Today I wish to use the image of Passion to illustrate another aspect of our life of prayer. When we use the word “passion” in this context we do so with relation to its Latin root, “passio = I suffer”. So to speak of the Passion of Jesus is to refer to his suffering and death. We could equally entitle this sermon “Prayer and Suffering” as well as “Prayer and Passion.” Let me begin with some illustrations.
As a Clinical Pastoral Education student working in the Spinal Unit at a large public hospital in Melbourne I used to visit each day a man in his twenties who was severely quadriplegic. To say it was hard work would be an understatement: we had little in common; his world had become very limited; and his condition was quite threatening to my sense of life. But I persisted with my visits (after all that is what I was there for) and I guess I began to get to know him and he me. However I felt a lot of time seem to be spent in awkward silence. Then one day Ray said to me “Andrew, thank you for your visits, they mean a lot to me”. I think I began to learn the importance of just being there, being there for him, being with him “in his passion” as it were.
Another experience that comes to mind occurred when I was Rector of my first parish attending the house of a neighbor several hours after one of her boys had been killed on his motor-bike. Sitting with the devastated mother I struggled to find something to say by way of comfort but nothing seem to make sense. Then a woman friend of the mother who was a Pentecostalist of some sort said, “God must have wanted him” and some other such platitudinous remarks. I was so angry with her that I told her to shut it! It seemed to me totally inappropriate to try and make sense out of a senseless loss. At that stage of events one could simply “weep with those who weep”.
Douglas Rhymes, an English priest author, in a book called “Prayer and the Secular City” tells a true story of a man who used to visit his gravely ill daughter each day. On his way to the hospital he would often stop at a church and say a prayer before the Crucifix. On this particular day it was his daughter’s birthday so he took a birthday cake with him to the hospital. When he arrived he was shattered to find that his daughter had died. Eventually he made his sad way home. He stopped by at the church and went to the Crucifix where he had prayed many times. He looked through his tears at the suffering Christ silently hanging there. Suddenly he took the birthday cake out of its box and hurled it at the Cross with a cry of anguish. That says Rhymes was an act of true prayer.
So we read in today’s gospel of Jesus weeping with his friends Mary and Martha over the death of Lazarus. Jesus identifies his suffering with their suffering. Jesus stands with the mourners. He enters into the tragedy of the moment. So much so that the gospel continues “So the Jews said, “See how he loved him”.” Of course there is more to this narrative than Jesus’ tears, but it is too easy in the name of John’s over-arching theological purpose to miss the drama and the significance of this very human moment. Note also the related emotions going on in Jesus. We hear that “Jesus was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved” and again “Then Jesus again greatly disturbed”. On one level I believe Jesus is mad as hell at the death of his friend. He is really cut up and fired up to do battle with God. That's how I felt at the death of that young man I mentioned earlier. He was the only decent kid in a highly dysfunctional family.
Again this incident, this “prayer” of Jesus, has a whole Biblical context which is worth recalling in that it helps inform our own understanding of an aspect of our prayer, that prayer which is related to suffering. Think of the Book of Job which embodies Job’s prayer in relation to his suffering and grief: Job demanding answers of God, shaking his fist at God in the face of innocent suffering and loss. Or think of King David lamenting the death of his traitorous son, Absalom, (2 Kings 18:33ff) or of King Hezekiah crying out to God in the midst of life-threatening illness(2 Kings:20:1-7). Or of the words of Psalm 130, “Out of the depths have I called to you O Lord, Lord hear voice”, words so movingly developed by Oscar Wilde in his “De Profundis”. Then in the Gospels not only do we have the powerful moment in today’s gospel but such profound moments as Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane and his prayer on the Cross which we will be hearing again in Holy Week.
Luke’s Gospel describes Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane: “In his anguish he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat became like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” I like to think of that prayer as “the prayer of waiting”, waiting for what you know is about to happen or that you fear may happen. It is the type of prayer that you may have experienced waiting for some medical test or before surgery, or the prayer at the bedside of someone you love who is dying. It is a prayer experienced by those in prison facing torture like Deitrich Bonhoeffer in his Nazi prison or Terry Waite, the Archbishop of Canterbury's envoy, who was imprisoned in Beirut for 5 years in the Eighties. Jesus’ prayer on the cross includes both his prayer for those who had wronged him, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do”, as well as his great cry of anguish, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” That cry of agony is a form of passionate prayer, capturing as it does the depths of human suffering.
This passionate prayer as we have seen can take a number of forms in differing circumstances of human suffering. I have mentioned such elements as weeping (as with Jesus with the family and friends of Lazarus) or wailing (the cry of agony from the cross: Luke speaks of Jesus uttering a loud cry before his death) or of watching ( keeping the night-watch with the dying) or of waiting (by ourselves or with others). This prayer may be full of questions to God, like that of Job; or a prayer of lament over a grievous loss; or a silent prayer at the bedside of a very sick child, spouse or friend. Often it is simply the “being with” someone in their agony or loss (like my story of the woman who had lost her son) that is the stuff of this prayer. But whatever we refer to it as, it is the very heart of prayer, of prayer which enters into our human passion or suffering. It is prayer which is familiar to us as intercessory prayer, as we come before God with the names of those we love on our hearts.
Ultimately it is prayer that is redemptive. In today’s Gospel Jesus’ tears are the prelude to Lazarus rising from the grave. Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane concludes with the words, “Father, not my will but yours be done”. Some would argue that at that point Jesus had won the battle with the forces of darkness: he had withstood the temptation to give up, to recoil from what lay ahead of him. The Gospels assert that Jesus’ prayer on the Cross is in fact the moment paradoxically when we see him in his Glory. It is in that sense that we speak of Good Friday; that we can speak of the Victory of the Cross. It is as Jesus enters into the reality of suffering, his and ours, that makes true Resurrection possible.
This type of prayer may seem difficult or hard work at first. But from our human experience we know it is prayer that can make a difference to ourselves and to others. To have the company of another through the “valley of the shadow of death”, or “through the vale of tears”, or in the midst of our agony, pain or despair, is to begin to sense the meaning of redemptive love, of that deep healing which is of God, of the “peace which passes all understanding”.
We glimpse in this passionate prayer the model which is at the heart of our faith, that is, the model of Death and Resurrection. It is the model which is central to our understanding of Baptism; it is the model also at the heart of Eucharist: it is as we “die with Christ, that we are made alive in him” (Romans 6:8). May our continuing Lent prayer be that as we walk with Jesus in his Passion so we may have the courage, faith and patience to confront and to endure our own suffering and that of those we love and in and through that to find Resurrection and the gift of Eternal Life. Amen
