Daniel J. Harrington SJ - Jesus and Prayer: What the New Testament Teaches Us

What the New Testament Teaches Us

What the New Testament Teaches Us

DANIEL J. HARRINGTON, SJ

Copyright 2009 Daniel J. Harrington, SJ

All rights reserved.

Published by The Word Among Us Press

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Frederick, Maryland 21704

www.wau.org

eISBN: 978-1-59325-443-8

Unless otherwise noted, Scriptures are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Catholic Edition, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U. S. A. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any meanselectronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other, except for brief quotations in printed reviewswithout the prior permission of the publisher.

Cover design by Christopher Tobias

Cover image: El Greco, (1541-1614), Christ Blessing.

Casa y Museo del Greco, Toledo, Spain

Photo Credit: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY

IN MEMORY OF

ROBERT E. MANNING, SJ (19372008):

A LOVER OF SACRED SCRIPTURE

What Are They Saying About Mark? (2004)

What Are They Saying About the Letter to the Hebrews (2005)

Jesus Ben Sira of Jerusalem: A Biblical Guide to Living Wisely (2005)

How Do Catholics Read the Bible? (2005)

The Letter to the Hebrews (2006)

What Are We Hoping For? New Testament Images (2006)

Jesus: A Historical Portrait (2007)

Why Do We Hope? Images in the Psalms (2008)

Meeting St. Paul Today (2008)

The Synoptic Gospels Set Free: Preaching without Anti-Judaism (2009)

Since ancient times Christians have turned to the New Testament to learn how to pray. Jesus himself teaches us about prayer, especially in his own prayer to the Father. Prayers by the early Christians about Jesus appear throughout the New Testament letters. As twenty-first century Christians, what can we expect to learn from an exploration of these prayers and the teachings on prayer that appear in the New Testament?

The New Testament consists of four gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, thirteen Pauline epistles, Hebrews, the seven Catholic epistles, and the Book of Revelation. While the bulk of these books are either narratives (gospels and Acts) or instructions and exhortations (epistles), many of them include prayers or instructions on prayer at decisive moments. It is my conviction that by focusing on the passages on prayer in the New Testament, we will see more clearly what the sacred writers thought was most important about Jesus. We will also join the earliest Christians in celebrating him as the definitive revealer and revelation of God.

In this book, I will seek to highlight how these passages and prayers are rooted in the Old Testament and the Jewish heritage of early Christianity. I want to use these prayer texts as a way to better understand Jesus and the early Christian writings that we call the New Testament. Finally, my hope is that such an exploration can help Christians today to integrate their own prayer with the basic prayer texts of the Christian tradition.

The title of this book is Jesus and Prayer. By Jesus, I mean not only the historical figure who lived and worked in Palestine in the first century, but alsoand especiallythe risen Christ, who is the main topic of the New Testament. Christians believe he now reigns in glory with his heavenly Father and will come again. As we will see, the gospels contain prayers by Jesus and teachings about prayer that surely come from him. But the New Testament also provides many prayers and hymns about Jesus, especially with regard to his incarnation, saving death, resurrection, and exaltation.

By prayer, I mean simply the raising of the mind and heart to God and its expression in words. In the Bible there are two basic categories of prayers: praises and petitions. The praises include benedictions, thanksgivings, doxologies, and other modes of expression that extol the greatness of God. The petitions are requests that God act on behalf of the one making the prayer, either on the personal level or in a communal context, or both. The two basic forms often appear in the same prayer, and in the various literary forms or prayer scripts there is a great deal of flexibility. In reading and reflecting on these prayers, it is important always to attend to the following elements in any act of communication: the speaker, the addressee, the medium or literary form, the message, and the purpose.

I hope to look at these writings in the context in which they were written. By context I mean three things. First, I will examine the historical setting or cultural milieu in which these prayers were composed (the Old Testament, Judaism, the Greco-Roman world). In attending to their context in the ancient world, we need especially to consider their language, literary forms, and theological assumptions. Second, I will look at the literary framework in which they now appear (the New Testament writings). In dealing with their role in the New Testament writings, we need to discern how they fit within those documents and how they contribute rhetorically to the overall theological message of those books. Third, I will address the situation in which these prayers may be read or prayed today (Christianity in the twenty-first century). In trying to make these prayers more intelligible and available for Christians today, we need to show how these ancient prayers can connect us more closely with the essential elements of the Christian narrative, deepen our relationship with God and Christ, and shape our character and our outlook on the world and other people.

The method by which these prayers and teachings on prayer will be studied in this book is literary, historical, and theological. In analyzing the texts we will examine their literary context, words and images, plot or progress of thought, literary form, and message. There will also be a serious effort to relate these New Testament passages to their Old Testament roots and Jewish context as well as their place in the early Christian movement. As we will see, most of these prayers deliberately reuse words and images from earlier texts. They place passages chiefly from the Old Testament in fresh combinations and contexts in order to create something new, celebrating what God has done in the past, especially through Jesus the Son of God, and what God will do in the future to bring about the fullness of Gods kingdom. This technique is often called the anthological style and is very common in Jewish writings of the Second Temple period (537 B.C. to A.D. 70). The texts we will study are most obviously religious texts that claim to speak about God and the ways of God with humankind. And so we will also be concerned with the problems that they presume, with the theological themes that they develop, and with how we in the twenty-first century might best make these prayers our own.

Nevertheless, in the Catholic tradition, the work of biblical interpretation is not completed merely by studying the historical and literary contexts of a passage. When we read and make our own the prayer texts treated in this volume, we engage in what philosophers and literary theorists have called the fusion of horizons. As twenty-first-century Christians we approach these texts not only to understand them better, but also in the hope of some kind of personal transformation. The act of reading can be an individual pursuit in the quiet of my room or a communal venture at a liturgy or in a Bible study group. In bringing the ancient historical and literary contexts together with our modern context, we hope that these prayer texts may move our minds and hearts, as they have for believers throughout the centuries.