Hilton Head Island, SC – April 9, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
Mark 11:1-10; Mark 14:32-42
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – And Jesus said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cupr from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.” – Mark 14:36
The greatest acclaim Jesus ever received occurred on Palm Sunday. Geographically, had Jesus been “Jesus of Bethlehem” rather than “Jesus of Nazareth,” he might have received much more acclaim during the time of his public ministry. Were that the case, Jesus presumably would have spent his entire ministry in the southern part of Judea, where Jerusalem and most of the Jews lived. As it was, his entire three-year ministry was spent in the north, in the region of the Galilee. Both Mary and Joseph were from Nazareth, and that is where Jesus grew up. Certainly there were people in the Galilee, but not nearly as many as in Judea. The Galileans were not the movers and shakers of first-century Judean society. The power brokers were in the south, not the north.
Therefore we might ask who composed the crowd who cheered Jesus as the Messiah when he rode into Jerusalem in apparent triumph. Probably they were mostly Galileans who had heard Jesus preach in their own home territory. They had come to Jerusalem, as the Torah required, to celebrate the liberation of the Israelites from the Egyptians during the time of Moses in the annual feast of Passover. So when Jesus rode into town, it was Galilean disciples, even if almost certainly there were not thousands of them, who shouted his praises as he entered the holy city.
It is obvious from the preliminary preparations Jesus made that he intended to enter Jerusalem in a particular fashion. He rode into the city on a donkey, not a horse. That signified he came in peace. No warrior would ride a donkey; it would be like riding a Shetland pony. It just wouldn’t look right. But Jesus didn’t want to look like a great general; he wanted to look like a prophet, like a man of God who came in peace to bring peace, not as a man of military might. But he did want to ride; he didn’t want to walk. Even on a donkey, Jesus hoped his followers would perceive him as the kind of king he wanted to be. And he knew that “his people,” however many of them in fact there may have been, would be there to cheer him when he humbly rode into the city on his almost comical little steed.
But from that moment of high acclamation, how quickly things turned against Jesus! From Sunday on, he was with his twelve carefully chosen disciples, but he also spent the remaining five days of his life among strangers, not Galilean followers. It was primarily his theological enemies who confronted him from then on, the priests and Sadducees and Pharisees. And in the end he stood before the Roman governor, a man he had never seen, and who knew nothing about him.
Jesus had an extraordinary and unique ability quickly to size up people and situations. Almost immediately he realized that whatever success he had had in the north among some people seeing him as God’s Chosen One, it was never going to be duplicated in the south. The young man from the hinterlands was doomed in the Big Pomegranate as soon as the hosannas of the Palm Sunday processional had died away among the limestone facades of Jerusalem’s buildings.
At the Last Supper on Maundy Thursday evening, Jesus had a deep sense of foreboding. The disciples couldn’t understand why he seemed so agitated, but they could clearly sense that he felt great fear. After they had celebrated the Passover Seder, and Jesus had spoken the words which have become the essence of the eucharist or holy communion liturgy ever since, Jesus led them to the Garden of Gethsemane. It is in the Kidron Valley on the east side of Jerusalem, far below the eastern wall of the Temple Mount. No doubt Jesus had been in Gethsemane several times before with the Twelve. They were all observant Jews, and so four times a year they went to Jerusalem for the four great annual festivals which Jews still celebrate to this day.
We don’t know why Jesus liked to go to Gethsemane, but there are hints in each of the Gospels that in fact it was his favorite place in the holy city. For the past several decades there has been a Franciscan church there, the Church of All Nations. It was designed by the Italian architect Barluzzi, who built several churches throughout Israel in particularly holy places associated with Jesus. Outside the church is a garden with large, ancient olive trees lovingly tended by the monks and their gardeners. Inside the church, in front of the altar, is a mosaic of Jesus kneeling beside a large flat rock. You have all seen copies of a famous nineteenth-century painting upon which the mosaic is based.
When Jesus went off by himself to pray, what was the purpose of his prayer? The Fourth Gospel does not tell us that Jesus prayed at all, only that he went to Gethsemane with the disciples. But Matthew, Mark, and Luke all say Jesus said essentially the same thing, and they all give us almost verbatim the prayer that is our sermon text for today. According to Mark, Jesus began his prayer with the word Abba. Abba is an Aramaic word, which is the language Jesus spoke. It was every-day as opposed to liturgical Hebrew. If you’re a southerner, or if you’re from certain sections of the north, it translates into English as “Daddy.” I’m from the Midwest, and in the Midwest almost none of the people I grew up with ever called their parents either “Daddy” or “Mama” or “Mommie”. Where I come from, they were always “Dad” and “Mom,” no matter how old the children were. Or at least that is the way I remember it. But if you’re from somewhere other than where I’m from, and you always called your parents Daddy and Mama, and you perceive God as Father the way Jesus perceived God as Father, you too might call Him “Daddy: Abba.” Maybe the closest English equivalent is “Papa.” It is the word many babies first use to designate their father, just as “Mama” is baby-talk for speaking to their mother.
“Abba, Father, all things are possible to Thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt” (Mk. 14:36, Mt. 26:39, Lk. 22:42).
What is the purpose of prayer? When it comes right down to it, why do we pray? What do we hope to accomplish? Do we want to try to bend God’s will to align itself with our will? Do we want to ask God to bend our wills to align them with His will? What is the purpose of prayer?
I was taught before seminary and during seminary, and I read it after seminary, that there are five traditional elements to prayer: praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and petition. Praise and thanksgiving are self-explanatory. Confession means that we acknowledge our sins and ask forgiveness for them. Intercessions are prayers offered on behalf of others, and petitions are things we ask God on our own behalf. In the pastoral prayers we have each Sunday in worship, the ministers try to incorporate some or all of those factors into our collective prayer. I could go into that in more detail, but this sermon is not primarily about the elements of prayer. Rather it is about what is the purpose of prayer.
As long as I have been a minister, I have owned a book called The Encyclopedia of Religious Quotations. Through the years I have used it very extensively, especially for finding bulletin cover quotes to correspond to whatever is the sermon theme for any given Sunday.
Here are a few examples of the fourteen pages of quotations about prayer. An anonymous source said, “In the morning, prayer is the key that opens to us the treasures of God’s mercies and blessings; in the evening, it is the key that places us under His protection and safeguard.” Thus we are to deduce that prayer enables us to avail ourselves of God’s blessings to us, and it also convinces us that He protects us. That undoubtedly is one of its purposes. An Arab proverb declares this: “Prayer is the pillow of religion.” From that we conclude it gives us rest, refreshment, and comfort. Two quotations could be used for those signboards you see outside certain kinds of churches. Philip James Bailey said, “Seven days without prayer makes one weak” – spelled “w-e-a-k.” It’s a play-on-words, a double-entendre, see; ha-ha. In other words, prayer gives us strength. Fred Beck said, “If you are swept off your feet, it’s time to get on your knees.” When in trouble, pray. Both those purposes of prayer are a little kitschy for me, but they convey a certain sort of truth about prayer’s purposes. The great Episcopalian preacher Phillips Brooks said, “Prayer, it its simplest definition, is merely a wish turned God-ward.” We present God with what we wish for, what we hope for, and we pray that it may come true.
All of these statements suggest three basic features about what prayer is. First, they tell us that prayer is our primary means of focusing our thoughts and concerns as we approach God. When we speak to God in prayer, we are informing Him what we are thinking. Of course if God is God, He is omniscient. That theological word means that He knows everything. Thus He knows what we are all thinking before we tell Him what we’re thinking. But one of the purposes of prayer is for us to gather our thoughts together in focused communication with God, not for His sake, but for our sake. Prayer gives us the opportunity to express what really matters to us.
Secondly, prayer automatically helps us sort out what really matters. We don’t need to bring minutiae before the Almighty One of Israel. Instead we should bring important things. Fifty years ago I had a friend who was a Franciscan priest. I remember him telling me about a woman who used to come to confession every week, telling him tiny peccadilloes she thought she had committed about this and that. Finally he told her one day, “Don’t come back again until you’ve committed a sin that is truly worth confessing!” Prayer should be an avenue to God for expressing what is heavy on our minds, not for every little niggling thing we must face.
Nine nights ago, I stayed up until 12:48 AM to watch the Mississippi State University women’s team basketball defeat the Connecticut women, ending their all-time best NCAA winning streak in any sport at a hundred and eleven games. It was one of the most exciting basketball games I ever saw. I had mixed feelings about Connecticut’s loss, although I thought it might help South Carolina in the finals, which probably it did. Afterward, when one of the announcers was talking with Geno Auriemma, the Connecticut coach, he said that he had told the team, “What we’ve been living” (with all those wins) “isn’t reality. This” (their first loss in 111 games!) “is real life.” One of the purposes of prayer is to help us learn what really matters, and how we must deal with reality, when it is very hard to take.
Thirdly, the five elements of prayer --- praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and petition --- are meant to remind us that our prayers need to be well rounded, that they cannot be a single factor that we constantly bring to the throne of grace. God doesn’t need to hear our prayers, but we need to pray them, and we need to pray with breadth and depth, not with just one factor which alone is the continuous obsession of our mind and heart.
If these ideas are central in telling us what prayer is, it is imperative also to know what prayer is not. Prayer is not at attempt to convince God to do things He otherwise would not do. Prayer should assist us in accepting God’s will, not in trying to direct God’s will. Thus prayer also is not a plea to God to do things we otherwise suspect He might not do. If we pray, “God, please help me to do the right thing,” God isn’t going to do that. Only we can do the right thing. But we can legitimately petition God to assist us in doing the right thing. Nor is prayer a means of telling God things we think He might not know. When we remind God that people in Syria are constantly being wounded and killed as pawns in a long and bitter multi-faceted war, we can be certain God is far more aware of what that actually means than we are. But prayer is God’s means of bringing such concerns before Him, not for His benefit, but for our benefit. To pray a concern may result in having that concern lifted, even if only temporarily, simply because we prayed it.
The four Gospels are not biographies of Jesus. They are quite brief collections of stories about Jesus, told from the perspective of each particular author. All four Gospels suggest, without providing much detail, that Holy Week was a rapid slide into disaster for Jesus. And if the essence of the stories are accurate, we are led to believe that the twelve disciples had no idea of what was coming. They were, to use a contemporary term, absolutely clueless.
When Jesus went with the disciples to the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus asked them to watch with him, to stay alert, to be on guard. But in every single retelling of the story, they all failed Jesus, and fell asleep. Mark adds that “their eyes were very heavy.”
Didn’t they know what was about to transpire? Couldn’t they sense the danger that Jesus so clearly felt? But, you see, they were the ones who related these stories to whomever eventually wrote the Gospels, and in sorrow they were admitting that they didn’t know! They had no inkling of what was coming! Further, they realized in retrospect that they failed Jesus in his time of greatest need.
But if the disciples did not understand what was happening, Jesus was excruciatingly aware of it. Do you know what the literal meaning of “excruciating” is? It means “from the cross: ex crux.” Cruciare in Latin means “to crucify.” Jesus felt himself already to be on the cross in Gethsemane. “Abba, Father, all things are possible to thee; remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what thou wilt.”
Did God want Jesus to be crucified? There is a long and very persuasive tradition in the Christian Church which declares that is indeed what God wanted. I don’t believe that is what Jesus’ prayer indicated, however. I am convinced what he was saying was this: “I am terrified over what I fear is about to happen to me, and I believe, Father, that You could free me from this unspeakable existential injustice. But I also trust that You will be with me whatever I must face.” The purpose of Jesus’ prayer, as should be a major purpose of all of our prayers, was to enable Jesus to accept whatever was coming, as horrendous as Jesus was certain it was to be.
Prayer is our best means of getting us through life until life is over and at last we see our Creator-Father face to face. And if all people don’t pray for themselves, then we must pray for all people. We need to become what certain kinds of Christians call “prayer warriors,” those who use prayer to battle the forces of darkness, sin, and death. In Gethsemane, that’s what Jesus did. “Remove this cup from me; yet not what I will, but what Thou wilt.”
Prayer never benefits God. But it does benefit us. Never forget it. And never stop praying.