The Uncomfortable Prayer

John 12:20-29

August 23, 2020 • Mount Pleasant UMC

Several years ago, we spent a week in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, a beautiful part of the country, and one day we ventured to Whitefish Point, famous because of the song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” If you don’t know that song, go find it and stream it after worship. You can thank me later (when it’s stuck in your head). Anyway, Whitefish Point is on Lake Superior, and we couldn’t resist sticking our feet into this Great Lake. Lake Superior is always cold because it’s so far north, and at Whitefish Point, it was also very rocky. One of the kids we were with stepped into the lake and soon stepped on a sharp rock. His face winced and he declared that Lake Superior is “the most uncomfortable of the Great Lakes.”

The most uncomfortable! That’s quite an indictment because there are few things we Americans love more than comfort. It has been said that our “minds are universally preoccupied with meeting the body’s every need and attending to life’s little comforts.” Those words were actually written by a Frenchman who traveled in America and observed our way of life—in 1831. Almost two hundred years ago—in the days before central heating and air conditioning, toilet paper and widespread indoor plumbing, hot and cold running water. It was before sweatpants, sneakers, and single-serve brownies you can bake in a mug in the microwave. And microwaves! And computers! And home theater systems! If we were obsessed with comfort 189 years ago, what does that say about us now? Of course, there is no one single definition for “comfort”—after all, what’s comfortable for me may not be for you—but we do know that “comfort” is something we want (cf. https://bit.ly/3g9iWrg). And that may be at least part of why the Gospel and with Jesus’ prayer life present so much of a challenge to us.

This morning we’re continuing our look at the nine prayers of Jesus—“The Lord’s Prayers,” as we’re calling this series. You remember that the first one, the one we call “The Lord’s Prayer,” is actually the disciples’ prayer. It’s the prayer Jesus gave to his first disciples and to us, to teach us how to pray. We’re focusing on the other eight—not that that one isn’t important, but these are the times in the Gospels when Jesus is intentionally praying out loud and we get to listen in. None of them are very long prayers, interestingly. Maybe that should say something to us who believe the longer we pray the more spiritual we are or the better chance we have of getting our prayers answered the way we want. Spoken out loud, none of Jesus’ prayers would have lasted more than a few seconds (except for the night in Gethsemane). Maybe Jesus really was serious when he said, “When you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them” (Matthew 6:7-8). So, Jesus’ own prayers are mostly short and to the point; the prayer we heard today certainly is! In the original Greek, it’s just five words; our English translations put it in four: “Father, glorify your name!” (12:28).

So Jesus is in Jerusalem, at “the festival,” John says. What festival? In John’s Gospel, this story takes place right after what we call the “triumphal entry,” the moment when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey—what we remember on Palm Sunday. This is the beginning of Jesus’ last week on earth, so it’s Passover time, the biggest festival in the Jewish year. This is the time when people from all over the world come to Jerusalem, when the city’s population gets something like three times bigger than normal. It’s the time when the Roman officials are on high alert, because if anything’s going to happen that threatens their rule, it’ll be during Passover. Passover celebrates the time when the Hebrews were set free from slavery in Egypt, so freedom is on everyone’s mind during this time. Thoughts of rebellion are in the air. And into that mix come Jesus and his disciples. Jesus rides a donkey into town, and in the other Gospels, this is where he clears out the Temple, where he runs out the merchants and the buyers and sellers who were set up in the Temple court. But in John’s Gospel, we have this interesting exchange where some Greeks—which is just another way of saying “Gentiles,” because everyone in the known world spoke Greek—some Greeks come and ask to see Jesus. And once that request makes its way through the disciples’ presumed “chain of command,” something changes in Jesus.

Several times in John’s Gospel, we have been told that something couldn’t happen because Jesus’ “hour” had not yet come. At the wedding in Cana, when Mary asks Jesus to help out the embarrassed bridal family who has run out of wine, Jesus says, “Why do you involve me? My hour has not yet come” (2:4). Of course, he goes ahead and makes wine for them anyway, but the point is still made about his time, his hour. On another occasion, when he’s stirring up trouble by claiming to have come from God, John says they didn’t arrest Jesus because “his hour had not yet come” (7:30). Then he rides into Jerusalem, and the Pharisees—some of his religious oppoents—make this comment: “The whole world has gone after him” (12:19). And when the Greeks—representing those in the world, those outside of the Jewish faith—come asking about him, that’s the moment when Jesus says, “The hour has come.” The hour has come. Everything has changed. God’s timetable is ready to move forward.

And that’s when the struggle begins, the struggle that will culminate in Gethsemane, another time of prayer at the end of the week which we’ll look at next week. We think Jesus’ whole struggle about going to the cross took place during that time in the Garden on Thursday night, but it really began here, at the beginning of the week. He says pretty clearly, “My soul is troubled,” and he admits there are two distinct prayers pulling at his soul. The first one is the easy prayer, the comfortable prayer: “Father, save me from this hour.” The second one, the one he eventually prays, is the uncomfortable, the dangerous prayer: “Father, glorify your name” (12:27-28; cf. Wright, John for Everyone—Part Two, pg. 30; Card, John: The Gospel of Wisdom, pg. 146).

Let’s look at both of these prayers so that we can understand the difference between them, and let’s start with the comfortable prayer. It’s the prayer I would want to pray, probably most of us would want to pray, if we were in Jesus’ shoes. Think about it: the arrival of the Greeks during this Passover festival somehow lets Jesus know that the time is now. It’s now the moment when, he knows, he will be arrested, beaten, and crucified. He has very little time left with these, his friends, and in this world that he loves. He’s about to suffer in excruciating ways. I mean, imagine if today you found out you would be killed in a violent, horrific way at the end of this week. Or think about those who, maybe this very week, have found out that they have only a short time to live—maybe months or weeks or days. That’s what’s going through Jesus’ mind. The end is coming, maybe quicker than he thought it would. The hour has come, he says. Of course he and we would want to pray the comfortable prayer: “Father, save me from this hour.”

Let me bring this a little closer to home. We’re all going through difficult times right now. When the school bus went by this past Tuesday, I did a double take and realized I had forgotten about school busses. It had been so long since I had seen one! We’ve been in some degree of lockdown for the last six months, and there’s this invisible killer, a virus, floating around that no one can seem to get a handle on. Even in places in the world where they think they have it conquered, it comes back. Now, let me say this clearly: I do not believe God brought the virus. God did not cause this. I do believe, as I said a couple of weeks ago, that God can and will bring good out of it, but I do not believe God caused it. That’s not the God I know; that’s not the God that is revealed in Scripture. A God who brings pain and suffering and death would be a petty, vengeful God, and that’s not the God we see in Jesus. And so, as I also said a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been praying, “Lord, heal our land.” That’s a good and appropriate prayer. But then I find that I take that prayer and twist it to my own comfort when I pray (as I have many times), “Take this virus away.” Here’s the difference: the first prayer asks God to heal the land in whatever way he sees fit; the other prayer tries to tell God to do it my way. And that’s the thing I don’t like, if I’m being honest: God, it seems, is healing us by leading us through the time of the virus, the difficult time, the struggle, rather than around it. But I should have expected that. Throughout the Scriptures, God leads people through the challenges rather than around them. The people of Israel had to go through the wilderness rather than escaping it. It took them forty years to get to the Promised Land. Jonah had to go through the belly of the big fish rather than take an easy walk to Nineveh. Jesus had to go to the cross rather than some easier route to bring salvation to humankind. The message of the Bible is that God will not usually deliver us from the difficulty but he will get us through it. Again, being honest, I wish it were the other way around. I want to pray Jesus’ first prayer: “Father, save me from this hour.” Get me out of this! Restore my comfort!

Several years ago, our family went through a prolonged time of discomfort. In fact, there were threats to our health and our welfare and our livelihood that were out of our control. And I did not like it. Not one bit. None of us did. I complained loudly to God. I wanted God to take it away, and I told him so on a daily basis. This mountain, this challenge, this wilderness—God, I know you can do anything. Save us from this hour. But God did not—at least not on our time. There was something he needed to teach me—us—that we could only learn by going through it. It was the same with the Apostle Paul. He tells us in 2 Corinthians that he experienced what he called a “thorn in the flesh.” We don’t know what it was, but the best scholarly guess today is that it might have been a debilitating eye condition. There’s a better than good chance that Paul was nearly blind. And he says he begged God repeatedly to take it away, to heal him, to make him better. “Father, save me from this hour!” Restore my comfort. Do you remember what God eventually said to him? God said no. God said he would have to live with it because it would teach him to depend on God’s grace. That’s where these famous words come from: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:8). Those words were not spoke in days of comfort; those are words for days of pain, days of uncertainty, days when we’re not sure we can get through this. Days of “Father, save me from this hour!”

Jesus wants to pray that prayer. Jesus wants to pray the comforting prayer. But he does not. The prayer he actually prays is in verse 28, and it’s this: “Father, glorify thy name.” This is the uncomfortable prayer. For one thing, Jesus makes it clear that he can’t pray both of these prayers. He can’t be rescued from what is to come AND bring glory to the Father. So that makes me ask this question: what does it mean to bring glory to the name of the Father? And why the “name”? What’s so significant about the name? A name, for us of course, is the unique identifier that tells us who you are. In most of our cases, it’s a gift given to you by your parents that sets you apart from everyone else. To know someone’s name is to know something about them that others don’t know. You, like me, likely see many people during the course of the week, but for the vast majority of them, you don’t know their name. They’re just a face in the crowd. But there are some whose name you know—and when you know their name, you have access to them. It’s sort of like when my phone rings—maybe you do this, too. I look to see who is calling me, and sometimes it is just a number, maybe with a location where the call is supposedly coming from. For other calls, my service provider marks them as “spam risk” and that identifier might show up. In both of those cases, do you know what I do? I don’t answer because I don’t know who is on the other end. I don’t know their name. Sometimes, yes, I miss a call I should have taken, but those folks leave a voicemail and I call them back. But when I look and I see a name that is in my address book, I’ll gladly answer—because I know that person. I know their name. They have access to me and I have access to them. The name represents who they are (cf. Whitacre, John [IVPNTC], pg. 313).

So what does it mean to “glorify” a name? Picture sitting in a theater, looking at a dark stage, and just as your eyes get accustomed to the dark, a bright spotlight shines on the main soloist or the main performer. What the light operators have just done is “glorify” the person in the spotlight. They’ve accentuated that person so that everything else fades into the background. That’s what it means to “glorify” something—you focus on it, you shine a light on it so that everything else fades away. So when we come here and we sing about “glorifying” Jesus, we are saying we want our own selves to fade away, to blend into the background, so that others see Jesus and him alone. That’s part of why this prayer is so difficult, so uncomfortable, because it’s in our nature to want to be noticed. Even those who say they don’t want to be noticed really want to be noticed for not wanting to be noticed. We want the spotlight and in different ways we all look for that fifteen minutes of fame that Andy Warhol promised we would all have. It’s hard to give the spotlight over to someone else; it’s even harder to give the spotlight over to someone whom we can’t see.

But this prayer gets even harder when we think about what it means to give glory to the Father’s name. Remember, the name tells us something about the person, and so when we give the spotlight over to the Father, what we really want is not for people to physically “see” him. We want them to get to know him, what he’s like, what his character is. The Scriptures say, quite simply, that “God is love” (1 John 4:8). That does not mean, “God is mushy, warm feelings, hearts and flowers.” It doesn’t mean, “God is all about just letting us do whatever we want to do.” No, the word for love there is that famous word agape—self-sacrificing love. In fact, in his later life, John (who has spent a lifetime reflecting on the meaning of Jesus’ life) would write these words: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10). In other words, it goes something like this: God is love, and love is sacrifice. Jesus knows glorifying the Father means laying down his life in obedience. He knows glorifying the Father means taking up the cross. Are you uncomfortable yet?

Because it means the same thing for us. The church today—and I don’t mean just our church, but the “big C” church—does pretty well with the starting point of a life with Jesus. We do pretty well with John 3:16. Many of you can say that with me (usually in the King James): “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (KJV). The problem is we get to that point and we stop. Oh, God loves me, and that's wonderful. We summarize the Gospel like this: “All is bad. I’m a sinner. Jesus is the Savior. Believe in him. All is good.” That’s true—as far as it goes. It is wonderful that God loves us. But it’s not our calling simply to be loved by God. That’s only a place to start; it shouldn’t be where we stop. John also wrote these words—again, after many years of reflecting on what it means to follow Jesus: “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters” (1 John 3:16). Want to know a cool side note? That’s 1 John 3:16. If John 3:16 is the beginning of the Gospel, 1 John 3:16 is “the second half of the Gospel” (cf. J. D. Walt). We’re not called just to be loved and be content. We’re called to follow Jesus and give our lives for the sake of others. That’s what it means to glorify the Father’s name. How else do you think the world will be able to see the love of God if they don’t see it in us and in the way we live toward them (cf. https://www.seedbed.com/problem-john-316/)? Are you uncomfortable yet? Well, C. S. Lewis put it this way: “If you want a religion to make you feel comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity” (God in the Dock).

Here are the two choices for Jesus’ prayer in response to his hour arriving. “Father, save me from this hour.” Let life go on just as it had. I’m used to it. I know what to expect. Let me be comfortable. Or. “Father, glorify your name.” Let me give my life so that others can see you in me. Let my life shine a spotlight on you. Or, as the psalmist once put it: “Not to us, Lord, not to us but to your name be the glory, because of your love and faithfulness” (Psalm 115:1). Can you pray this uncomfortable prayer with your life?

So I find it fascinating what happens in response to Jesus’ prayer. There is a response from heaven, a voice. John says the voice (which undoubtedly sounded like James Earl Jones) said this: “I have glorified it, and will glorify it again” (12:28). But what I love are the reactions of the people in the crowd standing around. John says some only heard thunder. Others thought it was an angel who had spoken. And then, obviously, there were those who heard the words and knew who had spoken (otherwise John wouldn’t be able to report it). What this tells me is that there are at least three levels of spiritual response to experiencing the glory of the Father. When people see you giving of yourself, when people see you living a life of love that leads to sacrifice, a life like Jesus’ life, they will respond in one of at least three ways. Some will ignore it, write it off as something natural or something that anyone could do. This is the “you don’t need God to be good” crowd. A second group will respond in some vaguely spiritual way, but they won’t necessarily understand. Think about any time there is a horrific event and the victims offer forgiveness to the one who harmed them. There are always people who respond with something like, “Well, that’s nice, but I don’t understand how they can forgive.” These folks who “heard an angel” might even believe in God, but they aren’t fully tuned in to what he wants to do in the world. They like the comfortable prayer much better.

And then there is the third response: the ones who heard the voice, the ones who get that God calls us to sacrifice. They’re the ones who know that in a crisis, Christians pray the uncomfortable prayer, the risky prayer. The fact that we are facing the first true pandemic in about a hundred years is catastrophic, but in the ancient world, in the world of Jesus and the centuries following him, plagues and disasters came around about every fifteen years. In most Roman cities, ordinary people lived in one-room apartments, used open fires for cooking and emptied chamber pots into the streets. So the average Roman town had sewage on the streets, smoke in the air, and plagues just around the corner. When a plague arrived, the wealthy would run away to their country estates but the poor were left behind. They had nowhere to go, so usually 30 to 40 percent of a city would die in an average plague. But there was this group of Jesus-followers who called themselves Christians. They believed all life was sacred, not just the wealthy. And because of that, Christians would stay in town and patrol the city squares and fountains, where people left their sick and dying relatives. Like Mother Teresa centuries later, they would gather these people up and, at the risk of their own lives, take care of them as Jesus had told them to do. In some places, records indicate, when the Christians prayed the uncomfortable prayer, when they loved like Jesus loved and glorified the Father’s name, survival rates increased by as much as two-thirds. Many people were won to the faith because of the willingness of the Christians to love like Jesus loved. By doing do, they helped shine the spotlight on God the Father (cf. Colson, The Faith, pgs. 15-17).

So here’s my question: what if God wants to see that happen again? What if this unprecedented time we’re in is not to be spent in fear but in love? What if God wants to use his people in this time to shine the light on his name, to help people see him in new ways? What if Jesus wants to shine his light through you and me? What if God is calling us to shun the comfortable life for an uncomfortable one? What is one thing you can do during this time to make a difference in a life for God’s sake? It all begins with a prayer: “Father, glorify your name!” If you’re feeling brave this morning, let’s…pray.