Jesus as a teacher of prayer

Awakening 1 by John Main OSB – Meditatio Talks Series 2014 C

Jesus was, in his own day, everything that we would understand and describe today in popular language as a guru, a teacher. He had this hidden life for thirty years before it culminated in his active ministry. The Gospel account of his life shows us that he had rabbinical learning after a long period of preparation; then the trial in the desert for forty days; and then during his ministry, the periods of solitude when he withdrew from the crowds to be alone with his heavenly Father. You know he was addressed as ‘Rabbi’, which is the Hebrew word for guru, teacher. Perhaps the most famous line in the whole of Scripture identifying Jesus as a teacher is in Luke: ‘Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.’ (Lk 11:1)

It is important for us to understand that Jesus did not teach new, esoteric techniques of prayer. He didn’t as it were suggest any magic formulas. The Lord’s Prayer itself is not some sort of magic spell. Because he was a teacher, because he was a prophet, he came to recall man to prayer. He took prayer as the ground of their being, not in the sense of restoring ancient rites or ancient customs from which people had fallen away, but he was recalling people to the basic, necessary fundamental attitude we must have to God, to God as the most significant and important relationship in our life – in human life. For Jesus, this attitude was not a matter of words or forms, but of the experience of our complete and utter dependence upon God. And the attitude that he denounced with the strongest possible excoriation was wordiness, formalism, and pedantry, which ousted the basic experience of our dependence upon God.

What did Jesus say explicitly about prayer? He taught essentially that prayer is an inner and intimate dimension of our relationship with the Father. Just as we are told that we must not make a show of our religion for men, so he tells us in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 6:

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites; they love to say their prayers standing up in the synagogue and at the streetcorners, for everyone to see them. I tell you this, they have their reward already. But when you pray, go into a room by yourself, shut the door, and pray to your Father who is there in the secret place; and your Father who sees what is secret will reward you. Mt 6:5-6

In telling us to pray by ourselves, Jesus is warning against the dangers of ceremonial prayer, of liturgy, which can so easily become mere formalism, mere vanity. What he is saying, if I understand it correctly, is that prayer is inevitably the personal responsibility of each individual. We have to take that responsibility to go to our own private room, to the innermost chamber of our heart. And only in accepting that responsibility, in the direct encounter with one’s own self, in the solitude of oneself, will we meet the Father in the secret place. What Jesus is saying is that this meeting of the Father in the innermost chamber of our heart is something that we have to share with others. And liturgical prayer, communal prayer is a group of realised spirits come together to share their joy in their possession of the Lord in their hearts.