnesses into all the world (Acts 1:8). By doing so, we honor the prayers offered up by all who have gone before us, including Jesus himself. And so, we do not just accept or receive eternal life, or even just observe and acknowledge its revelation to us, but fully participate in it.