Sunday 10 July 2022 - how to pray: unanswered prayer (Rev Rebecca Apperley)

In 2018 a member of the Cathedral small group Richard and I led suffered a sudden brain aneurysm when she was out visiting a friend. She was fit and healthy, with two young adult children. We had prayed for our small group members to deepen in intimacy with Jesus and our friend was growing in faith.

As she lay in an induced coma at the hospital, our Cathedral family gathered to pray – both in the Cathedral and at her hospital bed. This was one of the only times I remember our Cathedral community coming together in deep and heartfelt intercession. Judith was a member of the choir and was deeply loved and respected.

Surely, I felt, God would be able to use this situation to affect a miracle; one that would, in its obvious demonstration of God’s power, affect not just the restoration of Judith to life and health, but lead to a renewal of faith among our Cathedral community.

Judith passed away some 10 days afterwards.

I imagine we all have a story similar to this, where we have petitioned and interceded and nothing has happened. When this happens, it’s OK to have doubts:  Is God trustworthy? Does God even care? Is God real at all? In fact, if you didn’t have doubts, I’d wonder whether there was something wrong with your wiring. The questions we have about unanswered prayer are unlikely to ever go away while each of us live: humans have wrestled with these for centuries, and I’m not likely to give you answers today. We each have to keep wrestling.

But the Bible is honest about unanswered prayer. “Whether your struggle with unanswered prayer relates to a physical illness, mental health, or a spiritual void in which God seems to have abandoned you, Jesus truly understands. Jesus has the ultimate example of unanswered prayer: before his death, in the Garden of Gethsemane, which is the setting for our gospel reading today. So let’s take a deep dive into that.

We are dropped into the story after Jesus has shared his last meal with his friends. Jesus knows what is likely to happen to him in the next few days, and he takes the moment at hand to wrestle with God. Gethsemane means ‘oil press’ and this is where we see Jesus under pressure. [Barlach, 1919]. We see extreme psychological trauma played out in Jesus’ physiology, where in Luke’s account we hear that his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground (Luke 22:44). That’s an actual medical condition which happens under extreme stress.

Jesus takes his friends with him for support. The 22 words Jesus utters, recorded in Mark’s gospel, are rich.

Mark 14:36 (NIVUK84)

“Abba, Father,” he said, “everything is possible for you. Take this cup from me. Yet not what I will, but what you will.”

Later we’ll think about what we can learn from these words in terms of how we can cope with unanswered prayer, but first, let’s see if we can hit the curly question of why prayer might go unanswered.

Pete Greig has a few suggestions (and they’re not just his! Backed up by scholarship and theology).

His first suggestion is a relatively easy one to perhaps accept, or get our heads around.

It’s the idea he calls ‘God’s world’. The idea that the world has clear, God-given governing principles about how it works. We might see a farmer praying for rain, and at the same time rain might just be the worst thing that’s needed for the person across town who has a big whole in his roof. If we think about our petitions and intercessions like this it’s a little bit like treating God as if he manages a giant cosmic roster system. The same idea even, unfortunately, perhaps in some respects governs the outworkings of human behaviour such as the consequences of how we deal with conflict as humans. This is not to say that we don’t see moments when the natural order of things is upturned – miracle healings and interventions. But as C S Lewis notes: ‘that God can and does, on occasions, modify the behaviour of matter and produce what we call miracles is part of the Christian faith, but the very conception of a common, and therefore stable, world demands that these occasions should be extremely rare.’ It doesn’t follow though, that we shouldn’t thank God for that parking space, or sunny day, because we don’t know the big picture – God might just be at work in it after all for reasons we cannot see. And besides, every time we thank God like this we are reminding ourselves that it is God’s world, not ours, and submit ourselves to God’s sovereignty and good plans for our lives.

God’s war. The second idea about why prayer might go unanswered is a bit harder: and depends on us embracing a theology that some strands of our global church find harder to accept: which is that there are things going on in the spiritual realm that we simply cannot see and understand, and that our lives are part of a bigger picture, perhaps a little bit like the idea that in our physical world there are consequences. We know that there are some things that are just plain evil. When a child is trafficked, for example – that’s not the natural consequences of God’s world, nor is it God’s will. It’s just evil. This is where we are encouraged by Jesus to learn how to pray with spiritual authority: as Pete Greig says, to ‘put our fists together and pray.’ We’re going to explore this more in one of our upcoming weeks, but for now, even though we don’t understand why these things happens, let’s take hold of the scripture that there is nothing in death or life….that can separate us from the love of God.’

Finally, the third suggestion about the reasons for unanswered prayer is God’s will. God made the cosmos. Of course he’s going to do things that sometimes we don’t understand. This is where trust comes in, and it’s hard. But here’s a great quote which gives me comfort: “Doesn’t it stand to reason that the One who made and maintains this vast cosmos will something do things we can’t comprehend, and that he can be trusted with the patterns and the purpose of our own little lives?’

This is where we need to remember our identity in God. That we are made, and known, and loved. And that even though the deepest longings of our hearts might not be satisfied and we might undergo unimaginable suffering, that God is still trustworthy because he loves us.

“God loves you, and not just out of a divine duty to love people whether He likes them or not. He loves you passionately with relentless fascination because it is the great delight of His being to do so. The God of the cosmos thinks you are amazing. You! Not just some heavenly, idealized version of the person you might one day become. You – the person who does such stupid things. You – the one with a peculiar sense of humour. You – the one with bar hair, bad breath, and bad desires.’

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Having explored these things, which are just a short unpacking of what is a huge topic, let’s take it home in a practical way and see what Jesus did to cope with the deep distress of unanswered prayer in the face of extreme suffering:

Firstly, He chose to be vulnerable with his friends. Jesus didn’t pretend to be OK. He asked them to watch over him in prayer. “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” If you don’t feel like you have people you can turn to like this in your life, a reminder that our St Mike’s prayer team are here for you, with no judgement.

He chose to push into prayer (Luke 22:44). When you feel like God’s not there, in that great silence, it’s a common defence mechanism to isolate yourself from God, and choosing not to pray at all. In our Romans reading today we are reminded of that importance of perseverance, and that produces hope, which never puts us to shame.

Jesus holds onto God’s love. We see this in the first two words he speaks: Abba, Father. Abba is an intimate word, for Dad. One of the rare occasions where Mark, who writes in Greek, chooses to use the word in the original Aramaic language spoken by Jesus. It’s the only time in the whole gospels that ‘Jesus addresses God as Abba and He is doing it in his time of gravest vulnerability’. It is a simple, uncomplicated asking of someone who trusts that his Father has his best interests at heart.

The Lord’s Prayer that Jesus teaches us also encourages us to call God “Our Father”. Jesus ‘resolutely anchored himself in the Father’s love.’ ‘We are perfectly able to trust that which we cannot understand.’ We can still choose to trust in the love of God our Father.

Jesus holds out for God’s power: He says “all things are possible for you”. Everything is possible for God but when faced with unanswered prayer it’s natural to doubt God’s power. Don’t downgrade your expectations of God. Don’t protect yourself from the heartache of dashed hopes. Remember the truths you know about God and what you’ve learned in the past and through scripture and through other people.

Be honest with God. Jesus does. He asks directly: Take this cup from me. Pete Grieg calls this ‘the five most surprising words in the Bible’ – where Jesus appears to be praying unbiblically in that He asks God for an alternative. But he is being honest. He doesn’t try and manipulate God in his fear, or make bargains, like I did with Judith, or pretend that everything’s OK.

Praying relinquishment or yielding: Not my will but yours. Gosh this is a challenge: ‘to surrender ourselves to the will of God, not just when it makes sense and feels good, but when it makes no sense at all and hurts deeply.’ We understand now why Jesus’ prayer was unanswered. And we are promised that one day we will look back on our lives and understand why things happened a certain way (now I see through a glass darkly).

But for now, we keep wrestling with God, like Jesus did. We can wrestle with the honesty that God expects of us; honesty that God can handle. We keep holding out for God’s power, not shutting ourselves off from God. And we choose to remember that each of us - You, me - are God’s children, loved and known and created with a purpose and a plan, even if we don’t fully understand.

Let’s have a chat with our neighbours now…

● What stood out to you the most from today?

How has the reality of unanswered prayer affected your relationship with God?

● How do you think we can be better, as communities, at dealing with the realities and challenges

of unanswered prayer?

Read the Magician’s Nephew this week.