The Jesus Prayer Practice – Week 1 – 2/14/12

 

For the month of February and our three Tuesdays within it, we will explore a very particular Christian prayer practice – The Jesus Prayer. Some trace the origin of this particular prayer to Luke 18:35-43 and Mark 10:46-52.

So the practice is quite simple in that it involves merely repeating this exact phrase – “Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me” – over and over and over. There is nothing complicate about it. We use this exact phrasing as our sole focus and purpose. It anchors us and brings us back to the very NAME of Jesus.

Let’s look at the words that make up this powerful and historic prayer. First, the two preliminary phrases are names for God – Jesus Christ…Son of God. We are saying and repeating this name.

The next phrase, “Have mercy on me” or “Have mercy on us” is both a humble statement of who we are in the presence of that God we named in the first two phrases – in need of mercy – AND an affirmation of faith in what God can do, namely have mercy on us, forgive us, restore us, lift us up, or in Bartimaeus’s case, give us sight. Help us to see again. For we too are blind.

So in saying this simple, brief prayer, we are lifting up God and the name of God, we are showing faith in that God as powerful enough to help, to bestow mercy, and we are confessing our own inadequacy – we are in NEED of mercy. In some ways this is the entire essence of the Christian gospel summarized in one prayer – who God is, who we are, and the need we have for God.

Now, just like all our other practices, we can expect to be assaulted with distractions as we undertake this discipline. Our minds will wander. We’ll think about a bunch of other stuff, our relationships, our to-do lists, etc. But so what? That is our nature. The good news in this practice is that the response to distraction is very simple; we just say the prayer again and again. It is our anchor. It is our salvation, the thing we come back to. No frills. No fuss. No great emptying of the mind. Just repeat the prayer again and again.

If you want or need to, you can try just letting particular parts, words of the prayer rise to the top of your conscious – Jesus Christ, or Son of God, or Have mercy upon me. But these words are it. They are the goal and they are the means. They are literally all there is to this practice.

We’ll try it for two 15 minute portions with a little break in the middle.