Does God Hope?

Why does Our Lord, "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God" need to pray for St Peter? Dr Martin looks at the mystery.

From Crisis

By Regis Martin, STD

If prayer is the language of hope, the very ground and grammar of holy desire, and if the Our Father represents the greatest possible expression of that hope, why would Christ need to give voice to it himself?

Before Mass the other morning the priest, arrayed in blood red vestments, announced that he would be saying a Votive Mass in honor of the Apostle Peter, offered in thanksgiving to God for having given us so valiant a leader and saint. This was followed by an Entrance Antiphon I had not heard before, but which I was much struck by, owing to a certain mystery concealed within it:

The Lord says to Simon Peter: I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail and once you have turned your back, strengthen your brothers. 

Here, then, is Jesus, in a context fraught with high drama, telling the future pope two exceedingly important things. The text is a tag line taken from Luke’s Gospel, Chapter 22, in which Jesus, having just instituted the Holy Eucharist, turns to his eleven disciples, Judas having already left the room in order to go and betray him, to settle a petty dispute as to which of them is the greatest. Bickering among the brothers is not what Jesus needs at this moment when faced with imminent peril of arrest, torture, and death. And so he rebukes them, saying: “Let the greatest among you become as the youngest, and the leader as one who serves.” 

He then turns to Peter, imparting at greater length the two messages of which the Entrance Antiphon the other day had provided a compressed version. The entire passage runs from verse 31 to 35, which is worth reproducing for the sake of the mystery at the heart of it:

Simon, Simon, behold, Satan demanded to have you, that he might sift you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail; and when you have turned again, strengthen your brethren. 

Take note how Peter will at once remonstrate with Jesus, insisting that he would do anything for him. “Lord, I am ready to go with you to prison and to death.” To which Jesus delivers the most stinging rebuke of all: 

I tell you, Peter, the cock will not crow this day until you three times deny that you know me. 

Now that’s what you might call an ice-breaker. But how can this be? Does it really make sense to juxtapose the two statements in the way that Jesus has done? Should they even be combined at all? What must it have meant for Simon Peter to hear Jesus speaking in that way? Could he ever have imagined a scenario in which Christ would actually need to pray for him? Surely not. Besides, as the All-Powerful and All-Knowing God, why should he need to pray at all? Nevermind for Peter. Why must Christ pray at all? And a prayer of petition no less? 

But notice what followed. No sooner has Jesus promised to pray for Peter, than he goes on to pronounce, presumably on the strength of the happy outcome of his prayers, that he will then need to get busy strengthening his brothers. “Haven’t I,” Peter might reasonably reply, “been doing this all along?” 

So, what is going on here? Why, just to begin with, would Christ, who having invented the most profound and necessary petitionary prayer of all—the Our Father—feel it necessary to say one himself? Isn’t it for us rather to pray it? 

After all, if prayer is the language of hope, the very ground and grammar of holy desire, and if the Our Father represents the greatest possible expression of that hope, why would Christ need to give voice to it himself? Is he not God, after all, and so in full and perfect possession of certainty about everything? 

Hope is for humans; indeed, it is peculiarly fitted to our creaturely state, which is that of Homo Viator, of being on the way, and thus not having yet arrived. Which means, of course, that we might yet lose the way, and so succumb to a final fall into hell. But Jesus is not like us. He calls himself The Way, not someone on the way. 

And what’s this business about exhorting Peter, who, following his dust-up with the devil, must now go and strengthen all the others? I mean to say, if Christ, the Son of God, has already predicted what will happen, why should he need to ask the Father for something he simply knows will come about anyway?

Yes, but isn’t that precisely the mystery? Jesus is also a human being, which means that in the order of his humanity there are no crystal balls, no facile flights beyond the stars where everything is known in advance and human freedom has no need to exercise itself in quest of the good. 

And aren’t we forgetting something else, which takes us right to the heart of the mystery—or should I say paradox—about petitionary prayer? That Christ’s own petition to the Father that he might spare him the horror of crucifixion appears not to have been answered at all. At least not in a way that the human being Jesus might have wished. 

Which is why, in the very teeth of the Father’s apparent refusal to remit the pain of the Cross, Christ will cling with all the strength of which his humanity is capable to the sheer mystery of the Father’s plan. An inscrutability impossible for any man to unpuzzle, which is why Jesus will set aside his own preferences, submitting instead to the Father whom he loves above all else. “Not my will,” he says in the very extremity of his agony and fear, “but Thine be done.”

What a sublime and unsearchable mystery we are up against here! That Christ, the eternal Word of the Father, should freely choose to empty himself of such perfections—perfections that belong to him by dint of his very divinity—in order to enter the human estate in all its abject and messy detail, right down to becoming one of us in all things save sin.

This is because God is the One who Hopes, as the poet Peguy will put it, who, on seeing the mess we’ve made of things, actually hopes that with a nudge or two of grace we just might make it safely home. And when we do, we are assured by God himself, greater joy will be manifest than for those righteous ones who never needed any help along the way. 

“But the sinner who left and almost became lost,” Peguy continues, and here we think of Peter and the devil who sought to sift him like wheat, 

By his very going away…
He aroused fear and thus he caused hope itself to spring forth from the very heart of God,
From Jesus’ heart
The shudder of fear and the shiver,
The tremor of hope.

It is precisely owing to the wretchedness of our sins, you see, that Jesus entered into so fearful a state:

Because of this lost sheep Jesus experienced fear in love.
And the kind of tremor that divine hope creates in love itself.
Jesus as a man came to know human anxiety,
Jesus made man,
He came to know what anxiety is in the very heart of love…
But thus he also came to know the very first hint of hope’s awakening.
When the young virtue hope begins to rise in the heart of man,
Under the rough bark,
Like the first bud of April. 
– from The Portal of the Mystery of Hope

Pictured: Jesus saying farewell to the Apostles, from the Maesta by Duccio, 1308–1311