9. The Secret: Ignored

Last night we looked at Peter and his denial. Not at the three times he denied even knowing Jesus, but at how Peter was in denial about himself. He vehemently claimed he would never deny Jesus even if it meant dying with Jesus. But Peter didn’t know himself. None of us does, really, or at least we find it really hard to acknowledge the truth about ourselves. Until we face the truth, it is hard to go Jesus’ way. Our Lord’s way, the secret hiding in plain sight, is the way of the cross.

Denying who we are hinders our going Jesus’ way. Tonight we continue by reflecting on how we sometimes don’t deny Jesus’ way. We just ignore it. Let’s read it in Mark 14.

They went to a place called Gethsemane; and he said to his disciples, “Sit here while I pray.” He took with him Peter and James and John, and began to be distressed and agitated. And said to them, “I am deeply grieved, even to death; remain here, and keep awake.” And going a little farther, he threw himself on the ground and prayed that, if it were possible, the hour might pass from him. He said, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.” He came and found them sleeping; and he said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep? Could you not keep awake one hour? Keep awake and pray that you may not come into the time of trial; the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.” And again he went away and prayed, saying the same words. And once more he came and found them sleeping, for their eyes were very heavy; and they did not know what to say to him. He came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.”

Tonight’s text paints the disciples in very unflattering colors. Perhaps we’re getting used to that by now. Mark often portrays the first disciples as bad examples. Time and time again they don’t get it. They don’t see Jesus with the eyes of faith.

Tonight’s text reveals the disciples’ lack of faith so clearly, many scholars have wondered how this paragraph came to be accepted in the traditions of the early church. We are not absolutely certain who Mark was or how the gospel that bears his name came to be written. I’ll say a bit more about that tomorrow night. There is some consensus, however, that this gospel was based to a significant degree on the memories and reflections of Peter. But would Peter have told to Mark or whoever wrote things down such uncomplimentary things about himself and the other disciples? Would Peter have been so candid about the horror and distress Jesus apparently experienced? There is much debate about such questions.[1]

Last night we looked at how Peter was often in denial about himself. We all tend to be in denial. Maybe, as Peter looked back over the years, he came to a better sense of who he was and was no longer embarrassed to tell Mark how often he had blown it. Tradition tells us that Peter was martyred in Rome in the year 64, during the persecutions of Nero.[2] That was just a few years before Mark’s Gospel was written. Perhaps as Peter aged he also matured and was willing in his later years to both face and describe how blind he was when first following Jesus.

The blindness of Peter and the others in tonight’s text was not so much denial but ignorance. Here Jesus was in his extreme hour and his closest friends ignored it. They were oblivious to what was going on. We will never fully understand the mystery of Jesus in his relation to God. But in the garden of Gethsemane, earth and heaven were momentously entwined and Jesus was in agony. Peter and the rest ignored it. They fell asleep. Three times.

What does this say to us tonight? It warns us to not ignore our intimate relationship with God.

In very truth, we are not who we are supposed to be, who we are called to be by God, until we know God intimately. When Jesus prayed in the garden, he prayed, “Abba, Father.” I think we have heard that term “Abba” interpreted sufficiently to know that this is how a child addresses his or her father. “Poppa” or “daddy” are good translations. It is a term of endearment and intimacy and this is how Jesus prayed to God and how we are taught to pray to God.[3]

But notice something else in the text. When Jesus came back the first time and found Peter and the disciples snoring away, he said, “Simon, are you asleep?” He called him “Simon” not “Peter.” Remember that Jesus had given Simon the name Peter[4] — Petros which means Rock. But Peter was no Rock of towering faith that night, no Rock at all, unless we think of a rock as just stone cold asleep. Peter was just Simon in the garden. He wasn’t who Jesus had called and named him to be because he was ignoring what was going on.[5] He was just too tired to know God intimately.

I think many of us find it hard to pay attention to our own relationship with God. Over many years I have sporadically kept a journal of sorts, a diary of what’s going on in my mind and heart and soul. I doubt that anyone will ever read this. Oh, maybe after I am long gone and my kids are cleaning out my hard drive or my boxes of files, they will pause for awhile and read a few pages of what I wrote. If they do, they will notice how often I have struggled to be more disciplined in prayer and “the practice of the presence of God,” as Brother Lawrence puts it.

I find this so frustrating. For 33 years I have been doing Christian ministry and for several yeas before that, preparing for it. The work has always been demanding. But everyone would agree that a part of a minister’s work should and could be time to stay intimately related to God. No one would ever criticize a pastor for spending more time in prayer. And yet it has been all too easy to be distracted by the work or fatigued by it so much that I ignore an intimate relationship with my heavenly Abba.

Of course, this isn’t just a problem for clergy. If you have young children at home, especially mothers, you know how difficult it is to find a moment just to catch your breath let alone to breathe in the Holy Spirit. Some of you have work and travel responsibilities that leave little time or energy for anything else. And even retired persons are some of the busiest people I know. Plus we live in a 24/7/365 culture, the demands and distractions of which never cease nor decrease.

Our Lord said to Simon Peter, “Could you not keep awake one hour?” So much comes at us that we find it hard to keep focused on the Lord for five minutes at a time. We are created to know God intimately. But we are so distracted that we often ignore him.

Fortunately, Jesus is gentle with us even as he was with Peter and the rest. We might think that Jesus, in his anguish, would have scolded Peter harshly. And while the Lord did express disappointment, in the same breath he acknowledged the difficulty. Even when we want to do the right thing — the spirit is willing — we find it difficult — the flesh is weak.

I think one reason the flesh is weak is we’re just not sure that prayer or intimate fellowship with God do much good. Because we’re not sure, we don’t seek intimacy with God with the boldness and confidence we should.

You have probably seen recently newspaper and television reports about a scientific study that tried to determine if there were any measurable effects from intercessory prayer. The study was published a couple of weeks ago in the American Heart Journal.[6] The study examined patients who were about to receive cardiac bypass surgery. Patients at six hospitals around the country were randomly assigned to one of three groups. Intercessory prayer began the day before surgery and continued for two weeks. One group received intercessory prayer after being told that they may or may not receive it. Another group did not receive intercessory prayer also after being told that they may or may not receive it. And the third group received intercessory prayer after being told they definitely would receive it.

Then doctors and nurses, who didn’t know which group was which, evaluated each patient and whether or not there were complications after surgery. The study concluded that intercessory prayer had no effect on the severity or number of complications after surgery. The study also showed that those who knew for certain that they were prayed for had more complications than those who didn’t know whether they were prayed for or not.

Now people react differently to reports like this. Pat Robertson-types sneer and say, “God laughs at science and studies prove nothing.” Such reactions are, I think, arrogant and basically stupid. Skeptics read a report like that and say, “See, I told you. Prayer doesn’t do anything.” That is also arrogant and stupid. But a lot of believers read a report like that and don’t react arrogantly or stupidly. We’re just a bit more confused and less confident in praying. And the question may float through our heads, almost unconsciously, Does being intimately related to God really have no discernable effects?

Friends, the problem is not a scientific study or whether this one was done well or whether a different study would give different results. The problem is what we think about prayer. We have this notion that prayer is a way to get things to happen. That may be a particularly American conceit. We are practical people. We like to do things and get results. We want to pray for things and then have these things happen and if they don’t happen we conclude that either we’re not praying rightly or prayer doesn’t work.

Prayer is not a means for getting results. Prayer is a conversation, an intimate conversation with our heavenly Abba. Jesus prayed, “Remove this cup from me.” If any prayer should have gotten “results” it was that prayer. Yet the result was not God removing the cup of suffering from Jesus but Jesus continuing to pray, “… yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

In a wonderful little book called Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer, C. S. Lewis writes about Jesus praying in the garden. He says that for a long time he understood Jesus’ prayer — Thy will be done — only as a prayer of submission, most typically a painful and disappointing submission. But gradually Lewis began to hear the prayer differently. Thy will be done — and a great deal of that is to “be done by God’s creatures; including me,” Lewis said.[7] In other words, in our intimae conversation with God, we hear again what God wants us to do. Prayer is less about changing God and making things happen and much more about changing ourselves and letting God’s will happen in and through what we do.

There is much more to say about prayer but we have to stop for tonight, so I’ll conclude with this. At the end of tonight’s text Jesus said, “Get up, let us be going.” Surely he was speaking in the moment. Trouble rushed at him and it was time to meet it head on. As important as prayer and intimate fellowship with God are, there is a time to get up and get going. My mother used to call this “knee action and foot work.” We need time on our knees in prayer, if not literally on our knees, then in the posture and spirit of prayer. Then we need to get to our feet and walk, run, or climb the path of faithfulness. There is a time for prayer and a time for action.

For most of us — for me most of the time — I get to the action. I get to the doing but with insufficient time in prayer and I can almost hear my mother telling me that without sufficient knee action the foot won’t work.

Heaven and earth, the divine and the human met in a garden called Gethsemane. Despite his agony, Jesus remained intimately related to Abba, Father. The divine and the human can meet again in the gardens of our souls. May the disciples’ sleepiness in the garden long ago awaken us to never ignore our intimate fellowship with God, and then to go, in his name. But the feet of our going will not work without the knee action of prayer.

[1] D. E. Nineham, The Gospel of St. Mark (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972) 389-390.

[2] Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) 695. This tradition arises outside the canonical scriptures. Yet later tradition claims that St. Peter’s in Rome was built over Simon Peter’s burial place.

[3] In addition to Mark 14.36, there are two additional instances of Abba in the New Testament: Romans 8.15: “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’”; and Galatians 4.6: “And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, ‘Abba! Father!’”

[4] Mark 3.16a: “So he appointed the twelve: Simon (to whom he gave the name Peter).”

[5] Nineham, 392. “[It] may be right in saying: for the time he is ‘Peter’ no more: the new character which he owes to association with Jesus is in abeyance.”

[6] Herbert Benson, et. al., “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer,” American Heart Journal 151.4 (2006): 934-942. The study’s abstract states: Intercessory prayer is widely believed to influence recovery from illness, but claims of benefits are not supported by well-controlled clinical trials. Prior studies have not addressed whether prayer itself or knowledge/certainty that prayer is being provided may influence outcome. We evaluated whether (1) receiving intercessory prayer or (2) being certain of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with uncomplicated recovery after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery. Patients at 6 US hospitals were randomly assigned to 1 of 3 groups: 604 received intercessory prayer after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; 597 did not receive intercessory prayer also after being informed that they may or may not receive prayer; and 601 received intercessory prayer after being informed they would receive prayer. Intercessory prayer was provided for 14 days, starting the night before CABG. The primary outcome was presence of any complication within 30 days of CABG. Secondary outcomes were any major event and mortality. In the 2 groups uncertain about receiving intercessory prayer, complications occurred in 52% (315/604) of patients who received intercessory prayer versus 51% (304/597)of those who did not (relative risk 1.02, 95% CI 0.92-1.15). Complications occurred in 59% (352/601) of patients certain of receiving intercessory prayer compared with the 52% (315/604) of those uncertain of receiving intercessory prayer (relative risk 1.14,95% CI 1.02-1.28). Major events and 30-day mortality were similar across the 3 groups. Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from CABG, but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

[7] C. S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm: Chiefly on Prayer (New York: Harvest Books, 1964) 25-26.