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.