By his own profession H.G. Wells, the great science fiction writer of a century ago, was not a Christian believer. However, in 1930 he wrote a short anecdote about an archbishop who found himself bothered by some niggling problem that had been eating away at him and that that he was unable to identify or explain. “Maybe the shadow of age was falling upon him, he thought, maybe he had been overworking… Or had he done something wrong or acted in a mistaken spirit?”
It
troubled him to the point where he was unable to perform even the simplest,
most routine functions. What was he to do about it, he pondered? At last the
solution came to him. He would do what he was always telling everybody else to
do who came to him with a dilemma: Pray!
Yes, he would pray.
Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.
He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.
It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small
“Yes,” said the voice. “What is it?”
They found His Grace in the morning… Plainly his death had been instantaneous…[1]
Slowly he sank to his knees and put his hands together. He was touched by a sort of childish trustfulness in his own attitude. “Oh God,” he began, and paused.
He paused, and a sense of awful imminence, a monstrous awe, gripped him. And then he heard a voice.
It was not a harsh voice, but it was a clear strong voice. There was nothing about it still or small
“Yes,” said the voice. “What is it?”
They found His Grace in the morning… Plainly his death had been instantaneous…[1]
I don’t know about you. But speaking for myself I can say I’m grateful
for the times when God hasn’t answered my prayers. That is not to say that
there haven’t been occasions when God has graciously intervened in my life—when
he has answered my prayers sometimes in ways far more wonderfully than I had
even expected. But rather, I’m thinking of those times when my prayer has been
selfish or short-sighted or half-hearted. Perhaps you don’t have those times,
but I know I do—and more often than I care to admit.
Along the Way…
It seems to me that we
have a classic example of that in our reading from the Gospel of Mark this
morning. Mark tells us that it occurred as Jesus and his disciples were “on
their way up to Jerusalem”. Now that word “way” in Greek is hodos, and
it is a significant one—both for Mark, who uses it sixteen times, and for the
entire New Testament, where you’ll find it more than a hundred times. In fact, long
before they were ever called Christians, the earliest believers referred to
themselves as those who belonged to “the Way” (Acts 9:2; 19:9,23).
For Mark that way
begins with John the Baptist who has come to “prepare the way of the
Lord” (1:2-3). Some chapters later, after teaching a crowd of four
thousand people for a full three days, Jesus was concerned that as they
journeyed on the long walk towards home they might collapse along the way
(8:3). Two weeks ago, we read of how
Jesus and his followers were heading towards Cæsarea Philippi. Mark tells us
that it was as they were on the way that Jesus asked them, “Who do you
say I am?” To which Peter replied, “You are the Messiah.” Again, in last
Sunday’s reading, Mark tells us that it was as Jesus was “on his way” that a
man ran up to him to ask, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” (10:17).
Now in this morning’s
passage we encounter it three times. Indeed, it is here in these verses that we
begin to discover why the word “way” is so important for Mark. In the opening
verses of our reading this morning Jesus himself makes it crystal clear: “We
are going up to Jerusalem and the Son of Man will be delivered over to the
chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will hand
him over to the Gentiles, who
will mock him and spit on him, flog him and kill him. Three days later he will rise.”
In fact, this is the
third time Jesus has given this warning to his disciples. The way is the way to
Jerusalem, the way to Jesus offering up himself in death for the sins of the
world. Already the shadow of the cross looms ever darker over all that happens.
And that is the context in which James and John approach Jesus with their brash
request: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask.”
A Bold Request
Now we all know that
there are other places in the gospels where Jesus assures us that our prayers
will be answered. In John’s gospel, for example, we hear Jesus make the
promise, “You may ask me for anything in my name, and
I will do it” (John 14:14). Or again, in Matthew, “If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for
in prayer” (Matthew 21:22). But notice that in each case
there is a condition. We are to ask in Jesus’ name. We are to ask believing—not
just believing that God can do anything or formulaically tacking the words “in
Jesus’ name” onto the end of our prayers, but conforming our minds to the mind
of Christ, our hearts to the heart of Christ, our wills to the will of Christ.
But the disciples’
request comes without any qualifications: “Teacher, we want you to do for us
whatever we ask.” And then comes the request itself: “Let one of us
sit at your right and the other at your left in your glory.” If only the two
brothers had known what they were asking! If they had, I imagine they would
never have spoken as they did. They could be grateful that Jesus did not comply
with their demand. For in the space of a few short days they would learn that
Jesus’ glory would be revealed on a wooden cross and that the places they so
desired on Jesus’ right and left would be occupied by two criminals.
The problem with James’
and John’s request (or prayer, if we may call it that) was that it revolved
around them. Presbyterian theologian R.C. Sproul was one of many who have
written about the false understanding of God as a celestial bellhop, a God
whose very reason for existence is to do our bidding, one “who is on call every time we press
the button, just waiting to serve us our every request”.[2] Of course that is a caricature.
This winter Karen and I have been
attending a course on amateur astronomy. During the first couple of sessions our
instructor dwelt on the way people largely understood the universe before the
time of Copernicus in the early sixteenth century. Observers looked up at the
movement of the stars and the planets and they assumed that everything revolved
around the earth. In the face of considerable opposition Copernicus insisted
that the sun was the centre of the solar system and it took more than a century
for his observations to gain acceptance. Today we call that change in our
understanding the Copernican revolution.
In the same way James and John needed a
spiritual revolution—to move from a me-centred life to a God-centred life. We
find it encapsulated in Jesus’ response to their request: “Whoever
wants to become great among you must be your servant, and
whoever wants to be first must be slave of all”—and
they would find a model for that as they travelled a little farther along the
way.
True Prayer
They had just passed through Jericho, about
fifty kilometers from Jerusalem, when their journey was interrupted by what I
can only imagine were the piercing shouts of a desperate man. “Jesus,
Son of David, have mercy on me!” Some of the people in the crowd tried to get
him to shut up. But that only prompted him to cry out all the louder, “Son of
David, have mercy on me!”
I can’t imagine that Bartimaeus was
schooled in theology. And maybe his crying out from the roadside was a rather
crude way of getting attention. But those shouts of desperation showed a far
more profound grasp of what prayer is all about than James and John had
displayed earlier that day. “Jesus, Son of David, have
mercy on me!”
His words echoed a prayer uttered centuries
before by the prophet Daniel. With his people living in exile, their capital
city of Jerusalem and its temple in ruins, Daniel dressed himself in sackcloth
and covered himself in ashes as he made his plea on their behalf before God. At
the heart of his petition we find these words: “We do not make requests of you because we are righteous, but because of
your great mercy” (Daniel 9:18).
At the heart of both
Bartimaeus’ and Daniel’s prayers was the conviction that the God to whom we
bring our petitions is one who delights to show mercy and that this is the only
basis on which we come before him. This was how God revealed himself to Moses atop
Mount Sinai: “The Lord,
the Lord, the compassionate and
gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness …” (Exodus
34:6). And those words to Moses become a chorus that we find repeated again
and again through the Old Testament.
In the original Greek
of Mark’s gospel Bartimaeus’ words are these: Huie Dauid Iésou, eleéson me.
It did not take long for the early church to recognize the profound meaning in Bartimaeus’
prayer and to adopt it into its worship. We know it as the Kyrie eleison,
the threefold cry, “Lord, have mercy. Christ, have mercy. Lord, have mercy.” We
can trace it back at least to the middle of the fourth century, to some of the
most ancient Christian liturgies.
“Lord, have mercy.” I
believe that these words—and Bartimaeus’ cry—are an expression of what true,
God-centred, prayer is all about. For we come to God and we bring our needs
before him not because of any deserving in ourselves—not because we’ve served
him with our lives or because we’ve prayed faithfully over the years or because
we’ve managed to get our doctrine right, no, none of these things—but because
he is merciful.
And the depth of that
mercy would become clear as it compelled the Son of God to continue along the
road—the way that would lead to his own sacrificial death and to offer up his
life as a ransom for many.
