on the walk

I have been putting off this post. There has been plenty to write about, so I could pretend that I have just been busy. But that would not be the whole truth. I have been putting off this post. As we work our way through Mark we have come to chapter 11 and we already talked about the temple as a house of prayer, and I for one was stunned by the power of that text which appeared after I went back and read the texts being quoted there. If you missed it, it is probably better than this post will be so you should check it out.

Let’s start by looking at the text.

Mark 11:22-25 NIV

Have faith in God,” Jesus answered. “I tell you the truth, if anyone says to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart but believes that what he says will happen, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And when you stand praying, if you hold anything against anyone, forgive him, so that your Father in heaven may forgive you your sins.”

Let’s see it in a different translation. Here is the ESV.

And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

I included a second translation because I was hoping that maybe it said something different in a different translation. It does not.

I will warn you that I do not plan to do justice to this text. Fortunately, this teaching shows up a in a few forms throughout the gospels, and I promise to do it justice eventually. In this post, I just want to scope out the problem presented by this text because I do think that this text presents a problem and we need to deal with this problem. When the church fails to deal with problem we come across as fools and we set up people for false hope and failed dreams. I am convinced that many who are now far from God have been driven away in part by the churches inability to deal faithfully with the problem presented by this text.

So what is the problem. I am not exactly sure how to phrase it, but the problem is something like this: Prayer does not seem to work that way. If we think that these words should be read literally, then we have a big problem because this doesn’t happen. I am not saying that prayer has no power, but there are too many examples of prayers where clear requests we not granted. Jesus prays not to die. Paul prays for the thorn to be removed. Must I argue that these prayers were not prayed in faith?

In general I find that a prayer theology that is built upon a literal reading of this text and its companions quickly becomes a caricature of Christianity and this caricature will fail us and people will be driven away. I will give one example. There is a web-site out there called something like “Why doesn’t God heal amputees?” He chides Christians, that if we believe prayer can do anything, why don’ we pray for amputees to be healed like we do for cancer victims.

This post is hard for me to publish. I know that it raises more questions than answers. I know that these questions cut to the heart of what we assume we know about prayer. But if we don’t deal with these questions, then we have a problem and our witness to the world is confused and compromised. So for now we pray for wisdom. We will continue to look at the teaching and model of Jesus on prayer. I commit to you that I will not forever avoid these questions, but for now I hope it is enough to ask them.

on the walk

-Ethan

Trackback URI | Comments RSS