Tuesday Prayer: 32

This is my 32nd 'Tuesday Prayer' post. I've just started reading a new book by Donald Macleod, Christ Crucified: Understanding the Atonement, to review. This book goes deep inside the atonement, unpacking the glory of the Cross. Early on, though, Macleod observes something powerful regarding prayer. Macleod works hard to find words to describe the way that Jesus prayed before he went to the Cross;

“When Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed at Flossenburg concentration camp in April 1945, the camp doctor (Who didn't know who he was) watched him take off his prison garb, kneel on the floor and pray.

'I was most deeply moved', he wrote, 'by the way this unusually lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer'

Why, then, is Jesus so distraught? It can only be because he is facing more than martyrdom and more than death”

Bonhoeffer is an inspiring model of what it means to follow Christ, faithfully, even unto death. But he is not Jesus. There are twin challenges, then, here today. Firstly, to have such a 'fragrance of Christ' that even those who don't know who we are notice us as being 'unusually lovable', and prayerful. Secondly, that even Jesus prayed before the cross. Facing something none of us will ever have to face, because we are not him, and because of what he has done. To pray in the light of that, to realise and glimpse the total pain that Jesus endured for us, is to pray in the light of the Cross.

But it is Jesus whom we are called to model, to image, to echo, to embody. It is Jesus - even before the Cross - who sets the tone for the Christian life. I think this snapshot, this window on the Cross, this radical notion of dying for sinners and yet praying, is a profound challenge to the way we pray. Are we capable of praying when distraught? At the eve of death? In the face of sin and pain and suffering?

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Don't forget to check out the previous posts in the series, featuring quotes from Tom Wright, John Wimber, Richard Foster and Don Carson, the great J. C. Ryle and theologians Alister McGrath and James K. A. Smith. Since then, I've shared quotes from Justin Welby, E.M. Bounds, Vineyard Pastor Ken Wilson, C. S. Lewis,  O'Hallesby, Paul Miller, John Piper. Recently, we've heard Matthew Henry, Charles Finney, Andrew Murray, Tim Chester, Vaughan Roberts, Oliver O'Donovan, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and John Bunyan. Then we got rather retro, with quotes from Church Fathers John Chrysostom and Tertullian, before returning to more recent thinkers with Rowan Williams, Mike Reeves and Peter Jackson and Chris Wright and Andrew Case, R. C. Sproul, and (representing a slight change of tack) the Westminster Confession. Last week we considered Karl Barth.