“JESUS”
Saint John 16: 23-30
Rogate: 26 May Anno Domini 2019
Father Jay Watson SSP
The problem with asking is that you usually ask the wrong things, for the wrong reasons. Take a young child to the grocery store and they will bombard their parents with request after request; not for healthy fruits and vegetables or meats and cheese, but for processed salty mystery cartons and sugary or chemically charged sweet bombs and deserts. Now, imagine “old Adam,” the sinful self that lives in & with you, peppering The Lord with requests. He wants you to ask what He wants to give—stronger faith, more patience under trials, greater love “in action” for your neighbors, a forgiving heart that is overflowing, and an endurance in the one true faith unto life everlasting. He wants your requests to be “Kyrie eleison,” “Thy will be done,” and “Come quickly Lord Jesus.”
Why does The Messias speak to the “12” “and in that day ye shall ask me nothing?” He is teaching them that great Trinitarian mystery and joyful reality. When they will now pray, after His resurrection, when you pray, the prayer is to God The Father. The prayer is only possible by God The Holy Ghost. And, the prayer is always, and only, in the name of God The Son, Christ Jesus! No one can come to The Father unless they do so through The Son. No one can have the true God, unless They have, i.e. believe and confess, that Jesus IS GOD!
Now of course during the three years that the Disciples walked with Jesus, they did in fact, ask Him many things. They queried Him on the mundane, where are going next, do you want some of us to go into the village and procure food, why do John’s disciples and the Pharisees “fast” be we don’t, and a myriad of other questions. And, they also asked Him for things they should not have asked: “Lord, wilt thou that we command fire to come down from heaven, and consume them, even as Elias did?” and “they said unto him, grant unto us that we may sit, one on thy right hand, and the other on thy left hand, in thy glory.”
But the asking The Lord is referring to is praying To God—The Blessed Trinity yes, but directed to The Father, The First Person of The Godhead. Jesus had been teaching His Disciples to pray to The Father for all things needed. Jesus had been teaching His Disciples bit-by-bit and piece-by-piece that He Himself was The Christ of God, The Incarnate Emmanuel. And that He too was to be resorted to in all intercessory petitions for life and salvation.
Jesus says that NOW, after My impending visual departure, you will pray “in My Name” and that in His Name, “ye shall receive, that your joy may be full.”
His Name is Savior. His mission is salvation “to seek and to save that which is lost.” [Lk. 19.10] To pray is not to spew forth your emotions, which are usually going to be tinged, or overwhelmed, by sinful lusts and concupiscence for mammon, but to speak back to Him His own Word. The Words of Holy Scripture are Jesus, SAVIOR, the Word-made-Flesh Himself.
Yes, Christ spoke to the “12” in “Proverbs.” That does not mean that He was speaking the aphorisms and truths from the Hebrew Book of Proverbs—but He may have been, since all of The Old Testament speaks of Him. But rather Jesus had been speaking truth: period! He is The Truth. Everything He said is True. “Repent and Believe” was one of His main proverbs—truthful statements. It is both a demand/command and a promise delivered. One can only repent by the power of Jesus’ Word—The Law—first crushing and slaying the willful and sinful old nature. One can only believe by the power of Jesus’ Word—The Gospel—loosing and releasing and absolving sin and its fearful consequences. It’s all The Word. It’s all Jesus’ work.
Pray to God. Pray the “Our Father” because when you pray that special prayer that The Son, The God/Man gave to you, you are praying “in the stead and by the command” of our Lord Jesus Christ. You are praying in your Baptismal + identity as a brother or sister of Jesus, and as a son or daughter of The Heavenly Father. He loves you because He loves His only begotten Son from eternity. You are in Christ by virtue of Baptism, and Christ is in you by virtue of His declarative and creative all-working WORD, and by His Sacramental Meal of remission and strength.
Jesus came from The Father, from Trinitarian Oneness, eternal love in action and communication, for you. He obeyed. He suffered. He paid for all your sins. He died in your place.
Jesus rose from the dead for you. Jesus visually left the world and went to The Father for you. Jesus is here for you now.
“Now [you] are sure that Christ knows all things and need not ask Him anything else, save what He is now gives.
In the Name of the Father and + of the Son and of The Holy Ghost
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