A holy hatred?

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.
² There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
⁸ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
⁹ Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.   Psalm 137

 

Last time I reflected on the first six verses of Psalm 137 – on the need, first, to respect the place of “culture” in Christian discipleship while always ensuring that it never takes over from true spiritual faith; and, second, on the tragedy of loneliness, especially homesickness, and our responsibility, as Christians, to keep an eye open for the lonely people all around us, and to make them feel welcome (Matthew 25:35).

 

(Friends International is a nation-wide Christian organisation dedicated to welcoming, evengelising and supporting overseas students in British universities and colleges - a perfect charity to support if you would like to help people who may be feeling like the psalmist in verse 1.)

 

But I never got onto the shocking final verses of the psalm. They consist of a prayer to God that he will punish the people of Edom (verse 7), and then a curse against the Babylonians, who had come and destroyed their temple and their city, inflicted great cruelties on them, and carried them off into exile (verses 8-9).

These verses throw up various questions, and if we are thinking Christians we need to confront them.

 

First, what are such verses doing in the Bible?

 

The short answer is: demonstrating its honesty. God’s word tells us not only about the nature of God, but also about human nature: that it is wicked and corrupt. Psalm 137:7-9 is, sadly, by no means alone in reflecting that corruption (the book of Judges, taken as a whole, is if anything even more grim). We need to look facts in the face – in this case, that war is a horrible, evil thing (even if sometimes a sadly necessary evil), and the Bible makes that very clear.

 

Second, does the fact that these words are in the Bible mean it’s OK to feel this way?

 

The short answer again: No. No follower of Jesus can possibly echo such vengeful, hate-filled sentiments without feeling guilty.

 

Third, the big question, so what should we make of these verses; how can they become part of our spiritual lives?

 

I think - stating quite an obvious point, but one that it’s easy to overlook - we need to distinguish between the prayer of verse 7 and the curse of verses 8-9.

 

In verse 7 the writer asks God to do something – to “remember” the spiteful, gloating reaction of the Edomites on that terrible day when Jerusalem fell to the Babylonians. (Look up Obadiah 10-14.) What exactly that “remembering” might be in practice he is content to leave up to God. Obviously he wants some form of punishment, but more than that he doesn’t say. Taken at face value, his tone is actually quite mild.

 

In the same way we today might pray that God will “remember” those who kill and torture Christians and other victims of injustice – or even, more precisely, that he might “remember” President Putin in the light of the Ukraine war.

 

It’s verses 8-9 that we flinch from. I used the words “vengeful” and “hate-filled”, and I think that’s fair.

 

But surely what the psalmist is really wanting, in the cold light of day, is justice; and justice is part of God’s very essence, part of his holiness. So though the writer’s sentiment is decidedly sub-Christian (no ifs, no buts, please), what has happened is that his desire for something which is good in itself has become twisted and poisoned by his natural feelings. I think in a calmer moment he will have prayed differently.

 

I remember standing in the front room of a friend and his wife as they surveyed the trashed state of their home following a break-in. My friend was a strong Christian who occupied a leadership position in the church. As he stood there he spat out, almost under his breath, the vicious word “Bastards!”.

 

We never referred to it afterwards, and certainly I never so much as dreamed of rebuking him, even though I was his pastor. There was no need. Not that his expletive was right or justifiable; it wasn’t. But he didn’t need to be told, by me or by anybody else. Although the setting is very different, I see the psalmist’s words in the same light.

 

We know well the story of how Simon Peter disowned Jesus before the crucifixion. But do we remember equally well that in the lead-up to that moment he “began to curse and swear” (Matthew 26:74)? Jesus’ rebuke, if that’s what it was, was mild and full of compassion – he “turned and looked straight at Peter” (Luke 23:61). And, of course, just a little later he (would you believe it!) made him the leader of his church (John 21:15-19).

 

God is a God of perfect justice, and many things are done each day which cry out for justice. As Christians we should indeed pray that God’s justice will prevail in our world. And that is precisely what the writer of Psalm 137 is doing, though sadly in a perverted and distorted manner.

 

And, of course, we should never forget the prayer of Jesus for his tormentors: “Father, forgive them…” Wonderful, wonderful words.

 

Thank you, Father, for the honesty of your word in portraying human sin, even when it makes us uncomfortable. Give me, Lord, a holy hatred for all that is corrupt and wrong. Even more, give me grace to respond to it in the loving spirit of Jesus. Amen.

All the lonely people

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion.

² There on the poplars
    we hung our harps,
³ for there our captors asked us for songs,
    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;
    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

⁴ How can we sing the songs of the Lord
    while in a foreign land?
⁵ If I forget you, Jerusalem,
    may my right hand forget its skill.
⁶ May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth
    if I do not remember you,
if I do not consider Jerusalem
    my highest joy.

⁷ Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did
    on the day Jerusalem fell.
“Tear it down,” they cried,
    “tear it down to its foundations!”
⁸ Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,
    happy is the one who repays you
    according to what you have done to us.
⁹ Happy is the one who seizes your infants
    and dashes them against the rocks.   Psalm 137

 

I can only remember two occasions in my quite long life when I have felt seriously, agonisingly lonely.

 

There was the first night I spent at university - I had never been away from home alone before, and though I was only fifty miles away, it might as well have been a thousand (and there were no mobile phones in those days). And then, in my hitch-hiking days, I was on a kibbutz in Galilee when somebody casually mentioned at breakfast that there was a letter for me – but no-one knew where it had been put. Oh the sheer misery! the childlike need to cry! the pathetic self-pity!

 

But that’s all. How fortunate I have been.

 

Which makes it quite hard for me to get inside the skin of the person who wrote this little psalm.

 

“By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept when we remembered Zion…” So it begins.

 

In the year 587 BC the historic city of Jerusalem (Zion) was destroyed by the cruel Babylonians, and the writer of the psalm was clearly one of the many Judeans who, at some point afterwards, was taken off into captivity, not knowing if they would ever see Israel again.

 

Picture them, then, sitting “by the rivers” in this foreign country, and giving way to tears as they conjure up in their minds Solomon’s magnificent temple, the political as well as spiritual heart of their nation. Picture them pitifully “hanging their harps” (the instrument great King David played!) on the poplar trees and refusing to obey the taunts of their guards, “Come on, sing us one of your Zion-songs!”, spoken in a strange language.

 

“Sing? Sing for joy? In this God-forsaken place? That would be a betrayal of everything I value in belonging to the people of Israel!”

 

We get a strong feel for how Israelite religion was part and parcel of their lives and woven into their history – descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, forged into a nation by Moses and the experience of the Exodus, bound together by the law of God, and inspired, uplifted, challenged, often rebuked, by a succession of fiery prophets.

 

And there, in the heart of the city, that magnificent temple, where solemn worship was offered, sins confessed, sacrifices offered up.

 

And now this… after the rivers and green valleys of Israel, the massive Babylonian plains criss-crossed by what were possibly man-made irrigation canals.

 

Two completely distinct thoughts occur to me.

 

First, we are reminded of the very close connection that universally exists between “religion” and “culture” (think of the Jewish Passover festival, or the Muslims’ Ramadan, neither of which are purely “spiritual” events).

 

For me, as essentially a life-long free-church evangelical, “sacred music” and art, buildings and architecture, rituals and robes are, to borrow the in-phrase, far more of a turn-off than a help. Certainly, I can admire a magnificent cathedral (perhaps, even more, a mosque), but they “don’t do anything for me” in a spiritual sense. I’m planning to watch the coronation next month – but pretty much simply as a historic, once in a lifetime event.

 

Fair enough. But a danger lurks in wait for me: the sin of arrogance, of feeling superior to all those poor saps who will be revelling in the whole thing and foolishly imagining it might have something to do with their relationship with God. “Huh! empty ritual!” I’m tempted to snort.

 

Yet, for all I know, many of those people may have more of Jesus in their little finger than I have in my whole body. Arrogance! Or to use an even shorter word, just plain pride. Lord, have mercy on me!

 

Yes, there is a real danger that “faith” is hollow and lifeless, just going through outward forms of worship and focusing on the aesthetic rather than the genuinely spiritual. It’s part of our responsibility not to let that happen to us, to remain humble and teachable, and to leave it to God (who else!) to judge where somebody else stands whose way of worship is different from ours. As long as it’s Jesus who’s at the centre…

 

The lesson to learn: things that we may tend to dismiss as merely “cultural” or merely “religious” may in fact become instruments in the hands of God.

 

My second thought is simplicity itself… Psalm 137 is supremely about loneliness. This raises the challenge: How good are we at spotting the lonely person and making them feel wanted, welcomed and loved?

 

It may be somebody who has just moved in down the road; somebody I sit next to on the bus; somebody with or without a foreign face or a foreign accent; somebody new in church and looking lost; somebody who could very well have a label hanging round their neck: “I am a stranger – please say Hello to me!”.

Somebody whose heart is aching because they’re yearning for that tiny speck of the planet that we call… “home”: the lure of the familiar. Familiar places, familiar sounds, familiar smells, familiar people, familiar food – all of them are of no real importance, of course. Until, that is, they are far, far away.

Lord, give me the eyes to see, and the compassion to respond to the lonely people all around me. Amen.

Jesus said: Then the King will say to those on his right “Come, you who are blessed by my Father… For I was a stranger, and you invited me in…” Matthew 25:34-36

To judge or not to judge?

Jesus said “Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.

“Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces”. Matthew 7:1-6

I knew a man, many years ago, who used to greet me at the church door after a service where I had been preaching. I would find him standing there with his Bible open and, if I remember rightly, a finger carefully positioned on a particular verse. My heart would sink within me. His first words were likely to be, “With all due respect, Colin…” (he was a very polite man), and then he would proceed to put me right on some point where I had been in error in what I had said.

I must confess that after a time my attitude towards this man became – well, let’s just say, somewhat less than charitable. I saw him as a pest, to put it bluntly, distracting me from what I regarded as my pastoral duty to greet the rest of the congregation.

But looking back now, I find myself feeling guilty about my attitude. Yes, he was a pest - but of course that doesn’t necessarily mean he was wrong in his criticism, does it?

More to the point, I learned that we preachers (well, me anyway) need to be kept grounded. We are delicate little petals (I hope you realise that when you look at your pastor or minister) however confidently we may come across, and very easily bruised. We enjoy any praise or appreciation that may come our way, and, I suspect, get far more of it than we deserve. So a little lesson in humility is no bad thing: I therefore schooled myself to recognise that Mr Pest was in fact doing me a favour and that I should take him seriously and be thankful.

What am I leading up to with this story?

Well, recently I preached a sermon which included the thought that as Christians we shouldn’t judge others, but should leave judgment to God. After the service I was taken to task about this (though not by a pest, but by a very gracious and courteous man): “But I do judge sometimes! And I think we need to! There is so much evil in this world, and we should say so…” That was his drift.

And, of course, he was absolutely right.

But surely I was right too? It was a reminder that Bible truths contain many nuances – and that in any single sermon or message there are lots of aspects which can’t be fully covered.

On this particular topic, where better to go than Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 7:1-6? If we focus only on the first three words “Do not judge” and apply them strictly literally in all circumstances, we surely make nonsense of much else in the Bible, not to mention in life in general.

Think particularly of the Old Testament prophets. Think of Nathan’s pointing finger at King David, the adulterer (2 Samuel 12:7): “You are the man!” Think of Elijah’s scathing message to King Ahab (1 Kings 18:16-18). Think of John the Baptist condemning the Pharisees and Sadducees: “You brood of vipers!” (Matthew 3:7). Think supremely, of course, of Jesus himself: can you imagine any criticism more withering -more “judgmental” - than his list of “woes” in Matthew 23?

“Ah, but those people obviously had a special calling from God!” you might say. “It’s a bit different for us ordinary Christians”.

But is it? I don’t think so. Going back to Matthew 7, surely the comical illustration in verses 3-5 – all that about specks of sawdust and planks of wood in people’s eyes – makes it clear that Jesus intends us “ordinary Christians” to apply his teaching to ourselves and our everyday lives – though the key point, of course, is that if indeed we are inclined to go around judging others, mightn’t it be rather a good idea to start with ourselves?

What Jesus is getting at when he says “Do not judge” is, surely, “Don’t develop a basically judgmental spirit. Don’t go around looking for faults. Don’t look for reasons to condemn. Don’t routinely think the worst of other people: aim to see the best. Don’t form a negative judgment unless you have some very clear reason to do so”. (And, we might add, even then try to see with a compassionate eye.)

Suppose you have a particularly unpleasant and difficult boss: how about praying along the lines, “Lord, help me to see him/her with your eyes”? Persevere with that for a week or two and you might see your boss in a completely new way…

To sum up, Jesus is talking about judgment in the sense of condemnation, not in the sense of making wise and fair assessments.

I can’t finish without touching on that strange verse 6: “Do not give dogs what is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs…” It seems to be on a completely different topic from the preceding verses: about being discerning regarding who we should make the gospel known to. But however precisely we interpret it, it certainly makes it very clear that there are times when a proper, prayerful judgment is not only permissible but in fact essential.

For how do we know who those “dogs” or “pigs” are if we haven’t exercised… judgment?

Just something to think about… Which is what the second man I have mentioned did for me. And for which I thank him.

Father, please forgive me for my tendency to think the worst about others rather than the best. Please help me to exercise a wise and compassionate judgment in all situations, and to keep in mind the wonderful prayer of Jesus for his tormentors, “Father, forgive them – they don’t know what they’re doing”. Amen. 

A group of women honoured by God

So the women hurried away from the tomb, afraid yet filled with joy, and ran to tell his disciples. Suddenly Jesus met them. “Greetings,” he said. They came to him, clasped his feet and worshipped him. Then Jesus said to them, “Do not be afraid. Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” Matthew 28:8-10

Mary Magdalene and the other women who figure so prominently on the morning of Jesus’ resurrection have been called “apostles to the apostles and evangelists to the evangelists”.

This, of course, is because they were the first people to discover that Jesus’ tomb was empty, the first to hear the message of the angels to that effect (“he is not here; he has risen”), the first actually to see the risen Christ (“suddenly Jesus met them”), the first to recognise who he was (“they clasped his feet and worshipped him”), and the first to pass on this wonderful good news to the eleven apostles.

The four Gospels differ from one another in the way they tell the story, and they mention different names, but Mary Magdalene is common to each. John, in fact, chooses to focus on Mary alone – the famous encounter with the “gardener” – but the essence of the story is the same. (We needn’t worry about seeming inconsistencies between the four accounts – if nothing else, they demonstrate that the resurrection story was anything but a cooked-up job!)

So we can understand that famous tag – the women did do the job of apostles (an “apostle” is literally someone sent by God) and of evangelists (an “evangelist” is literally someone who proclaims the gospel) that wonderful morning; and the people to whom they brought the good news were the “real” apostles and evangelists, the men who had, it seems, been busy keeping their heads down out of fear.

Some Christians make a lot out of this fact – we might call them Christian feminists: “If God sees fit to use women to proclaim the resurrection gospel on Easter Day, why shouldn’t they be used to preach the gospel under more normal circumstances?”

I have a lot of sympathy with that attitude, and have worked happily over many years with female ministers. But I think it’s a bit of a stretch to take a one-off event – however amazing and remarkable it was – and to use it to establish a practice in the church.

Yes, the women were indeed “apostles and evangelists”, but only in the same sense that every Christian, whether male or female, is called to be. Which presents each of us who claims to be a Christian with a challenge: do we see ourselves as modern day apostles and evangelists? And if not, why not? If we don’t tell people about Jesus crucified and risen, well, who will?

Still, having said that, it’s a striking fact that this is how God chose to cause the events of Easter Day to unfold. It didn’t have to be that way! – God is in control, after all. The women followers of Jesus are pretty much in the shadows right through the four Gospels and it could very well have stayed that way. But it didn’t; God decided otherwise; suddenly, out of nowhere, the women come right to the front of the stage.

Two thoughts, I hope, are worth noticing.

First, the prominence of the women is good evidence that the resurrection story really is true.

As I said earlier, if you were aiming to fabricate a convincing story, this is the last detail you would invent, given the secondary status of women in both Jewish and Roman culture at the time. It would be a classic case of shooting yourself in the foot. Women couldn’t testify as witnesses in a court of law – so where would be the sense of making them your primary witnesses!

This is how it is described as happening – because this is precisely how it did happen.

If anyone reading this is sceptical about the resurrection, I can only urge you to look again at the facts. This is not an event you can be indifferent about – “Oh, I’ll have another look at it one day” – for if indeed it is true it changes everything. Nothing could matter more.

Second, whatever our opinion might be regarding women in ministry, God’s decision to cast the women in this role in that garden on Easter Day is very striking; as I said, it didn’t have to be this way.

I find my mind drawn back to that other garden – Eden - where man and woman worked all too briefly in harmonious unity. How quickly it all went wrong! How tragically that ideal existence was ruined! The “fall” is described in Genesis 3 – and already, in the very next chapter, we read how “Lamech married two women…” (Genesis 4:19), and the corruption of male-female relationships is under way. King Solomon, with all his wives and concubines, looms on the distant horizon.

Am I being a bit fanciful, or could it be God’s intention, by casting Mary Magdalene and her companions in such a starring role on Easter Day, to deliver a rebuke to hundreds of years of abuse? Is it God’s way of saying to his male followers, “See how highly I value women! Take it seriously! I can expect you to do the same, can’t I…?”

Lord God, please help me to be an apostle and evangelist in my day-to-day life, to be a worthy follower of Mary and her friends. Help me to worship and proclaim the crucified and risen Jesus. Amen.

Events that baffle your mind

And when Jesus had cried out again in a loud voice, he gave up his spirit. At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook, the rocks split and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people. Matthew 27:50-53

A mature Christian once admitted to me that, in spite of all the years she had been following Jesus, she had never really noticed this little passage. Matthew 27 is a long chapter, 66 verses, and the things described here occupy just four, so it’s easy for them to get a bit lost as Matthew unfolds all sorts of dramatic events. But they are saying important things.

In verse 50 we read about the death of Jesus, the central event in Christian faith: he “cried out again in a loud voice” and “gave up his spirit”.

In verse 51 we read that “the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom”, a symbol of the wonderful new access to God we sinful human beings have through his sacrifice on our behalf.

Still in verse 51 we read that “the earth shook and the rocks split…” – in other words, there was an earthquake, symbolising the world-changing, earth-shattering nature of what happened that day: our sins forgiven once-for-all through Christ’s body nailed to the cross.

So much, so familiar. But then, in verses 52-53: “… and the tombs broke open. The bodies of many holy people who had died were raised to life. They came out of the tombs after Jesus’ resurrection and went into the holy city and appeared to many people”.

How very strange! Remember, this is still Good Friday, not yet Easter Sunday. Yet a clear indication of new resurrection life is given. Not that these “holy people” were yet resurrected in the same sense that Jesus would be - “resuscitated” would be a better word. Like Lazarus in John 10 they would have to die again.

Taken at face value, these events raise all sorts of questions…

Given their extraordinary nature, why doesn’t the Bible tell us more about them? Mark, Luke and John say nothing, and even Matthew gives us no more than this handful of verses.

Who were these “holy people”? Old Testament saints? Just ordinary God-fearing members of Jerusalem society?

What did they do in the interval of time between being “raised” on the Friday and entering Jerusalem and appearing to “many people” on the Sunday? How did they spend that time?

In what form did they appear? Surely not walking skeletons! Or zombie-like humans? And what happened to them in Jerusalem? How did the “many people” who met them greet them? As if they were ghosts? Again, surely not.

And when it was time for them to return to their tombs, did they just lay themselves down again – rather like The Snowman in the cartoon film climbing back into his freezer and pulling the lid down with a sigh of pleasure?

Strange indeed. And no single explanation entirely satisfies.

Could it be that Matthew is describing a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in a strictly literal sense? We read in Ezekiel 37:1-14 about the “valley of the dry bones” being brought to life. It culminates in verse 13: “Then you, my people, will know that I am the Lord, when I open your graves and bring you up from them”.

That prediction, of course, belongs strictly to the time of Jesus’ return in glory; but could it be that Matthew is so certain of it that he depicts it as an event right in the here and now?

Or could it be that Matthew is describing some kind of collective vision? – not that the holy people were literally raised from the dead but that loved ones and others who had known them “saw” them in some dream-like state.

Could some such conversation as this have happened on the Saturday morning…? “’It’s really amazing: yesterday I saw my grandfather, as real as life…’ ‘That is amazing! I saw my wife, who died five years ago – and she looked so wonderfully well. And it wasn’t remotely spooky!’ ‘Yes; it all seemed to happen just after that horrible crucifixion outside the wall, didn’t it?’”

Who can say? Most New Testament scholars, unsurprisingly, write this episode off as a legend that grew up in the years after the event. But that certainly isn’t the way Matthew presents it – for him, it seems to be a plain statement of fact.

Questions, questions, questions! I’ve certainly raised more than I have answered! But perhaps that’s as it should be. What happened that first Easter weekend was the most momentous event in the history of the world. So we need to be aware that just to probe into it a little is to step onto holy ground, like Moses before the burning bush. Can we expect to understand such awesome mysteries?

Isn’t it enough to know that Jesus died for us and then rose again in glory? For the rest, let’s be content to wait until that day when we will see him face to face. I doubt if we’ll feel then the need to ask our questions, don’t you?

Father, I understand only the tiniest part of all that was happening over that first Easter weekend. You have given me a mind with which to probe and ask questions, for which I thank you. But help me not to overstep the mark. Help me simply to love and trust you a little more each day, and with that to be content. Amen.

Are you superstitious?

Jesus answered… “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it”. John 14:13-14

I feel slightly embarrassed about this, but I might as well spit it out: I sometimes wonder if I am guilty of lapsing into superstition.

Oh, don’t worry, nothing too serious: you won’t catch me consulting the entrails of sheep or goats to discover the future, or crossing my fingers to ensure good luck, or “touching wood” to avoid bad luck, or avoiding the number 13 (apparently there are many people who insist that their house number is 11b when, really, it’s 13). Of course not.

Indeed, show me a ladder and I’ll even go out of my way to walk under it, such is my bone-headed determination to demonstrate how very unsuperstitious I am.

But – here it comes – I have to admit to a slight discomfort sometimes if, at the end of a prayer, I haven’t tagged on the little formula “in Jesus’ name”, or some variation. The prayer somehow doesn’t seem quite finished without it; there’s the ridiculously illogical fear that it isn’t really a properly “Christian” prayer. As if God needs to be informed of the spirit in which the prayer was prayed; as if, indeed, he might actually reject it for lack of a little quasi-magic mantra.

It's absurd, of course; just a habit. But I notice that many Christians seem to share the same habit.

For me, it goes back some sixty years. I don’t know exactly when I first read John 14:13-14 but that, of course, is the key passage, recording the words of Jesus himself. But it was as a 15-year-old that I was converted – and that is a long time ago…

Of course, I’m not saying there is anything wrong with adding “in Jesus’ name” to the end of a prayer; if you feel it helpful to do so, God forbid that I should say anything to deter you. But surely Jesus didn’t speak these words simply in order to insist on just that? Surely their meaning is something far deeper?

Trying to pin that meaning down is not easy. We sense, certainly, that it is important (why else would Jesus say it twice in two verses? and why indeed does it crop up in his teaching on a number of occasions, such as Matthew 18:5 and 20 and John 15:16 and 16:23?). He obviously intended us to take it seriously.

But exactly what he meant by those three little words (four in the Greek) is frustratingly elusive. And the various different translations don’t really help very much; most of them settle for the literal meaning, leaving us as the readers to decide for ourselves. The Message, often very helpful, paraphrases it as “along the lines of who I am and what I am doing”, which is a bit of a mouthful and, to me, somehow rather flat.

I fear, though, that we have little choice but to multiply words quite substantially in order to tease out the meaning. I would suggest that a good translation of verse 13 would be something like: “And I will do whatever you ask on the basis of your love for me, your obedience to me, your trust in me, and your desire to please me…”

Rather wordy? Yes, of course. But it has the merit of putting our prayers fairly and squarely in the context of a personal relationship with God the Father through God the Son. If nothing else, it makes it absolutely clear that those words “in my name” are a million miles from being some kind of magic formula!

If the Christian faith is about anything, it is about relationships. Even within God himself there are relationships - between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And the whole point of the Son dying and rising again was to bring spiritually dead people (that’s all of us) into a relationship of love and trust with the Father.

Take any religious belief and rob it of that element of relationships and what are you left with? Superstition, that’s what. One definition I have read of superstition is “misplaced credulity concerning the supernatural, which leads to irrational fear, false religion and magic…”

Yes, it becomes just a matter of empty forms of words, the performing of rituals, and a trust not in a person but in a lifeless, mechanical ceremony. It even smacks of a belief that we can manipulate God if we can only get the formula right. Which, if it isn’t actually blasphemous, isn’t far off it.

Jesus, on the other hand, is all about warmth and love and trust. So when we pray something truly “in his name” (whether we spell that out or not) we are praying it because we are wonderfully part of him and he, even more wonderfully, is part of us, through the Holy Spirit.

All of that, I think (and no doubt far more besides), is wrapped up in those three little words “in my name”.

Loving Lord God, may my faith in you become more and more a living, vibrant thing with every passing day – and never shrivel to the level of a mechanical, empty gesture. Amen.