This is one of the oddest prayers in the Gospels, for three reasons:
- It’s a very personal prayer, between a Son and his Father, and yet, Jesus speaks it out loud in the hearing of his disciples.
- Jesus sometimes refers to himself in the third person, and once by name!
- The prayer has some pedagogical content. i.e. it’s not just praising God or thanking him or asking him for something – the usual content of prayers – but trying to teach some spiritual truths (e.g. “Now this is eternal life: …”) which is strange when the person you’re supposedly speaking to is God.
If you approach this story from the point of view of modern Biblical scholarship, then there’s no mystery about it: some later editor had a bunch of content that he wanted to insert into the story, and decided to put it directly into Jesus’ mouth, without apparently worrying too much about how it would sound that way, or how awkward the imagined scene would be. However, The Wineskin Project knows nothing of such interpretive frameworks, and so my task was to render the story at face value into a play. What could I do to turn this odd prayer into plausible human drama?
My solution was to imagine Jesus praying a “tactical prayer”, a communication not so much to God as to the people standing around listening to it. Every public prayer probably has this quality to some degree, but some are more tactical than others.
I was once in a Bible study where, at the end of the meeting, we went around in a circle praying, and when the turn came around to a woman who was holding her four year old daughter in her arms, she prayed for help with her daughter, who had been misbehaving all that week. At that moment, I opened my eyes and lifted my gaze to the girl, whose eyes were open, too, and gave her a look that said, “Uh oh, you’re in trouble now! Your mother is aiming a tactical prayer at you.”
A few years prior to that, in the conservative Bible church I grew up in, one of the deacons, leading the congregation in prayer, began, “Heavenly Father, as you know…” As you know! At least he understood that what he was about to say wasn’t intended for God, but for the congregation. A little while after that, I got embroiled in a small conflict with the leadership of the church, and at the end of a session in which we discussed our disagreements, that same deacon led us in prayer, and at one point prayed, “Help us to work out this conflict, even though you know we’re in the right and Freeman’s in the wrong.”
I knew I was in trouble then!
I imagine the disciples in this play being targeted by Jesus in this way not because they’re in conflict and he’s taking a cheap shot at them, but because they’re having a hard time hearing what he’s saying directly to them, so he resorts to a subtler method. And it succeeds, partially. Nobody manages to grasp everything about what’s about to happen to Jesus, of course, and some of them never get a clue, but a few do find themselves taking a few steps more into the Darkness about to encompass them all.