What does it mean when even Jesus’ prayer hasn’t been answered?
by Danielle Shroyer
Gospel Reading: John 17:1-11
For Sunday, June 5, 2011: Year A—Easter 7
Here’s the issue I have with John’s Jesus: he’s verbose. And Jesus, it seems to me from all the other gospels and the basic sense I get about him, was not one of those people who droned on and on because he loved the sound of his own voice. We know plenty of people like that. I wonder if John may have been like that, but Jesus? Jesus is the guy who always says less than you wished he would. He’s the guy who can bring your entire paradigm down with a one-liner. He’s not, in my opinion, someone who spouts ten minutes of repetitive dialogue like a monologue from a bad indie movie.
I bring this to your attention because you may think John makes Jesus sound a little bit like that in chapter 17. I may tend to agree with you. However, we will all try to move on and envision Jesus praying this prayer in his more edited, standard laser-to-your-heart-before-you-count-to-three-kind-of-way.
Game Time
So the first thing we need to remember is that Jesus isn’t that guy—the one with the luxury to be verbose. Who he is in this passage is someone who’s got a very limited amount of time left to teach his disciples. He’s in the middle of an eleventh hour crash course on “everything you need to know before all goes berserk between Good Friday and Easter.” It’s game time, and in this moment Jesus offers up a prayer for his followers, mindful of what they will have to endure (and with an eye toward all of us who will come long after them). The prayer itself is a teaching moment too, emphasizing some key points in John’s Gospel: 1) God and Jesus are mutually glorifying each other like two mirrors reflecting light back and forth, 2) eternal life is knowing God, and 3) Jesus’ disciples know that he is sent from God.
After all of those introductory, clarifying (maybe a bit circumlocutory but we are trying to get past it) comments are made, Jesus lays his prayer out there in true zinger-like fashion: “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”
Houston, we have a problem
Let’s just let that hang in the air for a moment.
We don’t have to get to Martin Luther, or even to the East/West schism of 1054, to know that Christian unity hasn’t lived up to Jesus’ prayer for us. Peter bailed on Jesus and his friends just a chapter later. Paul and Barnabas parted ways halfway through the Book of Acts. And us? If you checked the
blogosphere right now, you’d find thousands of examples of Christians arguing over the fine print of our faith. We aren’t one as Jesus and the Father are one. We spend most of our time competing with one another, finding scapegoat enemies on whom to blame the world’s problems, and yelling. We’re running a repetitive grinder of anxiety in our collective stomachs. If Jesus is praying on our behalf for us to attain a higher, more lofty sense of togetherness, we sure haven’t listened.
So what does that say about us?
A really big problem
Secondly, what does that say about Jesus’ prayer? For all those who were taught that their heartfelt prayers would be heard and answered, it is quite problematic to see the Son of God’s unanswered prayer staring us in the face. What does it mean when even Jesus’ prayer isn’t answered?
Certainly, there is an element of time at work here. I can hear the Sunday school response now about God’s three answers to prayer: yes, no, and later. But two thousand years is the kind of “later” we really don’t expect, or want. On the upside, the next time one of your community members feels alone in an unanswered prayer, you can assure him he’s in good company.
The Hardest Question
Jesus’ prayer asks something not only of God, but of us, too. He asks us to place relationship before rightness, mutuality above dismissal. So here’s another hard question for us: What if we spent less time praying about being right and more time praying about being one?
Danielle Shroyer is the Pastor of Journey Church in Dallas, TX. She is the author of The Boundary-Breaking God: An Unfolding Story of Hope and Promise (Jossey-Bass, 2009) and blogs at www.danielleshroyer.com. Danielle lives with her husband, two children, and two wild and crazy dogs in Dallas.
