It's Just Not True

It’s Just Not True

May 19, 2020

John 16:23-24

You know, the Bible contains so much that is true. It contains some of the most profound truth humans have ever uttered. “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” Micah 6:8. “For I am convinced that neither death nor life…nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Romans 8:38-39. “All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ….[I]n Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them.” 2 Corinthians 5:18-19. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God….And the Word became flesh and lived among us….” John 1:1, 14. “Jesus said to him ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life….’” John 14:6a. Both Testaments of the Christian Bible, including among many other parts of them the Gospels and many of the Letters speak these and other profound truths with clarity and power.

But then. Then there are things in the Bible that I just can’t understand as true at all. Some of the passages I struggle with contain promises about prayer that just don’t seem true to me. There’s one of those at John 16:23-24. There Jesus is talking to his disciples shortly before his arrest and execution by the Romans. He says some things they don’t understand about his going away and coming again. Then he says this to them: “Very truly, I tell you, if you ask anything of the Father in my name, he will give it to you….Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete.” What brings me up short in these lines is the use of the word “anything.” “If you ask anything in his name,” he says, God the Father will give it to you. I mean, Wow! Anything! Really? Wouldn’t it be great if that were true? Ever since I spent time in Germany in my youth I’ve wanted to own a Mercedes-Benz car, but I’ve never been able to afford one. You mean to say that all I have to do is ask God for one in Jesus’ name and God will get one for me? All I have to do is sing with Janis Joplin “Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes-Benz” and I’ll get one? Do I have to specify the model, or will God pick out the one that’s best for me? How could I have overlooked that way of getting one all these years?

Of course, the truth is that I could ask God to get me a Mercedes-Benz many times a day my whole life long, and God would never get me one. Therein lies my problem with what John’s Jesus says to his disciples here. Ask the Father for anything in my name and you’ll get it, he says. Now, I suppose I can’t completely rule out the possibility that these words were true for Jesus’ first disciples, although I’m not aware of any historical evidence to suggest that they were. One thing I know for sure. They aren’t true for me or as far as I know anybody else today. It’s not that I doubt that prayer has power. I know that in many circumstances it does. But that God will give us anything that we ask for in Jesus’ name just ain’t so.

I can hear the objections to what I just said. You think you know more about God than Jesus did? You think you’re smarter than the Bible? You claim to be a Christian minister. How dare you contradict God’s holy word? I hear those things. I’ve heard them all before. Here’s my response. I have faith in God and Jesus Christ not in the Bible. Jesus is the Word of God. The Bible isn’t. My faith in God and Jesus Christ doesn’t require me to turn off my brain or to deny my personal life experience or the experience of others. I don’t know why the author of the Gospel of John put these words in Jesus’ mouth, although along with the best Bible scholars I’m quite sure Jesus never said them. I know that God will grant us many things through prayer, but not anything, not everything. God just doesn’t work that way. I know that it’s bad theology to think that we can manipulate God into doing our will just by praying in Jesus’ name or by doing anything else for that matter. We can find spiritual things through prayer, things that God is always offering us and wants us to have. Spiritual things like peace, courage, and hope. But anything? I’m sorry. It just ain’t true. God doesn’t work that way no matter how much we might wish that God did.