“Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me; That I may be delivered from them that do not believe in Judaea; and that my service which I have for Jerusalem may be accepted of the saints; That I may come unto you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.”
Well, this is a bit embarrassing isn’t it? I mean if St. Paul and the Roman Christians cannot get a fairly simple and I must say, reasonable, petition approved and expedited through the Throne of Grace it appears that someone is coming up short. Here is the situation: St. Paul is closing out this long and profound epistle to the Romans probably while staying as a house guest to one of Corinth’s city officials who was also a parishioner of the Church he founded there — and with this remarkable epistle Paul made the simple point that Israel is bigger and wider than Israel or anyone else ever thought. Jacob was the son of Isaac; Isaac being the designated Seed of the Promise that God made to Abraham, Isaac’s father, and Jacob’s grandfather. It was with Jacob’s life that the promise blossoms openly and visibly after Jacob had struggled all night with a mysterious stranger who had intruded into his camp site. It turned out that the mysterious stranger was in fact the God who is God who had chosen his grandfather Abraham and his family to make his friends and his chief weapon against sin and death:
“And God said unto him, Thy name is Jacob: thy name shall not be called any more Jacob, but Israel shall be thy name: and he called his name Israel.”
Genesis 35:10
God changed his name from Jacob, which mean supplanter, to Israel which means “one who struggled with God.” He had twelve sons, designated “the sons of Israel.” This family ended up in Egypt where they became slaves and then God through his spokesman, Moses, rescued them from Pharaoh and led them back to the land he has promised to Abraham. God chose this family, Abraham’s family, and he opened up to them so completely that he was known as the “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is the God who is God, the Creator. To have him as your God you have to be a child of Abraham, an Israelite. Here’s what St. Paul says in Romans: one becomes a child of Abraham, an Israelite, so that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is your God through your relation to Jesus:
“That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”
Romans 10:9
Jesus is Israel, the Seed of the Promise. Jesus’ twelve apostles ought to remind us of twelve sons of Israel. The grand promise that was made to Abraham is perfectly summed up and fulfilled in Jesus the Messiah:
“I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ: for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth; to the Jew first, and also to the Greek.”
Romans 1:16
Jesus is Israel. Israel is God’s chosen family. To be in Jesus, through Holy Baptism, is to be an Israelite. And Paul is Jesus’ apostle to the Gentiles:
“That I should be the minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles, ministering the gospel of God, that the offering up of the Gentiles might be acceptable, being sanctified by the Holy Ghost.” Romans 15:16
Now given all that — given God’s obvious, conspicuous, fatherly care of his chosen family over hundreds, indeed thousands of years and finally bringing it all to perfection in his son, his only son Jesus — and given Paul’s special destiny and election as the Apostle to the Gentiles, one would think that Paul had made a good prayer and he had sought prayer support for that good request:
“Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me; That I may be delivered from them that do not believe in Judaea; and that my service which I have for Jerusalem may be accepted of the saints; That I may come unto you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.”
And yet we know from the Acts of the Apostles that Paul traveled to Jerusalem with the gift of financial support for the believers of the Mother Church that the Churches in Macedonia and Achaia had collected for that very purpose. Paul says that he has a plan to deliver an offering to the believers in Jerusalem and then head for Spain and from Spain he intended to travel to Rome. Such was the substance of his prayer requests. Paul knew the dangers in Jerusalem, in no small manner because prior to his conversion he was a fierce enemy who has consented to the death of Christians for being Christian and as we all know he was on his way to bring that terror to the Christians of Antioch when he was confronted by Jesus the Messiah himself. And since that day many years past from the writing of this epistle the alienation and hostility of the pharisaical caste against the Church and against Paul in particular was explosive and determined. As soon as Paul showed up at the Temple in Jerusalem he was recognized and a group of Jews seized him and they were about to kill him when the Roman guard came to his rescue. The very thing he did not want to happen had happened. The Temple leaders were stirring up the Jews who were by this time shouting for Paul’s death as they followed the guards who were taking him to their own barracks as a sort of safe house for Paul’s protection. Then, against all good sense, the chief of the Roman guard allowed Paul to speak to the crowd that was following them and he essentially went through his conversion experience to Jesus the Messiah and they pretty much listened quietly until he said that God was saving the gentiles and as you can easily guess that was like throwing dry hay on a fire. This is the moment when the police or the militia bring out the dogs and tear gas in our day and time, but back in that day they either just started killing people or they found a way to give in to them. The chief guard decided to give in: he meant to publicly beat Paul in order to give the people what they wanted, but he quickly stopped when he found out that Paul was a Roman citizen. To flog a Roman citizen back then would have been dealt with quickly and ruthlessly. After they found out that Paul was a Roman citizen he was taken from one council to another for examination; from one jurisdictional authority to another in an attempt to keep him alive long enough to have the case against him heard according to Roman law. Paul spent two years in prison in Caesarea and when he appealed his case to Caesar he was sent to Rome. On the way his ship went down and he ended up on the island of Malta and it is hard to say how much time he spent there. He did not go to Spain as he had planned, but he did end up in Rome where he spent two years under house arrest and then he was probably executed by beheading which was the preferred means of execution for Roman citizens.
Well, it doesn’t look to me as though St. Paul got his prayer answered — certainly not the way he had in mind and expressed to the Romans. What is the difference between being beaten or stoned to death by unbelieving Jews as opposed to being beheaded by unbelieving pagans? Not much in my book. And he certainly did not take a detour through Spain before going to Rome. And, yes, I am sure that there are plenty of cleaver ways to interpret the events at the end of Paul’s life so that we might affirm that his prayers were fully answered as he wanted or the way we think he must have wanted them to be answered. But that is where our desperation misreads the Bible. St. Paul’s horizon is very different from our horizon today. Our’s is a sick horizon. Even what we consider sickness and neurosis to be is different for St. Paul. In fact there is not category for neurosis in St. Paul horizon. Our horizons are often flat and colorless and ruled by self-will. My horizon may be my horizon, but that does not make me the center of the universe. Self-will declares “I want what I want when I want it, and I want it now.” When it comes to grasping what St. Paul meant by prayer and what he meant by this prayer and his prayer request in particular we will not succeed if we attempt to understand the meaning of this text through the principle of interpretation I am calling the “Amazon Prime” hermeneutic. From the Amazon Prime point-of-view getting what I want is what prayer is all about; and that raises serious existential questions for us. If I can get what I want overnight from Amazon why on earth does God make me wait? And why is it that when I tell Amazon what I want I get what I want and I even get to grade Amazon on how well they understood what I want and how quickly Amazon got what I want into my hands. Now that’s service! And there is the problem with the “Amazon Prime” hermeneutic. Prayer is not a sort of mystical equivalent to placing an order with Amazon.
It is true that we have not because we ask not, but the greatest, surest, most certain application of prayer is the prayer we pray as we gather as the Church to celebrate the sacraments. There is no doubt that God accomplishes the requests we put before him as we celebrate the sacrament of baptism. Nor is there any doubt that God does what we ask in the Holy Communion and of all the other sacraments we can be sure that when we knock he answers. Of that you can be certain, and there are few things that you can be certain of in this day and time. Furthermore it is true that God hears our prayers when we bring our many petitions, whatever they be, before the Throne of Grace. God does nothing in this world but through the prayers of his people not because he is incapable of anything else, but because he has determined to make our prayers a means of grace for ourselves and the whole wide world. But God is not the service provider of our dreams. He is the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; he is the God who is God, the God who loves us and gave his son, his only son Jesus to be our life-giving savior.
If it is true as I pointed out previously that Christian behavior as St. Paul and Jesus spoke of it has more to do with our declaration of God’s meaning by our enfleshing of his meaning through our behavior — if it has to do with our becoming “Christ-bearers” than it does with mere morality, incarnating and bringing to life the meaning of creation that continues to evade the wise of this age — if that is true then we may also see prayer as a christological, another self-giving behavior which is also a gift from God and not merely another pragmatic, utilitarian means-to-an-end. There are layers upon layers of meaning in the universe waiting for us to discern and to discover and Holy Mother Church and her children will incarnate those layers of meaning — you will bring them to life, you will offer up yourselves in imitation of Christ, body and soul, sound and sense, word and behavior to the one we imitate, Christ our Lord. And I submit to you that our acts of self-giving love and all our prayers leave an indelible mark, the stain of Christ’s life-giving blood, upon the world of men and things. Bearing the infirmities of the weak, as well as praying and requesting the prayers of other Christians are two of the deep meanings of creation that we are equipped to bring to life.
“Now I beseech you, brethren, for the Lord Jesus Christ’s sake, and for the love of the Spirit, that ye strive together with me in your prayers to God for me; That I may be delivered from them that do not believe in Judaea; and that my service which I have for Jerusalem may be accepted of the saints; That I may come unto you with joy by the will of God, and may with you be refreshed. Now the God of peace be with you all. Amen.”