Otherworldly Trees

With prayer, the medium is the message is the relationship

The (phone-enhanced) northern lights, Craftsbury, VT

It is Mother’s Day, and I’m grateful for mine. My mother was just as important in teaching me about God as my pastor father. She was half of the equation who first taught me how to pray, and she kept praying for me when I was away from the church. This was often through words, but her prayer was (and is, I think) through her whole-hearted living her life with God, and continuing to show love for me through that love of God when I had allergies to anything resembling Christianity.

I’m also grateful for my grandmother, a good Southern woman of the Presbyterian persuasion from a Good Presbyterian Family. Throughout my twenties, she always told me she was praying for me, even though I usually didn’t know what to say back. I didn’t really believe prayer was doing anything back then. A nice sentiment, perhaps, but from my perspective, not moving my metaphysical needle. She didn’t try to re-convert me when I was visited or anything, and I appreciated that. But why was she telling me she was praying for me?

Forget my grandmother for a second. Have you ever wondered why Jesus prays to God? I’m sure I must have seen it on an edgy atheist cartoon once long ago, a “gotcha” for a Christian paradox. Wouldn’t they, as two persons of the Trinity, already know what’s going on with each other? Why did he pray, even in private, when nobody was looking? 

The church calendar’s Scripture readings give us a chance to think about prayer, beginning with the first words of every monastery’s primary prayer book:

Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked, or take the path that sinners tread, or sit in the seat of scoffers;

But their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night.

They are like trees planted by streams of water, which yield their fruit in its season, and their leaves do not wither.

Psalm 1:1-3

This is the entire first half of one of the shortest Psalms. These opening words of the whole book of hymns call us to be rooted in our relationship to Scripture in order to have a thriving relationship in the world.

In contrast, today’s reading from John 17 is the longest prayer of Jesus in the Bible. Given right before his arrest in John’s gospel, he asks God to sanctify him—or set him apart—for his sacrifice as he sets us apart from the world. While the lectionary asks us to look at a snippet, it is hard not to read the full prayer that spans chapter 17. In it, we hear from Christ about his relationship to the Father, and our relationship to him:

Now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one…I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one. They do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth. As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

John 17:11,15-18

The prayer, which Church of Scotland founder John Knox supposedly asked for on his deathbed, contains too much depth for this reflection. Instead, I’m going to just focus on what it shows us about prayer in general. Why does Jesus pray?

Craftsbury, VT

The Medium is the Message: Prayer as Relationship

In dialogue across religions and with spiritual seekers, prayer is often treated as an interchangeable spiritual practice that will help us in our spiritual development. Some believe that prayer, meditation, yoga, and other practices are different journeys up the same mountain of bliss and consciousness transformation.

There are a few problems with this. For one, when we use “spirituality” this way, it often means only a certain kind of positive energy development, and equates that with our spirit and the purpose of our soul’s growth. But not only does this limit how we think of spirituality, it also diminishes what prayer is about.

Prayer is not just another spiritual practice for ourselves, but is most fundamentally about being in, expressing, and developing a relationship with God. Like any relationship, it is all the more fulfilling when it is two-way, not just us monologuing to God, but listening to and with him. And in hearing Jesus pray in John 17, we hear the depths of his relationship not only with God the Father, but with us.

I have been reading a book by Skye Jethani, “What if Jesus Was Serious About Prayer?” One insight mentioned by Jethani is that “prayer is about communion, not just communication.”¹ Jethani says that it is not only about praying with words, but all the prayers without words, with our heart, mind, soul, and body.

I want to go even one step further: even when it uses our words, prayer at its deepest level is not about our words.

As mid-20th century thinker Marshall McLuhan said, “The medium is the message.” While the words are important, it is the fact that we are praying at all, putting ourselves in communion with God, re-engaging in a relationship to God, that is the most important part of prayer. The medium of prayer is a relationship, and the relationship is the message. Prayer is the way in which we most intentionally develop communion with God.

And so Jesus’ extensive praying in Scripture not only “makes sense,” but is an extension of who he is. His very person is a communion with God.

Craftsbury, VT

Prayer, God, and the World

In John 17, Jesus is gathered together with his disciples and other followers for the last time before his arrest. He prays to God, and he prays for his friends, and he prays for the future church. His prayer is, in part, teaching us about who he is, who God is, and who we are in the world. While the content of his prayer does this—revealing certain theological claims about who he is, who God is, and what he is calling for us to do—the medium of the prayer does this, too. The fact that he is praying to God for us and with us at all is the teaching here.

As Jethani also says, “Prayer brings heaven’s power to earth” while “the simplest prayers link earth and eternity.”² We pray not only to tell God things, but in putting ourselves in a relationship to God, prayer also tells us something when we listen. When we listen to John 17, we learn much about who he is as a glorified, sanctified, walking-talking communion with the heavenly Father, further emphasized in lifting his face upward in prayer, up from this world to the One who dwells beyond it.

In Christ’s prayer, we see a God who is connected and invested in this world, but is himself otherworldly. To keep emphasizing the “r” word, being otherworldly is an expression of his relationship to the world, but it doesn't take something super heady and intellectual and extravagant and mystic, or even as dense as Jesus’ prayer here to connect with him and his otherworldliness. Some of my favorite prayers I’ve ever heard were as a chaplain intern among working-class Southern Baptist veterans in Asheville, NC. They taught me that prayer has nothing to do with your vocabulary, elegance, or poetry, but is an expression of our relationship to God. When things are far from well, prayer can remind us that he is not from here, but he has made his home here, and he is here for us and with us.

Again for emphasis: God and Jesus’ true, ultimate home is not this world as it is, in all the presence of evil, destruction, pain, injustice, greed, and everything else that runs it. And yet, paradoxically, God chooses to make his home in us through Christ and the Holy Spirit.

And he does this so that we may not forget that our true home is not this world either, but is in him. Whenever we are despised, destroyed, assaulted, ignored, and otherwise suffer at the hands of the world, we know that such darkness is not from our true home. Our home is with the Author of life and the Giver of light.³

Prayer In Relationship with Each Other

Beyond the paradox of the God whose home is not here yet makes his home in us if we let him, there are more paradoxes in John 17. We hear Jesus most starkly setting his followers in contrast to the world, to the point where it is uncomfortable for some of us, evoking the worst of “us and them” thinking. We are uncomfortable with it to the extent that we know John’s words elsewhere that tell us he is also the Savior of the world. So why does Jesus not pray for the world directly, but pray for those who have followed him? Again, it has to do with relationships.

Jesus’ closest friends and followers knew God through him; through relationship. By extension, Jesus prays that we may each come to know through Jesus through relationship, in turn, to them. And this is self-evidently true: none of us have come to faith without a relationship to some human, living or dead, written time-capsuled witness or vocal utterances of the Spirit, wordless action or elaborate treatise. We all know Christ through someone who knew someone who knew someone…all the way back to those who knew him.

Prayer is part of that long chain of faith. As Jethani says, “Prayer is how we connect others to God,”⁴ and this is what Jesus does in his long prayer. He explicitly prays for unity among his followers and for the future church, while praying that the church may be what connects the world who hates him to him. As F.F. Bruce wrote:

So, the disciples were given to Christ by the Father “out of the world” (v.6), they therefore no longer “belong to the world” (v. 14, 16), although they remain “in the world” (v. 11)...They are sent into it as their Master’s agents and messengers…Jesus does not pray explicitly for the world at this time (v. 9), [but] his prayer for the disciples involves hope for the world.⁵

Jesus’ hope, then, in this prayer, that those who are graced with a relationship with God might help others know God through them. He prays to his Father that through the church, the world might actually know what those John 3:16 bumper stickers say:

[That] the world may believe that you have sent me…that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.

John 17:21, 23

Craftsbury, VT

So when we pray prayers of intercession and petition, lifting people up in prayer, praying with each other, naming our joys and concerns, sorrows and hopes, excitements and tragedies, there is, of course, a part of us that hopes and asks for God’s blessing in all manner of ways. But again, when the “medium is the message,” the most primary thing that such prayers do is they bring our relationship with God out beyond ourselves and our individual personality and bring others into it. And this is what Jesus explicitly does with John 17, bringing his friends and the future of humanity directly into his communion with God.

To be prayed for and with is to be invited into a person’s relationship with God. And no matter what you may or may not believe about God, I hope you can see that is more powerful than mere sentiment. And for a faithful person to pray for and with someone is to bring them specifically into your communion with God. It is why praying for our enemies is important and powerful. And it is why it is not trivial to tell someone (when we mean it) that they are in our prayers, for it is to tell them that they are part of our relationship to God.

The Otherworldly Tree and the Otherworldly Trees

So it is only fitting to me that the topic of prayer comes up for Mother’s Day, for it is these women who have loved me through their relationship with God. Beyond life, they gave me the greatest gift of all, which was giving me the gift of knowing God through them, even when I couldn’t stand the G-word. They did this through prayer. More than their specific words to God, the medium of prayer was their message: that they knew God had not given up on me because they hadn’t given up on God or me. 

To “pray without ceasing” is to live a life like Jesus, connected to the Father and connected to each other, no matter what we’re literally saying or doing. And this is what Jesus prays for: a deepened, sanctified, and glorified relationship between him, God, and us.

Again, Psalm 1 tells us that if we love God’s law and his Word, then we will be like flourishing trees by the stream, still grounded in the world, but with God’s lifegiving nature flowing into us. And yet, as Jesus tells us here, while we may be grounded in this world, the world is not our ultimate home.

As is said several times in Acts and then again in Galatians, Christ was “hung on a tree.” The cross is, then, the ultimate otherworldly tree. And we are called to pray not just one-way at Jesus, but with Jesus, that we might live in communion with God and each other, and that we might also be otherworldly trees—like a cross, stuck in the ground, lifted up towards God, and extending ourselves out to each other.

East Craftsbury Cemetary, Craftsbury, VT

1. p.48

2. p.70 and p.44

3. Isaiah 45:7

4. p.90

5. Bruce, F.F.. The Gospel of John: A Verse-by-Verse Exposition (p. 367). Kingsley Books. Kindle Edition.