A friend asked me, puzzled, about the prayer of Jesus as it appears at the beginning of tomorrow’s Sunday Gospel, the healing of the leper.
He wondered: What did He pray? What was the prayer of Jesus? He is the Lord; how did He pray?
The evangelist Mark says: “And in the morning, a great while before day, he rose and went out to a lonely place, and there he prayed.”
I began to think and meditate on his question. The subject had never occurred to me. In fact, the text does not tell us what He prayed or how He prayed. We know His priestly prayer in chapter 17 of John’s Gospel, before He entered the week of the Passion, and it is magnificent. We also know that His disciples would be moved by the way He prayed to the Father. They would find in Him something new, something they were not used to, that they had not learned from their books or seen in their Pharisee teachers. That is why they would ask Him, with the familiarity of disciples who have become sons: “Lord, teach us to pray.”
He said to them: when you pray, pray like this: Our Father, who art in heaven… We can say that what Jesus prayed in the stillness of the wilderness, early before dawn, was this free surrender, with boundless love, to His heavenly Father. What He prayed in silence and in secret, in His deep and personal relationship with His Father, Jesus revealed to His disciples through the Our Father.
The Our Father reveals to us the depth of Jesus’ prayer and the greatness of His love for the heavenly Father. Above all, it shows us that the One we pray to is not just any god, not a being among beings, nor a distant one dwelling above the heavens, without heart or feeling, with no interest in our lives.
Jesus’ prayer taught us that God is Father, “Abba”; that He is a Person, the Most Holy Trinity, who loves us. He created us and did not want to leave us alone to our fate. He created us and promised us salvation. And so came the Son. Before returning to the Father’s house, the Son promised us that we would not be left orphans. So He sent us the Holy Spirit, the Comforter, who strengthens us and reminds us of all that Jesus said and did.
One thing is certain: even if we do not know the content of Jesus’ personal prayer, we know its fruits in the way He lived with the disciples and the crowds. What Jesus prayed in secret with His heavenly Father, He showed through His words, His parables, His way of life and His actions… His prayer is His boundless love… Jesus at prayer is the One who looked at me and loved me…
My friends, we are the children of this prayer of Jesus. The whole life of the Church: her liturgy, her theology, her teaching, her prayers… is the fruit of Jesus’ prayer…
Two thousand years of love, witness, martyrdom, building, culture and art… are the fruit of Jesus’ prayer…
Our spontaneous way of praying, our fraternal and prophetic relationships, our joys, our sorrows, our laughter, our disappointments, our dreams… our rising again, all are born of Jesus’ prayer…
What I am writing now, with this spontaneity and full confidence that there is, there or right here beside me, a personal God who hears me, reads me and loves me, is the fruit of Jesus’ prayer…
Thank You, Jesus, for Your prayer, for it has made us, in everything…
Fr. Joseph Abi Aoun
