[Jesus] was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.”
How often in our daily lives do we ask a question that isn’t really the one for which we want an answer, all the while hoping that the other person will hear the deeper, unspoken, and far more important question beneath the words that we’ve asked? Jesus’ disciples were very likely voicing just such a request. After all, they were Galilean Jews who knew how to pray; spreading their hands in upward devotion or lying prone with their face to the ground were second-nature practices to them. They weren’t seeking a new prayer technique per se when they asked Jesus to teach them to pray; rather, they were quite likely searching for a deeper connection, a greater intimacy with God, like the relationship they saw reflected in Jesus’ prayer life.
Throughout the gospel of Luke, Jesus is often found in prayer. He prayed immediately after his baptism just before the heaven opened and the Holy Spirit descended upon him and again very early the morning after healing Simon Peter’s mother-in-law and the many others who were brought to him the previous night. The Lord went to deserted places to pray and to the mountains. He even spent the entire night in prayer before he called the Twelve Apostles to follow him and, of course, at the Mount of Olives on the night of his betrayal by Judas when he asked the Father to remove the cup from him, but then prayed, “Not my will but yours be done.”
In all these instances, Jesus turned to prayer which was his resource for guidance, strength, and the ability to “keep on keeping on.” The disciples’ request of Jesus regarding their own prayer lives reveals their dawning understanding that having an intimate and ongoing communion with God was essential if they were going to follow Jesus to Jerusalem and his eventual crucifixion. It seems very possible that the Twelve were voicing a longing to be as close to the Father as Jesus was, i.e., to know God in a deeper way.
Their question verbalizes the hidden desire of the hearts of millions of Christians down through the centuries including our own. Many faithful followers of the Lord Jesus Christ have yearned or are yearning for a closer relationship to God, so that they can confidently trust all the circumstances of their lives to God’s love, care and mercy. Sometimes that longing springs up from deep within us when we, like the disciples, who observed Jesus’ prayer life, see someone for whom prayer is alive—a living, breathing, life-giving connection with the God whom they love and serve, which in turn gives birth within us to a yearning for that kind of relationship with God in our lives.
There is a wonderful story about Sarah Miles, a former atheist, who is now the director of the food pantry at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco that illustrates beautifully the yearning, the hunger for God upon which we’ve been reflecting. Sarah was a journalist who covered the 1980s wars in Central America up close where people were dying by the hundreds every day. She eventually became an editor for the investigative magazine Mother Jones and her curiosity, her outright pleasure in poking her nose into various places and situations and making interesting discoveries, caused her to wonder one day what was going on inside St. Gregory’s. So she wandered into the church and found a congregation that offered Communion to everyone, including strangers.
The story continues in Sarah’s own words: “A woman put a piece of fresh bread in my hand and gave me a goblet of some rather nasty, sweet wine. I ate the bread and was completely thunderstruck by what I felt happening to me. So I stood there crying, completely unsure of what was happening. I then got out of the church as quickly as I could before some strange, creepy Christian would try to chat with me, But I came back the next week because I was hungry, and I kept coming back again and again to take that bread.
I think what I discovered in that moment when I put the bread in my mouth and was so blown away by the reality of Jesus was that the requirement for faith seemed to be hunger. It was the hunger that I had always had and the willingness to be fed by something I didn’t understand.”
Sarah’s conversion story propelled by her hunger isn’t all that different from the hunger which the disciples experienced for a deeper relationship with God. Nor is it very different from our own deep yearning for a more intimate prayer life and connection to our heavenly Father.
Jesus had a two-fold response to the disciples’ request: he provided them first with a quick primer on the basics of prayer and then secondly and more importantly with an understanding of what God is like. The Lord’s primer on prayer had six basic points: first, God is the loving parent of the human family; therefore, we address him as our father, not just my father; secondly, God’s name must be reverenced because God is holy; thirdly, knowing that God’s kingdom has already come through Christ we are to pray that it comes in and through us and is extended to all people; fourthly, we are to pray for daily bread, acknowledging that everything that we have comes to us from God’s gracious and generous hand; fifthly, we are to pray for the forgiveness of our sins and the ability to forgive those who have sinned against us; and finally, we are to pray that we can avoid the time of trial.
The second part of the Lord’s response to his disciples’ request consisted of an illustration about the friend who comes in the middle of the night asking for three loaves of bread for a friend who has just arrived at his home. This story demonstrates God’s trustworthiness and immeasurably deep love for us, the beloved children. “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
Jesus is, in essence, telling his disciples about God’s heart—a heart of compassion and mercy. He is instilling in them a sense of trust and confidence that will bolster their prayer lives and more importantly their relationship with their heavenly Father. Jesus is answering their unspoken question, the yearning within their hearts for a deeper intimacy with their heavenly Father, a relationship closer to the one Jesus had with the Father.
Jesus was assuring them and us that God would fill their hunger. If we go to God hungry for anything less than God, we may come away empty; but, if we go hungry for God, we will come away with the deepest of all our hungers filled.
Because we trust the words of the One who gave his life so that we might have life, Jesus Christ our Savior, we keep praying. And we keep coming to the Lord’s Table to be fed, because at the heart of all our prayers, God is what we are praying for. Amen.
Pastor Shirley Ross-Jones