Mark 11

²² And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. ²³ Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. ²⁴ Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. ²⁵ And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel, Catch-22, is a fascinating, hilarious, and troubling account of a fictional group of American Army bombardiers stationed in Italy in WWII. In one scene, Colonel Cathcart calls the chaplain in to discuss with him the possibility of having prayers before bombing missions. Their discussion reveals the dilemmas we get ourselves into when we don’t think rightly about prayer:

“Now, I want you to give a lot of thought to the kind of prayers we’re going to say. I don’t want anything heavy or sad. I’d like you to keep it light and snappy, something that will send the boys out feeling pretty good. Do you know what I mean? I don’t want any of this Kingdom of God or Valley of Death stuff. That’s all too negative. What are you making such a sour face for?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” the chaplain stammered. “I happened to be thinking of the Twenty-third Psalm just as you said that.”

“How does that one go?”

“That’s the one you were just referring to, sir. ‘The Lord is my shepherd; I –‘”

“That’s the one I was just referring to. It’s out. What else have you got?”

“Save me, O God; for the waters are coming in unto – “

“No waters,” the colonel decided, blowing ruggedly into his cigarette holder after flipping the butt down into his combed-brass ash tray. “Why don’t we try something musical? How about the harps on the willows?”

“That has the rivers of Babylon in it, sir,” the chaplain replied, “…there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion.”

“Zion? Let’s forget about that one right now. I’d like to know how that one even got in there. Haven’t you got anything humorous that stays away from waters and valleys and God? I’d like to keep away from the subject of religion altogether if we can.”

The chaplain was apologetic. “I’m sorry, sir, but just about all the prayers I know are rather somber in tone and make at least some passing reference to God.”

“Then let’s get some new ones. The men are already doing enough [complaining] about the missions I send them on without our rubbing it in with any sermons about God or death or Paradise. Why can’t we take a more positive approach? Why can’t we all pray for something too, like a tighter bomb pattern, for example? Couldn’t we pray for a tighter bomb pattern?”

“Well, yes, sir, I suppose so,” the chaplain answered hesitantly. “You wouldn’t even need me if that’s all you wanted to do. You could do that yourself.”

“I know I could,” the colonel responded tartly. “But what do you think you’re here for? I could shop for my own food, too, but that’s Milo’s job…Your job is to lead us in prayers, and from now on you’re going to lead us in a prayer for a tighter bomb pattern before every mission. Is that clear? I think a tighter bomb pattern is something really worth praying for.”[1]

It is a hysterical passage because of the colonel’s obliviousness concerning prayer. It is a chilling passage because we can see in the colonel’s exaggerated misunderstanding a reflection of our own self-centered approach to prayer. We may not be as brazen as the colonel but in essence we do the exact same thing: we too can make prayer all about our own desires and our own agendas.

In the aftermath of the cursing of the fig tree and the cleansing of the temple Jesus speaks about faith and prayer. What He says serves as a much needed tonic to a great deal of our narcissistic prayer tendencies. We will approach this issue from the perspective of certain common “prayer mistakes” to which many of us are likely prone.

Prayer mistake #1: Prayer that is only “I” and never “we.”

Jesus speaks against our first prayer mistake in a way we may not first notice.

²² And Jesus answered them, “Have faith in God. ²³ Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. ²⁴ Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours. ²⁵ And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.”

The image of casting a mountain into the sea is a powerful one and a memorable one. It was actually a popular one among the Jews. William Barclay writes:

The phrase about removing mountains was a quite common Jewish phrase. It was a regular, vivid phrase for removing difficulties. It was specially used of wise teachers. A good teacher who could remove the difficulties which the minds of his scholars encountered was called a mountain-remover. One who heard a famous Rabbi teach said that “he saw Resh Lachish as if he were plucking up mountains.”[2]

Even though it was a popular saying Jesus did nuance it in an interesting way. Gundry observes that “the rabbis speak of uprooting mountains and moving them close together so that they knock and grind against each other, as in a mountain range…but Jesus speaks of a removal so complete that the mountain disappears in the depths of the sea!”[3]

There is, therefore, an intensity and thoroughness to Jesus’ image that likely would not have been missed by His Jewish hearers. For our purposes, however, what is most interesting is that these words are actually a call to the power of corporate prayer, of “we” prayer.

To understand what the problem is we must first understand the role that our unspoken and largely unrecognized assumptions play in our reading of the Bible. Every person who reads scripture brings to the task of reading a whole host of presuppositions, assumptions, preconceptions, and misconceptions. We bring those to our reading of the text and then we impose them on our reading of the text. And from whence do these presuppositions come? They come from all of the factors that shape us into who we are: family of origin, environment, culture, media, friends, etc.

It is important to understand this. Specifically, it is important to understand our own contexts, indeed, our own selves. Put another way, we must interpret ourselves before we can interpret scripture. It is also important to understand that some of our assumptions are largely shared within our wider cultural context. For instance, within modern American culture, radical individualism is a common assumption. That is, the assumption that we are primarily solitary individuals, the heroes of our own stories, and the point of our own story is prevalent in human society. As a result, we frequently miss the more corporate and communal aspects of the words of Jesus. That is often the case with this particular text. R.T. France explains this corporate element:

            The communal aspect of prayer is evident from the fact that vv. 22 and 24-25 are expressed in the plural (and the singular form of v. 23 derives from a os an which generalizes the statement); prayer is here presented as something which the community of disciples undertakes together, not a private transaction between the individual believer and God.[4]

In light of this, read the passage again with the “you’s” being plural. Let us use our own colloquialisms to help us understand even better:

²² And Jesus answered them, “[You all] [h]ave faith in God. ²³ Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. ²⁴ Therefore I tell [you all], whatever [you all] ask in prayer, believe that [you all] have received it, and it will be yours. ²⁵ And whenever [you all] stand praying, forgive, if [you all] have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive [you all] your trespasses.”

This is how these words should be read. Jesus is not here speaking primarily of you praying alone in your room. He is primarily speaking of His people praying corporately as a people, becoming, that is, a people of prayer. And this contrasts nicely, we might also notice, with what happened immediately before this when Jesus condemned the money changers and their crew from turning what was supposed to be a “house of prayer” into a den of robbers. In other words, the people of Jesus are to be a people of prayer in a way that radically contrasts with the self-centered self-interestedness of the money changers and their ilk.

None of this is to say that Jesus is not interested in you having a personal and private prayer life. The Bible speaks consistently of the need for personal prayer. Personal prayer is vitally important! But please do consider that if your understanding of prayer is overly-focused on you as an isolated individual and not on us as a praying people you are missing something vitally important.

The praying people of God can tell mountains to move! The praying people of God have great, great power!

Prayer mistake #2: Prayer that quits without wrestling.

Within the particular vocabulary of Jesus in this text we find a critique of another prayer mistake: the mistake of praying without wrestling, without persevering.

²³ Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him. ²⁴ Therefore I tell you, whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours.

Here again we might possibly miss this emphasis. Joel Marcus writes that these verses “put extraordinary emphasis on the necessity of perseverance in belief” and then explains why.

The exhortation in 11:23-24…contains a series of four verbs in the present tense, a grammatical structure that strongly accentuates the need for continuous prayer ([“]believe…pray…ask for…believe”), and the verbs are chiastically arranged to begin and end with the word “believe.” Our passage, then, is not an example of magical thinking: it emphasizes sharply the necessity of perseverance in the face of a seemingly contradictory reality.[5]

The present tense: “keep believing…keep praying…keep asking for…keep believing.” His reference to the chiastic structure of verses 23 and 24 is interesting. I chiasm is a series of paralleling thoughts in which the first and last words or thoughts are paralleled, the second and next-to-last words or thoughts are paralleled, and the central concept defines the whole. Many biblical writers use chiasms to emphasize certain key points. Here is how it works with our text:

A         believe

            B         pray

            B’        ask for

A’        believe

At the center of the chiasm is prayer and it is buttressed by belief, all of which are in the present tense denoting a continuation of asking.

Do not stop praying! Do not stop believing! This is a call to continuous prayer and continuous belief! This requires focus, determination, and fierce resolve! N.T. Wright has given a picture of what this kind of determination in prayer looks like.

St. Cuthbert, one of the greatest of the Celtic saints, used to pray standing up to his waist in the sea off the northeast coast of England. There’s no evidence that the sea there was any less bitterly cold then than it is in our own day.[6]

How very different this is from a casual, self-serving prayer in the midst of eating a hamburger at a red light! This is not to say, of course, that one cannot pray while eating a hamburger at a red light, but it is to say that we must regain determination and resolve in our prayer lives. This is the kind of prayer that Jesus is talking about: focused, real, and unwavering. He is speaking of the prayer that does battle, the prayer that wrestles, the prayer that will…not…quit!

He is speaking of the kind of prayer that Monica, the mother of St. Augustine demonstrated when she prayed for year after year after year that her profligate son would come to know the Lord! He is talking about the kind of prayer that we might find in this very church in which many of you have consistently called on the name of the Lord to move a mountain that shows no sign of budging. Do not quit! God hears you! God knows exactly what God is doing!

Why, then, does He wait? We must remember that God’s timing is not our own. We must also remember that God is absolutely aware of what the full implications of answering any particular prayer would be in the immediate context and in a context that transcends our own understanding.

What if you prayed a prayer at age 10 and God did not answer it until age 90? Would God have been cruel in such a scenario? Can we consider and trust that God has His reasons for “waiting” 80 years to answer? What if God knew that an answer to that particular prayer would actually have harmed you had He answered it before your 90^th birthday? What if God knew that you would not be ready until 80 years from now for the answer?

Pray without ceasing! Do not stop! Continue to wrestle and call out to the God who hears you!

Prayer mistake #3: Prayer that is undermined by the heart’s true state.

Jesus concludes His words concerning prayer with a surprising turn. He speaks of the need for the one who prays to offer forgiveness to anybody who needs it.

²⁵ And whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father also who is in heaven may forgive you your trespasses.

In saying this, Jesus was establishing the often-neglected and often-forgotten truth that our prayers can be undermined by the true state of our hearts. If we do not offer forgiveness then our prayers will be hindered and we will not be forgiven. The true state of your heart can hinder your prayers. Peter said the same thing in1 Peter when speaking of how the treatment of one’s spouse can hinder one’s prayers.

⁷ Likewise, husbands, live with your wives in an understanding way, showing honor to the woman as the weaker vessel, since they are heirs with you of the grace of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.

You cannot pray as if you are peace with God when you are harboring resentments and bitterness in your heart. Such corrosive elements hinder our prayers because they hinder our relationship with God. The link between our prayers and our relationship with God can be seen in the fact that Jesus calls God “Father” in verse 25. “Jesus’ use of the word father at the end of 11:25 should not be overlooked,” writes Ronald Kernaghan, “This is the first time in the Gospel of Mark that God is described in this way.”[7]

To call God “Father” is to presume to be in relationship with Him, but to refuse to give God those areas of our lives in which we are nursing our resentments and our feuds is to is to show that we do not truly trust Him as our Father. Our hearts must be His!

Like many others, my wife and I have a spare bedroom in our home in which there are, at times, clean clothes that we have not folded yet. When that is the case and we know that somebody is coming over we will sometimes say something like, “Let’s be sure to keep the door shut while they are here!” We laugh about this and promise to do better at folding all the clothes immediately, but, in the meantime, we simply shut the door.

You can do that with unfolded clothes but you cannot do that with your heart when it comes to Jesus. You cannot invite Jesus in and then say, “You are welcome here, Jesus, but you cannot go into that room. In that room is where I keep my anger. In that room is where I keep my hurt feelings. In that room is where I keep my refusal to forgive.”

No, to invite Jesus in is to give Him control of the whole house and all the rooms! Would you like to pray? Then stop compartmentalizing your life. Stop telling yourself that you can refuse to give forgiveness over here while calling on the name of Jesus over there. Give Him control of the whole house!

Prayer is a beautiful and powerful thing! Jesus has pointed to the beauty and power of it by telling us that mountains can be moved by faithful prayer. To see the full potential of prayer, we must pray alone and we must learn to pray together. We must pray without ceasing. And we must pray out of hearts that have forgiven those who need forgiveness.

Would you see the mountains move? Then ask God to move these mountains from your own life so that you can truly pray!

 

[1] Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 1995), 238-239.

[2] William Barclay, The Gospel of Mark. The Daily Study Bible. (Edinburgh: The Saint Andrew Press, 1971), p.287.

[3] Robert H. Gundry, Mark. Vol.2 (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1993), p.649.

[4] R.T. France, The Gospel of Mark. The New International Greek Testament Commentary. Gen. Eds., I. Howard Marshall and Donald A. Hagner. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2002), p.448.

[5] Joel Marcus, Mark 8-16. The Anchor Bible. Vol.27A (New Haven, CT: The Anchor Yale Bible, 2009), p.795-796.

[6] N.T. Wright, Simply Christian (San Francisco, CA: Harper San Francisco, 2006), p.23.

[7] Ronald J. Kernaghan, Mark. The IVP New Testament Commentary Series. Ed., Grant R. Osborne. Vol.2 (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2007), p.222.