In today’s gospel reading from the Book of John, Jesus prays to God to protect his disciples, his dear friends: “I am asking on their behalf; I am not asking on behalf of the world, but on behalf of those whom you gave me, because they are yours…And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (NRSV, John 17:9 – 11).
I find this prayer deeply touching for a couple of reasons. Partly because it shows such concern for oneness and unity. “This is a community of ‘friends’ bound together by their love for each other, which comes from the love Jesus first showed them, the very love of God” (Johnson 2010:487). Unity is key to Christian community, to its grounding. Without it there is no “community in the Spirit” (Johnson 2010: 487). Jesus knows this unity will be challenging to maintain in a world full of competing desires. And reading Jesus’s prayer gives me pause. How are we doing as a community of believers, united in the Spirit?
I am also touched any time I encounter Jesus praying. The praying Jesus is the human Jesus. He is vulnerable because he loves other human beings, like we do. And he’s worried about them.
“I am asking on their behalf…because they are yours” (John 17:9).
Jesus’s own mother may have offered a similar prayer for him. In fact, it strikes me as fitting that we’d read this passage on Mother’s Day. How often do mothers all over the world hope and pray for their children’s protection? We tie amulets with prayers sewed inside them around babies’ necks. We assign saints to watch over their travel, their work, their health. When my own children were babies, I leaned over where they slept each night and whispered: May goodness and mercy follow you all the days of your life. A hope, a prayer, a protective magical shield.
Earlier in the gospel of John, we see Jesus telling his disciples what they can expect of the world because they are his:
“If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you. Because you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world—therefore the world hates you” (John 15:18 – 19).
What is this hateful world that Jesus warns them about? It was the world of Roman occupied Palestine, full of flagrant exploitation of the poor, rejection of the disabled, corruption, and coersive political domination. Jesus’s message, that the last would be first, and the first last, “disrupted and reimagined the social and political order” (Florer-Bixler 2021: 31). And it continues to do so today. The simplicity of the Good News makes a mockery of the mechanisms of power that give people a sense of security, even of immortality.
In Matthew 10, Jesus warns: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves” (Matthew 10:16 – 18).
It’s a world hostile to the gospel message, indeed to the laws of God’s justice. And so, Jesus prays:
Protect them. I’ll be gone and unable to do it. Protect them. What is it to pray like this? To ask God to do something for us. To pray at all, really?
I’ve been thinking about this question a lot. Because for the past four months I’ve been doing a lot of praying. With strangers. In the hospital. As a chaplain intern at the UNC medical center, I visited with patients and listened to them talk about their life experiences, their beliefs and disbeliefs, their disappointments and their hopes. This part of the job was not a big stretch for me. But praying with people was. I was extremely nervous about this part. Nervous because I did not have a lot of experience praying extemporaneously with others. Prayer for me had always been something I did silently or aloud at the table when we say grace before a meal or liturgically with a group in unison. Suddenly I was responding to prayer requests from people who were suffering and in need of comfort.
I fumbled my way into it, trying to be true to my own beliefs and those of others, and drawing on the liturgies of my youth. I invoked a loving, merciful and just God, and I often, but not always, prayed in the name of Jesus Christ. I took people’s hands in mine. Hands big and rough; small and smooth. Wrinkled hands. Hands with missing fingers. Burned and bandaged hands. And I held onto them while I prayed. In fact, praying gave me an excuse to touch people, which I think was as powerful as any words I offered.
And I just kept praying until it started to come a little more naturally. But I was careful not to ask for specific things on behalf of others. One time, I overheard another chaplain, huddled in prayer with two young parents, asking God to let their dying baby live, which it did not. I walked away stunned from that experience, feeling the rawness of the moment and wondering how the parents felt, how the chaplain felt, and what God had in mind by taking the life of their three-month-old son after all that supplication.
It wasn’t until the very end of my time at the hospital this spring that I prayed for something specific. The patient was about to go back into the world where cocaine and alcohol would tempt him. And so, I asked God quite directly to fashion a protective shield around this man, to keep him safe and to make the path clear of all obstacles.
It felt a little dangerous. What if this man relapsed and felt like God hadn’t protected him, that he wasn’t worth protecting?
I don’t know if prayers get “answered” exactly—at least not in the literal sense. And maybe my way of praying—for general things (love, comfort, joy, peace and rest)—is a way of hedging my bets. Babies, spouses, and parents die, whether we ask for them to be spared or not. But after months of praying with people and hearing people talk about their hopes and disappointments, I’ve realized it’s okay to be specific when we talk with God. Praying for healing and miracles, for babies to live, expresses deep desire. It is a truthful and humble stance, “an offering to God of [our] internal orientation” (Florer-Bixler 2021:58). And I think God likes us that way. Praying for things we want and need reinforces our relationship with God’s unconditional love and acceptance (Florer-Bixler 2021:59). God knows who we are; it’s good if we are honest with ourselves about it before God.
A few weeks ago, I visited with a family who was praying for a miracle at their mother’s bedside. Their prayers were for healing, even though their mother was unresponsive and actively dying. They prayed for her to sit up, get out of bed and walk out of the hospital. I did not do any of the praying; they had their own practices that put them in communion with God and Jesus. But at one point, a member of the family turned to me and asked if I believed in miracles.
“Yes,” I said.
But that wasn’t the outcome of their prayers. At least not of their specific requests for their mother to be healed. And I don’t believe that was really the point of their prayers. Rather, these deeply faithful people were humbling themselves before God, unafraid to say clearly and repeatedly what they hoped for.
Jesus prayed for protection. We know the perils and dangers the disciples and other early Christians later encountered and endured—socially ostracized, imprisoned and killed. So, Jesus’s prayers weren’t technically answered either. But he prayed anyway, vulnerably sharing his deepest desires and showing us what it is to be in intimate relationship with God, who longs for us.
“I am not asking that you take them out of this world,” Jesus said. “But that you protect them…” (John 17:15).
Thanks be to God for the praying Jesus. The one who sits in hospital rooms, walks beside chaplains, and mothers, and all of us.
Works Cited:
Florer-Bixler, Melissa. 2021. How to Have an Enemy: Righteous Anger and the Work of Peace. Harrisonburg, VA: Harold Press.
Johnson, Luke Timothy. 2010. The Writings of the New Testament, 3rdedition. Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press.