Greater Things Not Different

Anything is Not Everything

John 14:12-14

Pastoral Prayer: Merciful Father, hear our prayers that Your works continue in Your Body, the Church. By Your Grace and for Your Glory, pray in and through us, producing the works of the Son by the Spirit, through the Cross of Christ and His Resurrection, which is now ours. Give us Your Word this day and always. And all God’s people say, Amen.

I entered the gym and saw Terry sitting near the top of the bleachers. I joined him there. The gym at First Baptist Church Oklahoma City is on the second or third floor of their building. Our high school church league basketball team played there. Our game would start after the game we were watching. It had been a rough few days for Terry. He had just gotten out of jail over the weekend.

We met in Middle School. He was considered a good-looking kid. All the girls liked him; just ask him. Walking home from school one day, we went by his house. It was not too far out of the way for me. He took me and maybe Chas to a small storage cabinet behind his house. Terry opened the doors to reveal his candy store. “Take what you want,” he said.

Terry was not considered rich by any means. In fact, we wondered where he got all that candy. We put two and two together and realized that Terry had been the culprit behind the break-ins at the school’s Student Store, stealing candy and more. He was a repeat offender, it turns out.

His habit did not die. Terry expanded his exploits into High School. Again, his target was the school’s Student Store. Pencils. Candy. Stuff. Not terribly valuable but not his.

I don’t recall the specific violation that landed him in jail that weekend before our next game. It was more than the petty larceny we knew about. Terry would not be able to play that night. We had a rule that players must attend three of five church events each week before the game. Sunday School. Morning Worship, Church Training, Evening Worship. Wednesday Youth Group. Miss more than two, and you did not play in the next game. Maybe now you pick up what it means to be a recovering legalist, a true fundamentalist. All law and no grace.

Terry showed up to watch.

We talked about his weekend. He did not offer many details. He did make a point to tell me,

“I prayed and asked that God would get me out of jail. He didn’t.”

I looked at him. I replied, “Terry, God did not put you in jail. You did that. You can’t break the law and think your prayer works magic and rules out consequences.”

Prayer is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.

Oklahoma Baptists may have felt a little pride when Bailey Smith was elected as President of the Southern Baptist Convention in June of 1980. Smith was pastor of the First Southern Baptist Church of Del City. He was the youngest pastor elected to serve the denomination as President at 41. Two months later, speaking at the Religious Roundtable’s National Affairs Briefing, he made a lightning-rod remark.

“It’s interesting to me at great political battles how you have a Protestant to pray and a Catholic to pray and then you have a Jew to pray,” Smith stated. “With all due respect to those dear people, my friend, God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. For how in the world can God hear the prayer of a man who says that Jesus Christ is not the true Messiah? It is blasphemy. It may be politically expedient, but no one can pray unless he prays through the name of Jesus Christ.”

The blowback came from Jews and even Baptists, among others. Later in his life, Smith described his words as an “unfortunate remark.” An interviewer reported,

He denied anti-Semitic intent and cited words attributed to Jesus in John 14:6, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.”

“So I believe that for our prayers to be heard, they must, as the Bible said, be made through Jesus,” Smith told People magazine in 1982. “I’ve never apologized for what I believe, but I am deeply sorry that I hurt some people.”

I recall the debates that swirled after that. I began at OBU in August one year later. There were still conversations being had.

One outcome was that many, and still do, believe that for a prayer to be heard, the one praying must conclude their prayer with the words “in Jesus’s name.” It was, and is, seen as the magic seal of every prayer. It was the law of proper prayer.

Prayer cannot be reduced to employing a proper formula.

Yes, Jesus said,

If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it.

That is Good News.

But Jesus’s Good News is not that we now have an expansive list of what we may ask, and that it is secured by the appropriate ending to our prayers. The Good News is that the Triune God will keep doing what the Father, Son, and Spirit have been doing to put an end to the Powers of Sin and Death through the Cross and Resurrection of Christ, for he lives with death behind Him, and in Him we do. The Good News is that the God who raised Jesus from the dead, having first delivered Israel from Egypt, rescues and delivers people today from the Powers of Sin and Death. He still works the works He always has so that we might believe into Jesus.

Look up the page to the last line from our reading last week. It is worth reminding ourselves that the Farewell Discourse runs right into Jesus’s High Priestly Prayer and builds as we go along. That is, we fail if we make Jesus’s words here about anything but the ongoing works of the Father through the Son. That is what Jesus said.

Otherwise, believe because of the works themselves.

And then Jesus gives the Truly, Truly, or the King James Verily, Verily; it is the exclamation point that emphasizes what follows. Jesus doesn’t want what he says to be missed when He says,

The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do. And he will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.

That is, the works Jesus does are not random or disconnected from Who He is and His mission. Life may be arbitrary in our experience of it. But the works Jesus does are not. Therefore, the greater works that those who believe do and will do cannot be anything less than, or different from, what Jesus does with the Father in Him. Put another way, the Church, the only Body Jesus has on earth today, will do by the Spirit what the Father gives the Son to do. Jesus said anything, not everything.

Think of it this way. After the Resurrection, Jesus is not now answering prayers as if He is Bruce Almighty. He is not at all like the Jim Carey character that takes up God’s job while God, played by Morgan Freeman, goes on vacation.

Bruce sits at his computer and sees his Inbox full of prayer requests. Rather than read them he indiscriminately answers all of them, “Yes.” When he leaves his house the next morning, chaos abounds. The always “Yes” creates a waterfall of contradictory conditions. And they are random and disconnected. We may want our every prayer answered with a “Yes,” but it is Good News they are not.

Jesus tells us his works, the works they have seen, the works we have seen, are always on offer.

Ask anything in my name, and I will do it,

Jesus connects Who He is and the works the Father has done through him. Therefore, the answer cannot always be, “Yes.” It may be better that rather than viewing the lack of a “Yes” as a “No,” it may be that our ask does not align with the works Jesus did and does. Anything is not everything.

Jesus adds,

That the Father may be glorified in the Son.

Consider this one more layer that points to the obedience Jesus describes as,

I only do what the Father gives me to do . . .

I only say what the Father gives me to say . . .

I do what I see the Father doing, and I say what I hear the Father saying . . .

Glory is revealed in the faithfulness of the Son. Jesus prays that in his hour, on the Cross, the Father would be glorified in the Son. That is to say, that the offer to do anything for those who pray in the name of Jesus is not about praying and then appending Jesus’s name to our ask. Jesus makes the offer on his way to the Cross. That is, anything that brings glory to the Father through the cross of Christ is the anything prayers Jesus will do.

The glory of God is made known as Jesus answers our prayers that His works of grace and mercy - the work of the Cross - bringing about the redemption of all creation from the Powers of Sin and Death - are answered. Jesus continues the works of the Father through the Spirit in the Church. Our work today is gospel work. To ask, praying, that the Spirit of Jesus will do and does the works of Jesus through those who believe into Jesus, you and me, we, is the cause for which Jesus answers.

If you ask anything in my name, I will do it.

Our friend Jason neared the end of his sermon last Sunday on this very passage.

On Wednesday afternoon, I was at the infusion center at my oncologist’s office, he said.

An old woman sat directly next to me, a red-orange tube running from a bag to her chest. She wore a blue scarf with peacocks on it around her small, bony head. Her face looked so sunken and her skin so stretched and translucent that guessing her age felt impossible. She greeted me - exhausted, her eyes only half open - with a distinct prairie accent.

After I sat down next to her, I opened Frederich Dale Bruner’s doorstop heavy book on the Gospel of John and I turned to his commentary on this passage from the Farewell Discourse.

No sooner had I opened the book than the woman started to cry- whimper really - from the sores her chemo-poison had burnt into her mouth and tongue and throat. Beseeching the nurse, she pleaded, “Make the pain go away.” She kept on like that, inconsolable, with no concern for what I or anyone else might think about her. In a different-size person you’d call it a tantrum. After a while, once she had calmed down and her agony subsided, she glanced down at the page open between us where verses thirteen and fourteen were set apart and made obvious by bold italics.

Then she glared at me, “Why did Jesus ever make the promise.”

Hearing this question as Jason preached reminded me of another conversation.

We sat at a high-top table. For a few years, a few friends had gotten together most every week to talk about the upcoming Sunday’s Scriptures in the Lectionary. This time one of those friends and I were meeting with a small group that had serious, even hard questions about life and faith, about the Bible and why some things, bad things, happen. The stories we heard were heartbreaking; some were maddening. Why did they not end sooner? How will we recover? Will there be justice? Why no answer? Didn’t Jesus say ask and I will do anything?

Not long after those conversations, my friend told me he could no longer believe. His prayers and others had not been answered. These were not prayers for a new car, a new house, a new job, more pay, or anything that we have heard some propose that we name it and claim it. Whatever it is.

To this day I am saddened that I did not have a better response. No matter my tried-and-true, even Scriptural, suggestions, they were no match for those who had decided there were no works to believe in. That asking in prayer did not work. Maybe you have been or are there. Or maybe you have never been in one of life’s gravest situations, so you have not been disenchanted, but you would not be sure how you might respond should you get news that your body is at war with itself.

Jason continued his story.

“Why did Jesus ever make that promise?”

The woman in the peacock scarf did not lift her tired, hollow glare from me.

She waited for an answer.

“Because,” I replied, “Jesus wants to continue his redemptive work through us - through our prayers. If we pray petitions conformed to his cross and in his service to the gospel, he promises to act on them. Ask in the cross’s cause, and he has bound himself to do it.”

I watched that port in her chest rise and fall as she sighed. She thought I was dodging her question.

“What sort of prayer is in the cause of the cross?” She asked.

I thought about it.

Finally, I answered, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner - God answers that prayer every time.”

A silence settled between us. I turned pages in Bruner’s big book, and I got to work as I waited for the nurse. After a while she turned to me in the large, leather infusion chair.

“How long you been coming here? She asked.

She looked surprised by my answer, “Over ten years now.”

“You ever pray for God to heal you total? Make you whole and put this clean behind you?”

I nodded, “Of course. All the time.”

“Me too,” she said, “For almost a year now.”

I waited.

I could tell she was considering whether the next question would offend me.

“If Jesus made that promise …”

And she pointed at the page of the book resting on the arm of my chair.

“If Jesus made that promise, then how come not one of my prayers for healing has been answered? He promised to do it, right? But he hasn’t done it. And the hourglass in me is nearly empty.”

I closed the book and turned in my seat to look her square in the face.

“Jesus does not always heal us,” I said, “God does miracles, absolutely. But more often, the way we suffer and the manner in which we die, they are a way - no, they are the way - we bear witness to his cross and our resurrection. Remember, the Father did not remove the cup from Jesus either.”

She stared at me, chewing on my words.

“Look,” I said, “No one wants me to be healed more than me. But God’s trying to heal a whole creation, and he can’t do it without a people who live as if they they’re unafraid to die.”

“My daughter is a Buddhist,” she said, “According to her, the Buddha teaches that all of life is suffering. What do you think about that?”

“I think the Buddha didn’t need to be very perceptive to come up with a line like that.”

She looked me over, uncertain if I was joking.

“I don’t know about the Buddha. I only know that he’s not the way to the Father.”

She turned away from me and looked at the ceiling tiles.

“I would prefer it if Jesus would just do anything I asked of him.”

“Sure, you would. Me too! That’s the trouble with a true and living God. He’s real enough to disappoint us. The anything he promises is not everything. But he is already your everything.”

“How is that? How is he already my everything?”

“It’s a different promise he makes, I said, “whenever you pray, it is Jesus praying in you as though you are his very own garden. We do not always get the answers we want, but we never pray alone. And the one who prays with us lives with death behind him. So even our prayers that seem to go unanswered are nevertheless proof that this sickness will not end in death.”

Jesus told the troubled disciples, not that everything would he do, but anything that was in line with the Good News of God’s salvation, the gospel he would do. Greater things, Jesus said. Not different things. We are given, that is the Body of Christ, is given anything we need to do the works that give the world the Good News. And that news most often comes, no always comes, as power is made perfect in weakness. This is the cause of the "anything," not everything, Jesus says he will do.

We are in Christ, having died with Him. We have been raised with Christ whom the Father raised from the dead. Now living with death behind Christ, and so us, Jesus is given to do anything we ask for the redemption of others, of sinners, of the world by His grace and for His glory.