John 14.8-14
In January 2008, Connie Kang, the religion reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a member of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood, wrote an article entitled “Service Celebrates Two Beliefs” and subtitled “Episcopalians Hold an Indian Rite Mass with Hindus and Apologize for Past Religious Discrimination.” Kang’s article reported— objectively and fairly— what happened at the worship service, attended by both Christians and Hindus, at St. John’s Cathedral near downtown Los Angeles.
Summarizing the purpose of the service, Kang writes, “During the service, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles issued a statement of apology to the Hindu religious community for centuries-old acts of religious discrimination by Christians, including attempts to convert them. The bishop also said he was committed to renouncing the “proselytizing of Hindus.” The entire congregation that day, Hindus and Christians, were then invited to holy communion. Connie Kang writes, “The Rev. Karen MacQueen, an associate priest at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Pomona, in her homily said that in both Hinduism and Christianity devotees believe that “the Divine Presence” illuminates the whole world…and that both faiths revere “great figures who embody the divine light, who teach the divine truth.”
Pastor MacQueen’s homily then concluded with the assertion, “For Christians, Jesus preeminently embodies the divine light. While for Hindus, a number of figures embody the divine light and teach the divine truth.”
During the celebration of the Lord’s Supper, in deference to Hindu tradition a tray of flowers was consecrated in addition to loaf and cup. “To my knowledge this is an unprecedented event in L.A., California and the U.S.,” said the Rev. Gwynne Guibord, head of the ecumenical and inter-religious affairs for the diocese, which initiated the service. Meanwhile the spokesperson for the Vedanta Society of Southern California, who was among about a dozen Hindu leaders honored during the service, called the Episcopal bishop’s stance “a great and courageous step that binds the two communities.”
Swami Sarvadevananda told Connie Kang, “By declaring that there will be no more proselytizing by Christians, the bishop has opened a new door of understanding. The modern religious man must expand his understanding and love of religions and their practices, for they are all but different ways to the same end.”
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To which Jesus replies to Philip in the Upper Room, “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.” Mary’s boy does not answer Philip’s query with alternatives, “Whoever has seen me or…has seen the Father.”
Whoever has seen me or Brahman has seen the Father.
Whoever has seen me or Moloch has seen the Father.
Whoever has seen me or the Invisible Hand of the Market.
No.
The God who rescues Israel from slavery is not interchangeable with Egypt’s deities who would have kept her there. In seeing Jesus, Philip has seen none other than the Almighty God himself; which is to say— correlatively, the LORD is not to be seen otherwise than in Christ Jesus. If Jesus is the fullness of God then he is it alone. In his response to Philip Jesus remains both as thoroughly humble and as absolutely immodest as when, a moment earlier, he declared of himself, “I AM the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except by way of me.” And that exclusive way to the Father includes prayer. As Jesus attests to Philip and the eleven in his Farewell Discourse, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it.” Thus, to posit Jesus of Nazareth’s singular identity as God with the Father is not merely a provocation; it is an essential component of any intelligible prayer. That is, constitutive to the act of prayer is knowledge of the one to whom we pray.
The Decalogue commands faith.
The creed says how faith is possible.
And prayer is the act of faith.
Answered prayers, Jesus promises in the Upper Room, are necessarily those that have been rightly addressed.
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The New Testament scholar Frederick Dale Bruner shares a pew with the Los Angeles Times reporter Connie Kang. In fact, the latter attends the former’s Sunday School Class at the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. After reading Kang’s article in the Times, Bruner wrote a letter to the paper’s editors.
He writes:
“Dear Editors:
The Saturday notice of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles’ celebration with Hindus of the fact that “both faiths” [Christianity and Hinduism] revere “great figures who embody the divine light, who teach the divine truth,” does us the service of showing why much Mainline Protestant Christianity is dying.
The ancient church refused to join Jesus with the Roman pantheon of “great figures who embody divine light” and, as a result, she was mowed down in the coliseums of the Mediterranean world for what was felt to be her arrogant intolerance. But the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the church and in three-hundred years the Roman Empire was converted.
When the church has had the guts to hold to the One God of Israel and to this One God’s One Great Self-Revelation, Christ Jesus, and when she speaks and acts as graciously and as courageously as her LORD and his prophets in mission, she deeply helps not only (still) caste-bound Hinduism but everyone else she reaches.
The bishop of our diocese does not need to apologize for attempts to convert people of other religions; he needs to apologize for the loss of the faith and courage to seek such conversions. Let a thousand faiths, religious and secular, speak their deep convictions in the public square, and each with its legitimate passion to convert. Let us respectfully listen to what each has to say; and let us see who prevails. I pray for the church to prevail. And because I pray this in the name of Jesus, he will most certainly bring it to pass.
— F. Dale Bruner, Adult Sunday-School Teacher, First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood.”
Bruner adds a postscript about his note to the editors, “My letter was not published.” The L.A. Times, it turns out, has its own ways of mowing down the church.
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As if to prove Frederick Dale Bruner’s point about the Mainline Protestant Church, at the global gathering of the United Methodist Church in the spring of 2024, a mass choir sang a song— I refuse to call it a hymn— titled, “All Faiths Lead to God.” Among its verses: “From different sources, comfort comes; each seeks for the divine. Your voice speaks many languages, just one of them is mine.” “We should not ask before we reach to offer our embrace,” the song continues, “We do not ask, “How do you pray?” We reach with arms of grace.”
Fittingly, the song opens by addressing God as the “Creator of the Intertwined.”
But stubbornly— rudely— Jesus insists the name makes all the difference. Creator of the Intertwined is no more a name than is God. God is a common noun, a job description for which any Baal can apply.
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In the Book of Acts, a man crippled from birth sits on the streets of Lystra and listens intently as Paul and Barnabas preach. Seeing him, Paul exhorts the lame man in a loud voice, “Stand upright on your feet.” Luke reports that immediately the man “sprang up and began to walk.”
Just as quickly, the bystanders begin to shout in their Lycaonian language, positing Paul and Barnabas as avatars of their pagan deities. According to Luke, all of Lystra kicks into cultic gear, “The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought oxen and garlands— trays of flowers— to the gates; he and the crowds wanted to offer sacrifice.”
Paul emphatically rejects the honor they offer. And he quickly announces the purpose of their travels, “We are here to speak the gospel to you; so that, you may turn from such barren deities to the living God.” In other words, the chief purpose of the gospel is to introduce those who hear it to the true and living God over against the barren deities.
The gospel is an introduction.
And prayer is what those who have been so introduced may do.
Therefore, the promise Jesus makes about prayer in the Upper Room is not the non sequitur it may first appear.
Philip responds to Christ’s “I AM” statement by admitting that despite his time and intimacy with him, he has not truly seen Jesus. He has not seen in the human son of Mary, Mary’s own Maker. “LORD, show us the Father!” Philip pleads. Jesus replies by attesting that whoever has seen him has seen the Father. Then with his double “amen” Jesus signals the magnitude of the promise he pledges next. Because he is going to the Father through the cross, Jesus reveals, he will yet do even greater works with his risen body, the church. And he— that is, we— will do these still greater works by means of prayer. As Saint Augustine preached on the promise in this passage, “We do Christ’s work in this work of prayer.” “Whatever you ask in my name,” Jesus promises, “this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.”
As much as this promise might embarrass or discomfit us, Christ’s grammar will not permit us to mitigate his promise. The word translated into English as “and whatever” is ho ti an; it means “anything.” Jesus follows it with an emphatic declarative pronoun, touto: “this.” Literally, in the Upper Room Jesus promises, “Anything you petition in my name, this very thing I will do; so that, the Father may be glorified…If you ask this anything in my name, I will do it.”
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On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the infusion center at my oncologist’s office. An old woman sat directly next to me, a red-orange tube running from a bag to her chest. She wore a blue scarf with peacocks on it around her small, bony head. Her face looked so sunken and her skin so stretched and translucent that guessing her age felt impossible. She greeted me—exhausted, her eyes only half open—with a distinct prairie accent.
After I sat down next to her, I opened Frederick Dale Bruner’s doorstop-heavy book on the Gospel of John and I turned to his commentary on this passage from the Farewell Discourse.
No sooner had I opened the book than the woman started to cry—whimper really—from the sores her chemo-poison had burnt into her mouth and tongue and throat. Beseeching the nurse, she pleaded, “Make the pain go away.” She kept on like that, inconsolable, with no concern for what I or anyone else might think about her. In a different-size person you’d call it a tantrum. After a while, once she had calmed and her agony had subsided, she glanced down at the page open between us where verses thirteen and fourteen were set apart and made obvious by bold italics.
Then she glared at me, “Why did Jesus ever make that promise?”
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“Anything you petition in my name, this very thing I will do; so that, the Father may be glorified…If you ask this anything in my name, I will do it.”
Surely not anything?
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Keziah Goodwyn Hopkins Brevard was a fifty-seven year old widow who owned two plantations near Columbia, South Carolina. A self-avowed Christian, Brevard maintained an almost manic prayer journal. On the morning of October 19, 1860, she prayed, “Lord, negroes are such trying creatures!” And then, after lamenting to God that her slave Rosanna had stolen some of her vegetables rather than wait for her mistress to gift them to her, Brevard prayed, “Oh Lord, I wish I had been born in a Christian land & never seen or known of slaves of any color. Negroes are as deceitful and lying as any people can well be— Lord give me better feelings towards them. Forgive me Lord, for unkind thoughts and have mercy on me!”
Anything?
A week earlier in 1860, Mistress Brevard wrote in her prayer journal, “God, kindle affection for thee in the hearts of my slaves. Make my servants (those who labor for me) to know thee and love thee.” “Lord, may you give my slaves true religion,” she beseeched God two weeks later. Complaining to God that “some of my lazy negroes” had pretended to accidentally drop salt in her coffee, Brevard prayed, “I do wish, God, that you would punish deception with us at all times as you did with Ananias and Sapphira.”
Anything you ask in my name.
Anything?
A year later, on a Thursday in March 1861, another incident of subtle rebellion provoked Brevard to prayer, “My anger rises in spite of all I can do, Lord. What is the use of so much property when I can’t get one thing cooked fit to eat. I am mad, Lord, when I think how mean my negroes serve me. Oh my God help me to bear all of these crosses with more patience. And oh God, fit me to leave them and take me to heaven. Crosses after crosses is all I realize on earth.”
This anything I will do.
Really?
Mistress Brevard prayed to the LORD of the Exodus.
And asked him to be Pharaoh’s god.
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“It is not true that all roads lead to the top of the mountain,” Frederick Dale Bruner writes, “There are roads which lead over the precipice.”
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About prayer, my teacher Robert Jenson insists:
“Unabashed petitionary prayer is the one decisively appropriate creaturely act over against the true God. Faith is absurd if we cannot trust that God will in fact act for us. To pray is to lay claim to co-determination of the universe. Prayer is participation in providence or it is pitiful delusion. The faith that is too humble to trouble God is phony.”
No doubt, the scriptures will not permit any lesser assertions than these. The trouble is that the promise of Jesus far outbids Jenson’s bold claims. Our text simply will not accommodate our disenchanted Christianity. Jesus quite clearly expects his church to be miraculous and missionary. Jesus obviously wants us to be expectant pray-ers.
The claim in the text— Christ’s promise— is objectively clear. Yet it is not empirically verifiable in our everyday lives. As Saint Augustine candidly puts it in his second sermon on this promise, “When the Lord said, “Whatever you ask for in my name I shall do,” he promised a great hope to those who hope in him. But what does whatever you ask mean, when we often see those who believe in him ask and not receive?”
Prayer is not magic.
If Jesus here presents himself as no different from a genie in a lamp, only with unlimited wishes to grant, then he is quite clearly a fraud or a failure— or both. Wanting him to be a genie, we fix on the expansive word in his promise, whatever. Yet given that this promise about prayer occurs in the context of Jesus declaring that he— who is the Father’s fullness— is going to the cross, the operative words are not “whatever” but “in my name” and “for the Father’s glory.”
Again, Jesus makes this promise in the Upper Room on his way to the Father. Or as he himself says it— on his way to his enthronement upon the cross. Therefore, “in my name” means not “addressed to me” but “in my cause.” He is not talking about salutations but salvation.
Likewise, given the context, “for the Father’s glory” means nothing other than “for the service of the gospel.”
In my cause. For the Father’s glory in the Son.
That is—
For others. For sinners. Power made perfect in weakness.
Jesus is not a genie in a lamp.
He is not selling an infinity of mutually contradicting whatevers.
He is promising that whatever you ask (whatever you ask) in conformity to his cruciform cause and his strange gospel, that— he will do!
He has staked his name on it.
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You see—
It is not that the prayers of Mistress Keziah Brevard were not prayers. And it is not even that her prayers failed to address Jesus and his Father. It is that they were not prayers in his name. Nor were they in service to his gospel.
This is why it is so crucial to name God rightly.
The prayers in which the Triune God delights are those particular to himself.
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“Why did Jesus ever make that promise?”
The woman in the peacock scarf did not lift her tired, hollow glare from me.
She waited for an answer.
“Because,” I replied, “Jesus wants to continue his redemptive work through us— through our prayers. If we pray petitions conformed to his cross and in service to the gospel, he promises to act on them. Ask in the cross’s cause, and he has bound himself to do it.”
I watched the port in her chest rise and fall as she sighed. She thought I was dodging her question.
“What sort of prayer is in the cause of the cross?” she asked.
I thought about it.
Finally, I answered, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner— God answers that prayer every time.”
A silence settled between us. I turned pages in Bruner’s big book, and I got to work as I waited for the nurse. After a while she turned to me in the large, leather infusion chair.
“How long you been coming here?” she asked.
She looked surprised by my answer, “Over ten years now.”
“You ever pray for God to heal you total? Make you whole and put this clean behind you?”
I nodded, “Of course. All the time.”
“Me too,” she said, “For almost a year now.”
I waited.
I could tell she was considering whether the next question would offend me.
“If Jesus made that promise…”
And she pointed at the page of the book resting on the arm of my chair.
“If Jesus made that promise, then how come not one of my prayers for healing has been answered? He promised to do it, right? But he hasn’t done it. And the hourglass in me is nearly empty.”
I closed the book and turned in my seat to look her square in the face.
“Jesus does not always heal us,” I said, “God does miracles, absolutely. But more often, the way we suffer and the manner in which we die, they are a way— no, they are the way— we bear witness to his cross and our resurrection. Remember, the Father did not remove the cup from Jesus either.”
She stared at me, chewing on my words.
“Look,” I said, “No one wants me to be healed more than me. But God’s trying to heal a whole creation, and he can’t do it without a people who live as though they’re unafraid to die.”
“My daughter is a Buddhist,” she said, “According to her, the Buddha teaches that all of life is suffering. What do you think about that?”
“I think the Buddha didn’t need to be very perceptive to come up with a line like that.”
She looked me over, uncertain if I was joking.
“I don’t know about the Buddha. I only know he’s not the way to the Father.”
She turned away from me and looked up at the ceiling tiles.
“I would prefer it if Jesus would just do anything I asked of him.”
“Sure, you would. Me too! That’s the trouble with a true and living God. He’s real enough to disappoint us. The anything he promises is not everything. But he is already your everything.”
“How is that? How is he already my everything?”
“It’s a different promise he makes,” I said, “whenever you pray, it is Jesus praying in you as though you are his very own garden. We do not always get the answers we want, but we never pray alone. And the one who prays with us lives with death behind him. So even our prayers that seem to go unanswered are nevertheless proof that this sickness will not end in death.”
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Come to the table.
The Sursum Corda. The Sanctus. The Words of Institution. The Epiclesis— the calling down of Christ’s Spirit to transfigure loaf and cup into his body and blood.
Like “Have mercy on me, a sinner,” the table is another prayer God always answers.
