What Is The Most Intense Prayer in the Bible?

What is the most intense prayer in the Bible?  David’s words in Psalm 42 and 43, they are up there certainly.  In my experience of the Bible, I do not think this most intense prayer is in the Psalms.  I think it comes from our Lord Jesus.  It was in the lead up to his own death on the cross, in the Garden of Gethsemane.  In one of the gospel accounts, it goes so far as to describe that Jesus was sweating blood because of the pain in his desperate outreach to God.

What is the wind up to that prayer?  “Thy will be done.”  Jesus is asking for the cup of wrath to be passed from him, but that is not the Plan.  That is not how God is going to redeem humanity.  Now, a presupposition in our faith is that our God is a loving God.  But if I am going to take the witness of Jesus seriously, I need to acknowledge the cruelty of what is happening here.  

Why do we need to be witnesses to a prayer of such pain and depth of feeling to a God who can do anything?  I think it is because it has never been enough to tell us, as humans, anything.  It is as simple as the story about the child warned by their parents not to touch the stove.  The pull to touch the stove is intense.  The history of faith we have in the Bible of Jesus, in the Hebrew Bible, is filled with examples of people who would not simply listen to God. 

God went through such extremes to get through to us.  I must presuppose that God did this because this is what is necessary to get through to us.  Yes, that sounds like circular reasoning, but it would not take a lot of review and reflection on our history as a species to understand that we are capable of some pretty extreme behavior, obscenely graphic and cruel behavior.  But, maybe even worse, is how capable we are, as a species, to gloss over or justify such behavior.  That is where Holocaust deniers prove the point. It is through this capacity that God must break through to get us to truly pay attention.

Maybe the worst thing that the sinful world has presented to humanity is the capacity NOT to care.  This capacity to deny the evil and destructiveness that surrounds us.  And it is not something we try to do, something we seek.  We can simply close our hearts to the world around us.  We can turn off the news, we can deny the reality of a world being ground down into uselessness, we can deflect and blame "those", other, people.

The alternative is to rip off the bandage of our denial and allow, into our souls, the full force of the knowledge that we are a cruel species on a dying planet.  What kind of heart-rending effort will be needed to cut through the denial and dare to love the world, to save the world?  Funny we should ask.  Because in the Garden of Gethsemane, we have our Lord Jesus praying just such a prayer.  The burden of salvation of the world was upon his shoulders.  It was a cruel thing God tasked him with.  And he ripped open his soul to feel the weight of that burden, to confront his denial.  But, in God’s power, he overcame his denial.  And he overcame sin to bring salvation to the world.

It may seem impossible that just one of us or one community of us could possibly, truly, make a difference.  It may seem a cruel thing God has tasked us with, to save the world.  But, in God’s power, we can overcome our denial.  And bring God’s power to the world.  But Jesus shows us the way to pray to that need.  If we are willing.

Peace,

Pastor Peter