On the Spot: Prayer in the Name of Jesus

This series highlights difficult questions and comments experienced by catechists, teachers and parents who are put ‘on the spot’ by those they are teaching. It outlines possible ways of answering, faithful to Church teaching. This time we look at what it means to pray ‘in the name’ of Jesus. ‘And I tell you, ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened.’ (Luke 11:9-10) ‘Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it, that the Father may be glorified in the Son; if you ask anything in my name, I will do it.’ (John 14:13-14) These are such specific and unequivocal promises, that it is not difficult to see the problem for those, immature in years or in the Faith, who take these promises at the most literal level and then feel let down when their requests, often altruistic in form and content, are not met. We are not, I think, so often put ‘on the spot’ with this dilemma by young children who have not been in this world as long, take things more trustingly, and, most importantly, perhaps have not yet put those words of Jesus to the test. It is more often their parents or elder siblings who challenge catechists with this. Perhaps the difficulty could be illustrated by reference to two young people – we’ll call them Molly and Steve. Molly is the mother of a young family. Happily married, she attends Mass grimly, with no personal satisfaction, to please her husband and to keep to their agreement to bring up their children as Catholics. Several years ago, just as their first child was baptised, her twin sister became ill. Molly prayed very hard that she would be healed, but she died within a few weeks. Since then, Molly cannot believe the words of Jesus, as she asked in Jesus’ name for her sister’s healing, and she consequently feels that there is no reason for her to believe any of the words of Jesus, or the teachings of the Church. Steve is a young man who finds it difficult to believe in the existence of God, despite his Catholic upbringing. As a teenager, he noticed the promise of Jesus, ‘Whatever you ask in my name, I will do it.’ Good, he thought; what I want is some kind of reassurance that I’m not wasting my life on a belief that is only a human invention. I will ask God to show himself so I can believe. So Steve prayed very hard for a sign from God. But there was no sign. He concluded that he would be spending a lot of his valuable time on Mass-going and prayer, with no guarantee that there was any substance to his belief – and decided to live for himself and for the day, according to the human and moral values he would work out when as he needed. Both these young people would say with sincerity that they prayed in the name of Jesus. They took him at his word, and he let them down. The Catechism recognises the problem: ‘Some even stop praying because they think their prayer is not heard.’ (CCC 2734)