The Prayer Life of Jesus – Human Despair on the Cross

The Prayer Life of Jesus – Human Despair on the Cross.

“Tremendous power is released through the passionate, heartfelt prayer of a righteous man!” (James 5:16).

The Lord Jesus always was and still continues to be the ultimate prayer warrior. He prayed to the Father even before He was born (Hebrews 10:5-7), and He kept praying until the moment of His ascension (Luke 24:50-53). But He didn’t stop praying when His work on earth was done, for He continues to intercede for us at the right hand of the Father as we read this! (Hebrews 7:25). His ministry was largely a prayer ministry in the sense of prayer being the foundation for everything He did. He prayed for saints and sinners, privately and publicly, with His face to the ground and His head up facing the heavens. He prayed in grief and He prayed in gratitude, while exhausted and while full of energy. Jesus prayed with His dying breath and He prayed after He rose from the dead. He prayed before major decisions and during dramatic miracles. He prayed spontaneously and He prayed in words prepared thousands of years before Him. He prayed short, one-sentence prayers (John 12:28), and He prayed in at least one long prayer that seemed to encompass just about everything (John 17). Jesus developed a lifestyle of prayer that was common to observant Jews, but nonetheless uncommon in its intimacy with the Father.

Jewish Lifestyle. Being born and raised in an observant and orthodox Jewish household, Jesus was immersed from Day One on earth in prayer, in the centrality of prayer to one’s life and faith. Observant Jews practiced formal prayers frequently during the day, and spontaneous prayers throughout each day. They would pray the Sh’ma twice a day, the primary statement of faith for all biblical Jews, starting with its first line, “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might…” (Deuteronomy 6:4-9). Then there’s the Amidah, a series of 18 sacred benedictions that each Jewish father would recite at home twice a day, or perhaps each rabbi in the local synagogue. The Psalms were memorized and on the lips of all believing Jews, as were other classic prayers from the Hebrew Bible, most notably Aaron’s Priestly Blessing in Numbers 6:24-26, “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious to you; the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.”  But by no means were the Jews content with all those formal prayers each day. The rabbis taught each Jew to offer up sincere blessings for just about everything in the course of each day, as many as a hundred blessings, giving God praise and thanks for every common blessing enjoyed. There were blessings for practically every conceivable grace and event, from successfully going to the bathroom, to waking up each morning, to the blessing of being able to retire at the end of the day. These formal prayers and the more informal blessings developed a habit of prayer in each earnest Jewish believer, and made sure that God was seen as the main reference point all day for everyone in the faith. The Jewish prayers were constant reminders of God’s grace and goodness, and made sure that each Jewish home and synagogue were cultures of prayer. Jesus was shaped and directed and nurtured in this Jewish prayer life, and since He was a faithful Jew, prayer was certainly second nature to Him throughout His time on earth.

Inner Dialogue. Few mysteries in the faith are less likely to be understood than the union between the Father and the Son. Their level of intimate, eternal communion is well beyond our grasp. “The Father is in me, and I am in the Father.” (John 17:21). The prayer life of Jesus has everything to do with their intimacy. Somehow, the Father and the Son were inside each other in Spirit. So when Jesus prayed to the Father, He was spiritually looking inward to the Father’s presence. Jesus was speaking to the Father in a secret place within Himself where the Father dwelled. The prayer life of Christ was an inner dialogue between Father and Son, a private conversation of two divine Beings who love each other. Jesus said that He would not even take a step without the direction from the Father, He wouldn’t say a word without the Father’s approval. Jesus placed Himself completely at His Father’s disposal, such was the level of trust between the Father and the Son. Certainly, Jesus was the perfect example of one who “prayed without ceasing” (1 Thess. 5:16-17). Jesus’ prayer was conscious and deliberate, and it was also subconscious and intuitive. Jesus walked prayerfully every second of every day, out of devotion to the Father.

“My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me!” (Matthew 27:46; also refer to Psalm 22).

Forsaken (Greek, “enkatelipes”): deserted; left in the lurch; abandoned; left behind; left helpless in dire circumstances.

All the land was covered in darkness for three hours as Jesus hung on the Cross, dying a torturous death. And then with his last breath, He loudly cried out His parting words to His loving Father. He charged the Father with deserting Him when was needed the most, by the One He least expected would do such a thing. This cry of abandonment was a cry from the human heart. Jesus so fully human that He appropriated our nature and submitted to the devastating emotional experience of true separation from the only Person in the world He trusted.

So on the one hand, in the process of bearing the sins of the world on the Cross, of carrying God’s curse on mankind, Jesus bore upon Himself the brunt of sinfulness before God. The fact is that the separation between God and man certainly had to be a part of the sacrifice of Christ. We can understand Christ’s sense of being cut off from the Father while standing in for our sinfulness. Perhaps this human feeling of Jesus was how He was meant to bear God’s wrath, I don’t know. Isaiah 53:4 states that the suffering servant “was smitten by God and afflicted.” And in Is. 53:10, we read, “It was the will of the Lord to crush Him and put Him to grief.” Certainly Jesus felt that grief fully to His depths. And the prophet Habakkuk asked the painful question, “Lord, why do you remain silent when the wicked swallows up the Man more righteous than he?” (Hab. 1:3).  God’s inaction in the face of the Son’s helplessness, was perhaps the most painful aspect of the Cross.

But on the other hand, Jesus was not ever abandoned by God, ever. That is unthinkable. They share an unbreakable, eternal bond of love. The relationship enjoyed between the Father and the Son was indivisible. They couldn’t be separated by anything in any way. On the Cross, Jesus was humanly distressed but not in spiritual despair. Notice that Jesus cried out, “My God! My God! Their relationship was intact, and the Son remained convinced that the Father was indeed His, even while He lay dying. In fact, Jesus on the Cross did what observant Jews tended to do… When a Bible verse from the Hebrew Bible was quoted, it was considered a topic sentence of a larger passage. The first line of a portion of Scripture served as the working title of the extended passage, just a start of further discussion. The Jewish listener was trained to continue that first line by reciting the entire passage to the end. When Jesus cried out the first line of Psalm 22, either He continued reciting that prophetic psalm to the end, or He intended for those who were listening to complete it. One tradition has Jesus starting Psalm 22 with His cry of abandonment, and then continuing to recite that psalm aloud to the very end, right there on the Cross. And what would have been brought to mind by listening to Jesus recite Psalm 22? “I will declare Your name to my kinsmen; in the congregation I will praise You. You who fear the Lord God, praise Him! All you descendants of Jacob, honor Him! Revere Him, all you descendants of Israel! For He has not despised or disdained the suffering of the Afflicted One; He has not hidden His face from Him but has listened to His cry for help… Those who seek the Lord God will praise Him; Your hearts will enjoy Him forever!”(Ps. 22:22-24, 26).  No, the Father didn’t turn His back on his Son. The Son wasn’t a temporary orphan. There can be no division of the indivisible. Jesus closed His testimony on the Cross by stating that He was the fulfillment of Psalm 22, all of it, from beginning to end! Jesus didn’t end His human life with a whimper but with a bang, with joyful confidence and a triumphant sense of final victory.