How Would You Have Prayed?

by Jemma Stephens

How would you have prayed? As I ponder what to write in response to Holy Week this year this is the question that keeps coming back to me. The insistent question that I can’t let go of, and yet it is a question that seems unexpected. 

After all, I wonder, what does our intercession have to do with Holy Week? Sometimes it’s hard to connect a weekly zoom call (Hello, intercession in 2020!) with a suffering Jesus. And yet, is intercession not just prayer but also action on behalf of another? If so, the cross is perhaps the greatest act of intercession in history; certainly the most powerful.

And so, I come back to the question: How would you have prayed?

If you were there in the Garden of Gethsemane, watching as an innocent man was arrested, how would you have prayed? If you were there at the trial of Jesus, watching as it became clear that political motivations rather than justice would prevail, how would you have prayed? If you were there when the one who had promised to be the hope for salvation was humiliated, stripped naked, and crucified, how would you have prayed?

When I look at how I respond to the injustices I see around me today, I get a glimpse of this. Today there are plenty of examples of the innocent being arrested, of politically motivated convictions, and innocent people dying. There are plenty of moments for the motive and attitude of our hearts to reveal themselves as we pray. In fact, it was only a few weeks ago that we joined our brothers and sisters in Myanmar to pray for the situation that continues to unfold there. As I look back on times of intercession and examine my heart in that place, I see a heart that is so often moved by injustice more than it is moved by God; a heart that is easily overwhelmed and quick to anger. 

On the surface, it may look like we are aligned with the heart of God as we pray. Yet, what if we look at our intercession and our hearts through the lens of the cross? The cross - and indeed, history - teaches us that God cares so much more about having our hearts than He does about fulfilling our desires for comfort, or ensuring that justice is done according to what we think it should look like, or being politically correct. However, as much as I would like to believe that my intercession is always aligned with the heart of God, when I honestly examine myself I find myself more often in the posture of Peter, ready to chop off someone’s ear and fight, than in the posture of Jesus, open to however God would choose to move.

This pandemic has been a season of realignment. I started it angry. I was ready to proverbially chop off someone’s ear or (far more likely) cry a river of angry tears that would drown someone. I had been encouraged in this, leaning by the current climate in which it is entirely politically correct to be angry. However, as the year has gone by God has been slowly and insistently pointing me to another posture in prayer, one where I relinquish my good ideas and thoughts on justice issues and ask Him to reveal what He desires in any given circumstance without a prior expectation of what that would look like. 

“... there is an invitation to be ones who would not just come to Him in prayer but to be ones who would carry His heart as we pray. ”

And now as I prepare for Holy Week and read the words written for us in the gospels afresh, I see a new picture of intercession. What He’s been calling me into in this last season makes far more sense in view of the cross.  

I see God answering the groanings of this world through a cross; bringing life through pain, suffering, and death. I see God bringing justice through what was deemed as the ultimate act of injustice this world has seen. At that moment, it did not make sense. No one in their right mind would have prayed for it to happen. Looking through the gospel account I see Jesus betrayed by ones He spent His life with and sowed into. I see Jesus standing by as He is wrongfully condemned to death. I see Jesus being forced to carry the cross on which He will be killed. I see Jesus fall, multiple times, under the weight of this cross. I see Jesus weak and in need of help and assistance to go further, He is not even able to complete this journey independently. I see Jesus willing to enter into the grief of others even as He walks this crushing path. I see Jesus encounter His mother in the deepest place of suffering. I see Jesus offering forgiveness to the perpetrators of this injustice even in the final moments before His death.

And so, as I look to the cross again I find an uncomfortable realignment. The cross that reveals my lack, my need for Him, and my insufficiencies, is also the means by which I know I am invited into more of Him?.

I am not saying that God doesn’t listen to each and every one of our prayers regardless of what they are. He draws near to us and delights in doing so every time we come to him in prayer. He delights that we would bring our angry and hurting hearts before Him. He delights that we are moved by what we see around us. He delights in our desire for justice. But there is an invitation to be ones who would not just come to Him in prayer but to be ones who would carry His heart as we pray. 

In this season, I feel Him giving us this invitation as a community of believers. He invites us not only to pray from our comfort zones, but to be provoked in the urgency of the hour, and to be ones that would be willing to be led by the Spirit to seek after His heart and be moved by it; no matter what that looks like. He is calling us to be ones who would join Him in praying things that don’t always make sense, and be captured by His goodness and holiness over and above our own logic and rights. We journey with Him in learning how to be responsive to His heart together; no matter how long it takes us to understand what this means or how many times we don’t get it right.