Trinity 19 (30C) St Bartholomew, Brighton Jesus Prayer 27.10.19

How can I live a simpler Christian life? 

Is there a summary of faith that’s clear, memorable and portable?  A biblical aid to praying at all times? A means of Holy Spirit empowerment which can bypass a distracted mind? Is there an instrument of Jesus Christ useful to carrying his worship into life and vice versa?

The Jesus Prayer of Eastern Orthodoxy, ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ is such an instrument. Thoroughly biblical, carried forward by the faith of the church through the centuries, it stands as a unique gift and task.

It’s based on the prayer of the tax-collector in today’s Gospel from Luke 18 verses 9 to 14. This so-called Publican’s prayer is there contrasted by Our Lord with the ostentatious prayer of the Pharisee. The man would not even look up to heaven, but beat his breast saying ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’. From this prayer the Jesus Prayer is built, a simple repeated prayer for quiet individual use with capacity to empower and lead into simplicity of life.

I have come to believe there’s nothing new in Christianity, just the need to enter the day by day newness of Jesus. That newness refreshes me day by day through attending Mass and through reciting ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ in an aspiration to carry my Communion forward obedient to the biblical injunction to pray at all times. The Jesus Prayer is inhabited by Jesus who is an effective reminder that God is love and has mercy on us frail mortals.  

It’s a prayer discipline in use across the Christian world since the 5th century and preserved to this day across Eastern Orthodoxy from where it is spreading as a blessing to us in the western Church. 

The Jesus Prayer states the simple good news of Christianity, provides Holy Spirit empowerment to bypass distracted minds, links worship and life and resonates with the faith and prayer of the church through the ages. 

We live in times when many find themselves burdened by anxiety or mental distraction and are seeking help from Buddhist type mindfulness exercises. If only they could enter the spiritual discipline Christians have built from today’s Gospel!  The Jesus Prayer is a ‘God-given mantra’.‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’. Repeating that sentence brings power to bear upon the soul besides helping us as Christians in relating worship to life.

I knew of the Jesus Prayer for thirty years before I welcomed it as the gift and task it is to help us ‘pray without ceasing’ (1 Thessalonians 5:17).  As a priest leading worship, attending to people’s joys and sorrows and the stresses and strains of church administration I have found the Jesus Prayer an invaluable aid and this is because of the simple message it holds before me - that God loves me and all that is, minute by minute, day by day and for all eternity.  

In the early years of the Church, when there was heavy persecution, if a Christian met a stranger in the road, he sometimes drew one arc of a simple fish outline in the dirt. If the stranger drew the other arc, both believers knew they were in safe company. The early Christians used the secret sign of the fish because the Greek word for fish ‘icthus’ was an acronym for ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God and Saviour’, the earliest creed and the shortest statement of Christian faith. The Jesus Prayer is a short expansion of that personal creed. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’ implies the historical figure of Jesus is universal Lord and Son of God. Behind the statement is a conviction that the invisible God has in one human life at one time and place made himself visible, supremely upon the Cross, showing us his love to be witnessed to every generation. 

God who made all and loves all desires to claim all - starting with the human race made in his image.  The first clause of the Jesus Prayer affirms the good news Jesus brings to our lives, news that we come from God, we belong to God and we go to God. ‘The eternal God is our refuge and underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deuteronomy 33:27 NIV)

It’s that faith I express when, for example, in the gym.  ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ I repeat on the machine. Time in the gym helps get me out of my mind into my body and that’s especially welcome when been sitting around at home with the family or on the computer. Gym time helps our bodily well being. It can also be deep thinking time, though this can turn into anxious mental preoccupation, which is why I think many people wear headphones to engage their minds as they exercise their bodies. No headphones on occasion for me in the gym, but rather a conscious coming back into the Lord’s presence.  As I recover repeating the Jesus Prayer it flows with the movement of the gym machines just as its pace fits the natural rhythm of breathing in and out. 

‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner’ 

As the prayer centres me I become aware again of God’s love present alongside me in Jesus, of a dispelling of negative preoccupation and an outward focussing upon those around me wherever I am.  The Lord uses the discipline of continuous recitation to turn me out of myself in loving intercession towards my neighbours. ‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God’ I repeat the Jesus Prayer under my breath, and find myself emphasising the second phrase ‘have mercy on me a sinner’.  The phrase ‘have mercy on me a sinner’ in the Jesus Prayer echoes both today’s Gospel and a phrase that recurs in Christian worship: kyrie eleison, literally ‘O Lord take pity on me’:

To show mercy is to treat others as better than they are. In the Jesus Prayer we are not so much asking the Lord repeatedly to demonstrate mercy to us but affirming and celebrating that quality and allowing it to brush off on us and make us more fully his instruments of forbearance. 

The great thinker Simone Weil writes ‘that two great forces rule the universe: gravity and grace. Gravity causes one body to attract other bodies so that it continually enlarges by absorbing more and more of the universe into itself. Something like this same force operates in human beings. We too want to expand, to acquire, to swell in significance. …Emotionally, Weil concluded, we humans operate by laws as fixed as Newton’s. “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.” Most of us remain trapped in the gravitational field of self-love, and thus we “fill up the fissures through which grace might pass.”’ 

The choice to live for God is a choice to live under grace and mercy and not under compulsion. It is an ongoing choice which the Jesus Prayer can facilitate. The beauty of the Prayer is its being a continual reminder both of God’s mercy towards us and of our call to imitate it in our dealings towards others and towards ourselves. It is a reminder true to the action we’re part of this morning in the eucharist as we see that mercy before us in Christ’s body broken and his blood poured forth, mercy we all the better carry out with us after Mass through the quiet discipline of reciting the Jesus Prayer.

Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world, have mercy on us!

We do not presume to come to this your table, O merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!