Prayer to Christ
In the NT, prayer is typically addressed to God the
Father. However, it appears
that Jesus was also addressed in prayer in two
ways:
Firstly, a range of NT books including Pauline
epistles, 1 Peter and Jude speak of prayer or praise being offered to God through
Jesus Christ. (Rom.1:8; 5:11; 7:25; 16:27; Col.3:17;
Heb.13:15; 1 Pet.2:5; 4:11; Jude:25.) Illustrative of these is Jude’s closing
doxology:
to the only God our Saviour be glory, majesty,
power and authority, through Jesus Christ
our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen. (Jude:25)
However, a small number of other texts appear to
indicate prayer being made
directly to the heavenly Jesus:
Peter’s Pentecost speech begins with a recitation
of Joel’s prophecy that ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be
saved’. However, by the end of Peter’s speech, it is the name of Jesus that he
urges the crowd to call on in order to be saved. (Acts 2:21,38)
Stephen’s dying prayer ‘Lord Jesus, receive my
spirit’ (Acts 7:59f ) is not only unequivocally directly addressed to Jesus,
but also appears deliberately to echo Jesus’ dying prayer, ‘Father, into your
hands I commit my spirit’ (Luke 23:46).
Acts also records Ananias’ prayer to ‘the Lord’,
who in a vision told him to visit Saul. His subsequent comment to Saul that
‘the Lord Jesus’ has sent him indicates that ‘the Lord’ Ananias addressed in
prayer was Jesus. (Acts 9:10-17)
In Paul’s account of his prayers to ‘the Lord’ about
his thorn in the flesh, ‘the Lord’ almost certainly refers to Jesus, as the
Lord’s reply ‘my power is made perfect in weakness’ is specifically stated in
the following verse to be ‘Christ’s power’. (2 Cor.12:7-9)
The Aramaic prayer Maran-atha
– ‘come Lord’, used by Paul in 1 Corinthians, is
almost certainly addressed to Jesus, as the NT is consistent in only
anticipating the eschatological coming to earth of Jesus. The synonymous Greek
expression at the end of Revelation accords with this, by being specifically addressed
to Jesus. (1 Cor.16:22; Rev.22:20) Interestingly, the NT indicates that the
early church preserved two Aramaic prayers: one – Abba,
being addressed to God the Father, while the other
– Maranatha - was
addressed to Jesus.
As well as these prayers solely addressed to Jesus,
prayer was also made jointly to Jesus and the Father. In 1 Thessalonians
3:11-13 Paul asks ‘our God and Father himself and our Lord Jesus’ (Αυτος
δε ο θεος και πετηρ ημων και ο κυριος ημων 'Ιησους)
to establish and strengthen the church, a prayer he echoes in 2 Thessalonians
2:16-17, but in reverse order, addressing it to ‘our Lord Jesus Christ himself
and God our Father’ (Αυτος δε ο κυριος ημων 'Ιησους Χριστος και ο θεος ο
πατηρ ημων).
Interestingly, the Fourth Gospel records Jesus’
teaching during the final Passover meal, that his disciples should both pray to
the Father in Jesus’ name, and that Jesus himself will grant them whatever they
ask in his name to glorify the Father. (Jn 14:13-14; 16:23-24) This portrays
Jesus as both the means of access to the Father and the one who enacts the
response to the prayer, a description that the Logos christology of the
prologue makes understandable.
Significantly, Colossians 3:17 appears to echo the
Fourth Gospel’s account of this teaching of Jesus, when it urges that all
worship practices, including thanksgiving prayer, should be done ‘in
the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through
him’. Hurtado observes that this characteristic offering
of prayer to God, through Jesus
occurs both in the NT and other early Christian sources.
In fact, it is hard to see how the NT’s affirmation
of prayer to both God and Jesus could have been held together with the explicit
affirmation of monolatry, without the presupposition of something approximating
to a Logos Christology underlying it. (Martin Parsons, Unveiling God:
Contextualizing Christology for Islamic Culture [Pasadena, Calif.: William
Carey Library, 2004], 123-24)
