6 January 2016
Wednesday after Epiphany
Our Faith teaches us that Jesus was true God and true man. And so, as we celebrate the Epiphany, we are prone to imagine the bright light of God shining like a glow around the man Jesus. No doubt for those with eyes to see, so it was.
And yet, though He was divine by nature, Jesus had to pray. He prayed as a man, to be sure – and gave us the example of prayer throughout the Gospels. In fact, we are told that He would often spend His nights in prayer “to the Father.” That is a sure sign of hope for insomniacs: the inability to sleep well may well be a hidden invitation to use the quiet, dark hours of the night for prayer! Jesus did.
But did He also pray as God? Does God pray? Well, the Son was in relation with the Father – we see Him praying to the Father in human words, to be sure, but always as the Son who is relating to the Father. Whatever words the divine Son did or did not use in His communication with the Father within the Trinity are not fully known to us by any means: but we know that He was in constant communication with the Father, and that He set aside special times for that exclusive activity. John’s Gospel especially shows us what this prayer was like. Now: if the Son of God would spend His nights in prayer with the Father, how can we do anything less? As the priest keeps reminding us at Mass: “let us pray…..”