Prayer In The Triune Life

Do you ever wonder whether your prayers get outside of your skull? Perhaps the whole spiritual life is merely a genetic program circulating through our brains. Maybe there is a religious propensity found more in one kind of humans than others, which causes the release of some sort of “spiritual” chemicals which make us feel connected to something we call Transcendent. After all, how could God “hear” our unvoiced prayers? Lying on our beds in the dark, we send our thoughts out from ourselves with the same mysterious impulse that causes our fingers to wiggle when we determine to move them. It happens, but we don’t really understand how. Of course there is an underlying chemistry to the connection between the brain and the movement of the body. A few highly educated people can actually trace that chemical path, but even for those scientists, the ineffable qualities of emotion and choice which lead to action elude us. In a similar way, there is a mystery to the reality of prayer which we will never fathom in this life. Yet prayer, like neurology, has a certain grammar which may be learned. Patterns and pathways exist for us to explore which have their origin in the very being of God.

The journey unfolds with questions: How does God hear our prayers? Where do our prayers go? Why does prayer work? What difference does it make if prayer is in the name of Jesus or not?

As creatures who live embodied in a world where we have to go from one place to another, our thoughts of prayer are inevitably spatial. We pray to God “up there.” God hears us and sends an answer back “down here.” In more Trinitarian language, the whole journey of our prayer takes place within the life of God. The Holy Spirit, who prays in us and through us, conveys our prayers to the eternal Son who is at the right hand of the Father. The Son takes up our prayers, makes them his own and offers them, now cleansed and sanctified, to the Father. The Father who delights to answer the prayers of the Son replies, and the Son, in turn, pours out the Spirit in greater measure to us. Thus we are answered according to the will of the Triune God.

We know that this is a symbolic way of speaking about a true reality that is beyond description. For surely the Father does not need to wait to hear our prayers via the Spirit and the Son to know what we have said! For the Triune God, the entire creation is present simultaneously and equally in the divine awareness. The God who hears a penguin feather fall to the ice in Antarctica maintains at the same time a perfect awareness of the tiny sound made when a cell inside your body is invaded by a virus, while yet distinguishing every other event occurring in the world. The inside of the lining of an artery is just as clear to the sight of God as the mountain peak that juts before our eyes. There is no effort for God in perceiving one thing more than another. Nor is there any time lag between our prayers and God’s hearing of them. God is not delayed by the speed of sound nor even the speed of light.

We employ—or more truly said, God in gracious condescension has employed for us—metaphors of time and space to consider what is really a matter of relationships. There is a gap between us and God, a difference between us that requires reaching speech to cross. Human beings and God are not one and the same. God has granted us an existence of our own, even though all our life is lived in, through, and from the three Persons of the Trinity. God accommodates our frailty and speaks in a way we can hear, acts in the world in ways we can perceive, stoops to meet us where and as we are. Whether we were as large as a galaxy or smaller than an electron, mere stature would be no barrier to the God who made us. God can get to us as we are. But we have trouble getting to God. We pray—we offer up our thoughts and words—but we may well wonder if or how we are getting through to God. What’s the problem? We know we can never comprehend all that God is; our capacities remain miniscule. Yet we also know in our bones that the limitations of our creatureliness are not really the issue. This gap between us and God is more than the mere disparity between finite creatures and the infinite Triune Creator.

The separation is one of relationship. Human sin has made the gap unbridgeable from our side of the divide. The Scriptures tell us how from the beginning our desire to be our own gods and have our own way has created a rift in our communion with the One who made us. How sad is the story of God’s call to Adam and Eve that fateful evening in the Garden. “Where are you?” This is the question that touches our deep spiritual loneliness. Where are we? Hiding from shame, pretending we cannot be found the way toddlers cover their eyes in hide and seek as if that makes them invisible. We run from God to the farthest shores and then throw back the question in defiance, “Where are you, God? Why do my prayers seem to fall on deaf ears?” The Lord knew perfectly well where Adam and Eve were. Our physical location does not separate us from God but rather our spiritual condition. Now even our ability to perceive God’s presence has been vastly diminished. All our thoughts of God are distorted by what Luther described as our being curved in on ourselves. The grammar of prayer must account for this condition of separation and the efforts God has made to cross the divide and restore our capacity for relationship.

The Mediator

God’s response to our suspended conversation was to bridge the gap by coming to us as a human being. Each person of the Triune God was, and is, involved. Sent by the Father, the eternal Son of God became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14). As one of us, from our side of the divide, Jesus entered the intimate communion with his Father of which we were incapable. He did so by being above all the man of the Spirit. Conceived by the Holy Spirit in the womb of Mary (Lk 1:35), Jesus beheld the Spirit descend upon him as a dove as he rose from the waters of his baptism (Lk 3:22). The same Spirit led him into the wilderness for his temptations and sustained him through his trials (Lk 4:1), not only there, but also in Gethsemane. Jesus was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit (Lk 4:14) in order to preach the good news and heal the sick. He even prayed by means of the Spirit. At one point, we read of him rejoicing in the Spirit as he gave thanks to his Father that through himself the Father might be made known to the humble rather than the wise (Lk 10:21). Through the eternal Spirit (Heb 9:14), Jesus made his ultimate offering as he gave his life on the cross. Then, raised in the Spirit by the power of God (I Pet 3:18, Rom 8:11), Jesus ascended to the right hand of the Father. There, Jesus who conducted his entire life in the fullness of the Spirit received even more as the ascended Lord who “received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit” (Acts 2:33) that he might in turn pour out the Holy Spirit on the disciples at Pentecost.

This living out of a human life in our name in intimate fidelity to the Father through the Spirit transformed the possibilities for all humanity. Jesus in his obedience by means of the Holy Spirit made human beings once more a fit dwelling place for the Holy Spirit. As Irenaeus wrote long ago,

The Son of God…when He became incarnate, and was made man, He commenced afresh the long line of human beings, and furnished us, in a brief, comprehensive manner, with salvation; so that what we had lost in Adam—namely, to be according to the image and likeness of God—that we might recover in Christ Jesus (Against Heresies, III. 18. 1).

Jesus “commenced afresh” a humanity that can live in intimate communion with God. So not only did the Triune God cross the divide with reaching speech as Jesus revealed to us his Father, but from our side Jesus offered the reaching speech of human faithfulness and response to God. Jesus is the living bridge between humanity and God. Because Jesus himself is both fully human and fully divine, he is our mediator not only through his gracious acts but also in his very person.

This is why prayer is in the name of Jesus. We cannot cross the breach between us and God. But Jesus is God come to our side. He is united forever to our humanity so that we may speak to him and be heard. Moreover Jesus has united our humanity to his divinity so that in him our human prayers reach all the way to God the Father. The interruption in communion between God and humanity has been overcome as long as the human and divine are held together in the person of Jesus—and that union is forever!

Returning to the earlier imagery, hiding was the human response to God after communion was broken. Jesus brought humanity out from behind the bushes and gave a new answer of availability. He restored prayer as the faithful response to God. The book of Hebrews explains this through the use of a remarkable series of Old Testament passages ascribed to Jesus:

For the one who sanctifies and those who are sanctified all have one Father. For this reason Jesus is not ashamed to call them brothers and sisters, saying, “I will proclaim your name to my brothers and sisters, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” And again, “I will put my trust in him.” And again, “Here am I and the children whom God has given me.” (Heb 2:11-13)

First, we see that the one who makes us fit for communion with God, and we people, the ones he makes fit, are bonded as family. Literally, Hebrews says we are “all out of one.” We are cut from the same piece of cloth, the humanity we have in common with Jesus. And he is pleased to be related to us. Second, we hear that the incarnate Son of God reveals God to his brothers and sisters in the flesh. But then, thirdly, we hear that Jesus the man will praise his Father in the midst of the assembled, summoned people of God. Fourth, Jesus reverses the hiding and shame of our first parents.1 In response to the deep and abiding question of God, “Where are you?” Jesus answers, “Here I am! Here I am and the children I have gathered because you gave them to me.” These passages are not just in the past tense, as something done once long ago. They are present and future tense. They are occurring right now and will continue to do so! The very person of Jesus provides the living dynamic for prayer in his name. All prayer and indeed all worship is a participation in Jesus’ own prayer and praise to the Father, in our name.

The Conveyer

How does this occur? How are we participants in what the Son of God is doing? Since he is removed physically from us through the ascension to the right hand of the Father, how is it that he can be said to be in the midst of our congregations? The answer to all three questions is deceptively simple: through the work of God the Holy Spirit. Though the resurrected Christ has departed the earth, in the Holy Spirit he is not removed from us. The Spirit is the Spirit of Jesus, and brings his presence to us in worship and prayer, most especially in the preaching of the Word and the administration of the sacraments. And the Spirit lifts us up, spiritually, in our prayers to the throne of God where Jesus serves as our mediator, priest, intercessor and worship leader. Through the Spirit, then, the ascended Jesus comes to be in our midst, and through the same Spirit we are brought in into the Father’s welcoming presence.

Jesus compared the Spirit to the wind, whose effects we see though we never see the wind itself (Jn 3:8). Similarly, speaking of the Holy Spirit is like trying to describe the wind. We make more sense when we mention trees swaying and a chill on our cheeks than when we try to name the invisible force directly. For the Spirit is always directing attention to the other persons of the Triune God, especially the words and works of the Son. Jesus said:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. For this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (Jn 16:13-15)

In this we overhear the inner dynamics of the Triune God. The Father gives all to the Son; the Son gives his life in love for the Father and the world. The Spirit, who has empowered the Son all along, goes on to make the Son known, speaking only what the Son has said, and so leading us into all the truth of who Jesus is. Thus the Holy Spirit brings Jesus the mediator to us, and in so doing reveals to us who the Father truly is (Mt 11:27).

In turn, the Holy Spirit brings us to Jesus. Paul wrote, “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us” (Rom 5:5). The presence of God within us is the Holy Spirit who initiates all our faith, all our prayers, our entire response to God. Paul wrote, “God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Gal 4:6). So the Spirit confirms with inner assurance our union with Christ; within us the Spirit “bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God” (Rom 8:16). Woven deeply inside our souls, the Holy Spirit prays from within us even when we do not know what to pray. Sometimes the Spirit speaks for us to the Father with groanings too deep for words (Rom 8:27) and in the intimacy of the Triune life, the Father searches, finds and understands these utterances of the Spirit on our behalf. Yet we recall that such exchanges all run through the person of the Son. Prayer requires the living work of Christ the mediator. Our link with him is his own Spirit sent within us to unite Christ to us and us to Christ so that in him we might re-enter communion with the Father.

In his book, With Christ in the School of Prayer, Andrew Murray wrote:

All the fullness is in Jesus; the fullness of grace and truth, out of which we receive grace for grace. The Holy Spirit is the appointed conveyancer, whose special work it is to make Jesus and all there is in him for us ours in…blessed experience.2

The word conveyancer is splendidly evocative. The Spirit carries our prayers to Jesus, who is at the right hand of God, interceding with his very life for us. And in turn, the Spirit carries all that Christ is to us back to us. So we have two intercessors, praying for us and enabling our prayers: the Spirit within and Jesus the Son above at the right hand of the Father. The Spirit is the connector between Christ and us, bringing all that Jesus is and does into our present experience. The Spirit is the artery between Jesus the Head and his Body the church, communicating all the essential life, energy and information that we need.

The grammar of prayer, then, is the Triune life of God. Even as the divine Persons flow in and out of one another in perfect love, so identifying the role of each in our prayers always leads to the sense that the work of one Person is tumbling into another in an endless circle of love. It is with the crossing of the divide in the arrival of Jesus the Son that this circle of the Triune life opens to us. Jesus is our mediator, even now. His very person, in whom God and humanity are united and reconciled, makes prayer possible. We are brought into this wonderful union by the gracious activity of the blessed Holy Spirit. The Spirit, we now see, is not only the bond of love between Father and Son but also the bond of union between us and Christ Jesus so that in the Spirit we are taken into the very life of God. Our prayer in the Spirit through the Son to the Father is nothing less than a dynamic participation in the Triune God of Love.3

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 13, No. 3 (May/Jun 2007).