Just about everyone who believes in God has been praying about a close-to-the-heart matter for a long time. Whether it be for the healing of a loved one, the conversion of a loved one, the conversion of a leader, for the gift of a child, for the gift of a spouse, for the gift of employment, for revival in a locality or in a worshipping community, asking for an answer to whether a deceased loved one made it to heaven or not, for funds to enable a special project, for reconciliation between loved ones, for the release of a loved one from addiction or from a gang, asking for ‘what is my vocation?’ answers from God – we’ve all got at least one of these.

Some people receive from God very quickly, and the rest of us struggle to quieten the envy that arises in our hearts. We are happy for them, but at the same time our hearts feel shattered because our hearts feel that God has overlooked us, or that we weren’t worthy enough, and we wonder ‘what have we done wrong’?

Somewhere in our minds we know that God’s answers are always good, and that they are either Yes, Not Yet, or I’ve Got Something Better For You. But our hearts feel the pain of the delay, and it is an ongoing battle to have faith and not let doubt take over. We feel the weariness of that battle when we’ve been praying night and day for 4 years, 7 years, 12 years, 20 years. Add to that the mockery of those who infer, ‘You’re still praying for that!, Get over it, get a life’.

At times we console ourselves with the notion that there is a truth to the longer the delay the bigger and better the answer. We cling onto the answer St Monica received after 20 years of praying for her wayward son Augustine. Not only did he get converted from error, he became a priest; not only did he become a priest, he became a bishop; not only did he become a bishop, he became a saint; not only did he become a saint, but he is recognised as a doctor of the Church, and his writings appear more frequently than any others in the Office of Readings. St Monica didn’t see much of this happen on earth except his conversion, but her prayers paved the way for the rest.

We have moments of hope, faith and trust, but the battle to persevere and to keep our hearts soft and thankful towards God keeps on going.

Is there any good news? Yes, there is.
God has an observable modus operandi when it comes to long term prayers.

There are three patterns.

The first pattern is the long-term prayer followed by the suddenly. We see this in Anna the daughter of Phanuel. She had been praying for several decades that the Messiah would come, and then suddenly she is given an opportunity to hold Him in her arms. In the Gospel we see several healings take on that pattern, with long periods of illness and prayer for healing, like the woman with the haemorrhage, then sudden and complete healing through Jesus.

The second pattern is long term prayer followed by a promise followed by more long-term prayer and then a specific promise linked to a specific date. We see this in Simeon. He had prayed so much for the coming of the Messiah that God gave him a promise that he would see the Messiah with his own eyes before he died. He kept praying, strengthened by that promise, until the prompting of the Holy Spirit said something like, ‘Get to the Temple, Now!’. We also see this in Abraham and Sarah who were childless and had long prayed for a child, then God gave them a promise that they indeed would have a child, then more long years of praying and waiting occurred until God said, this time next year you will hold your child in your arms.

The third pattern is long term prayer until a holy person comes along, and not-knowing gives way to holy expectation. We see this in Hannah the mother of Samuel. She had long term prayers but after Eli’s blessing she went home happy, convinced that God had heard and answered. We see it with Elizabeth and Zechariah, parents of John the Baptist. They had long term prayers for a child, but it was only after the visitation of the angel to Zechariah that they knew God’s answer was coming.

I’ve experienced the second pattern and the third pattern in my own life.

What do these examples teach us? That God answers long-term prayers in specific, personal and unmistakable ways. God honours the perseverance of His sons and daughters in specific, personal and unmistakable ways. He doesn’t give nebulous answers to long term hopes.

That means that the array of prophetic words that say 'your breakthrough is coming', 'your long-term prayers are being answered' are just stating a universal truth and not actually promising anything. The answers to our long-term prayers are always on the way. What our hearts long for is a bankable answer to When.

Those kinds of prophetic words are rather easy to release because they are non-specific, and no one really knows if it was directly for them or not. They also tend to be crowd pleasing words because everyone wants to know that their time of waiting is over. But they also tend to be faith-destroyers and send people on hope-deferred spirals.

Let me explain how that happens. A non-specific word is given, and because they are words we long to hear specifically addressed to ourselves, we let hope spring up. Then a few weeks elapse and absolutely nothing in our situation has changed. That little spring of hope deflates and we enter the hope-deferred no man’s land again, kicking ourselves that we gave in to false hope yet again. When this happens often enough, we begin to stop believing in God’s goodness and become convinced that God is cruel. When that spiral happens often enough, we either delete that prophet’s social media posts from our scrolling or we change churches, because we just can’t go through that particular agony again.

What a difference it would make if the various people receiving this kernel of a prophetic word from God would diligently seek Him for specifics! It is similar to the change in faith dynamic between a leader saying, ‘God wants to heal people tonight’ compared to ‘God wants to heal people with hearing issues tonight’. The latter gives specific form to faith expectations, and consequently the faith level increases. Consider the difference between ‘I declare you (plural) are going to receive breakthrough today’ and ‘I declare that there is a special grace here today to heal those who have been in chronic pain for over a year’. It is far easier for someone to say, ‘hey that’s me, yes please God’ to the latter than to the former, it is also far easier with the latter for those who say, ‘hey that’s not me’, to happily pray for those whose day of grace it is.
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We do the character of God a grave injustice if we release the beginning of His communication and not the fullness of it. Frequently Jesus used the rabbinic method in the Gospels, He set a topic and waited for people to ask questions; or someone asked Him a question, He responded with a clarifying question, and the answer given by the questioner gave scope to the ultimate answer of Jesus. We know that Jesus was deeply grieved when He privately gave the apostles teaching about His suffering and death and they refused to question Him to gain deeper understanding.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 25th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, is taken from the third quarter of Chapter 9 of St Mark. Between last Sunday and this Sunday (Mark 8:27-35) there has been the transfiguration of Jesus, questions about Elijah preceding the Messiah, and the deliverance of a boy with a spirit of dumbness.

At the transfiguration the Father had a message for the disciples and for us, ‘Listen to My beloved Son’; and what had Jesus been talking about prior to the transfiguration? That the Messiah must be rejected, suffer and be put to death, and be raised up.

After the transfiguration and the deliverance of the boy, Jesus deliberately takes the disciples away from the hurly-burly of public ministry, away from all the usual distractions, so that He could teach them something of the utmost importance.

The crucial mission of the Messiah – far above all the other parts of His mission from the Father – is to redeem the world from sin, to totally conquer evil, and the only way that can happen is through His sacrificial death as the pure and innocent Passover Lamb of God.

Soon the journey to Jerusalem, the one that will take Him to Calvary, to accomplish this crucial mission, will begin. It is imperative that He prepares His disciples for the cataclysmic events that are going to take place.

But it becomes obvious that they are either unable to listen or unwilling to engage with the topic of the necessity of suffering and of the Cross.

One reason for this is denial. Jesus is talking about truly horrific things as being a non-negotiable done deal. It is also our usual first response to bad news.

Another reason is fear. When we experience fear, the body’s fight/flight/freeze response kicks in, and the higher mental functions of reasoning are suspended.

So they don’t do their job as disciples, which is to ask questions of the teacher. Asking questions and probing a topic is how students best come to grasp and internalize that topic. And no teacher can go on to the next topic until he/she is sure that his/her students have grasped the prerequisite topics for understanding the new topic he/she wants to present to them. For example, in order to teach multiplication, you must first teach addition; before you can teach how to cook a mornay, you have to teach how to prepare a basic white sauce.

What kind of questions was Jesus expecting?

Perhaps…
How are You feeling about that?
Is this suffering you are to undergo absolutely necessary?
Help me understand why.
Why is it necessary for the Messiah to suffer like this?
What’s the point?
How do You prepare for sufferings like that?
How do You keep sane knowing that this is coming?
How certain is this, 80%, 90%, 100%?
Does that mean suffering of that order of magnitude is in our paths too?
What do You want us to do when this begins to happen?
How can we help You as You face this?
Is it possible for us to help You in any way?
Those psalms that foretell this are quite scary, is it really going to be like that?
What is the value of rejection, suffering and death?
How should we prepare for when these days overtake us?
Teach us how to prepare for our own times of suffering and trial.
How far away are these events? When will they take place?
How do you want us to handle your burial?
Death is final. What is this event after your death that you speak of?
How will we recognise it?
What will become of us when you are gone?

Can you begin to understand how differently the disciples would have coped with His passion and death if they had asked any of these questions?
Can you begin to fathom the treasures of wisdom and understanding that were there for the asking, but were never asked for, and how much we (the whole church throughout time) would have gained if those questions had been asked?
Can you begin to grasp how frustrating it must have been for Jesus, to see His disciples not listening, and so utterly disengaged from what He is trying to teach them and prepare them for.

Despite their lack of engagement, Jesus still continued to try to prepare the disciples for the horror to come, and also tells them that the horror won’t be the end of the story. What else could He do? He had to trust that when the hour of His passion and death overtook them, that they would remember that He had told them it was going to happen, so that they might find a ray of hope that God was still in control, that this was indeed part of God’s plan, and that His death was not the end of that plan, and there’s something big to come after His death.

Fear and denial are our usual response too
‘dear God I hope that’s not true, may it never happen’.

In fact we do it regularly. We dismiss prophets as false because what they say seems so surreal eg Kenneth Hargin 1963 http://garycarpenter.org/PDF/KennethHagin1963Prophecy.pdf

We did the same with the very few prophets who said ‘pray, because there are laboratories preparing bio-weapons’ and the ones who said, ‘a pandemic is coming’.
It seemed so wild, so far from the reality at that time, so weird, so far-fetched,
and yet ultimately it was true.

Our automatic response at the time was: ‘O dear God, I hope that’s not true, may it never happen’.

It should have been
How do You want me to pray about this?
What do You want me to do about this?
What kind of preparations need to happen to minimize and/or prevent this?
I need confirmation from You to treat this as seriously as You want me to; if this is true please send me confirmation, and help me to recognise it when it comes, as coming from You.

If the disciples can’t hear the part about ‘rejection, suffering and death’, then they can’t hear the part about being raised up either. We don’t know what else Jesus wanted to reveal, because the disciples shut their minds and hearts down and refused to engage in the teaching process.

Jesus must have been so disappointed and discouraged by this. Any teacher is when his/her students just don’t get it and they actively disengage by passing notes and creating paper planes.
And this was teaching of the highest importance, the key to understanding everything else.

To make things worse, instead of spending their conversation time productively
His disciples indulge in that sad masculine pastime of ‘I’m better than you because…’

What did Jesus do?

He set Himself to do the best job of teaching them these unpalatable truths that He could.
That way He knew He had done the best He could, and He could hope that later on they might remember that He had tried to teach them about the cataclysm that was going to happen.

He could have chosen to leave them in the ignorance they preferred
but He loved them far too much to let them face the days of His passion and death without preparation.

Jesus could have walked away, the provocation was there, but He chose to persist with His apostles and disciples. This was probably in obedience to His Father, because part 1 of the messianic mission is suffering, death, resurrection and ascension and part 2 is building the foundations of the church, of the kingdom of God. Both missions had to be fulfilled.

He could also have yelled and thrown things and generally have let His frustrations out with impact, but He doesn’t.
Have you ever tried to teach something as basic as the answer to 10 times 11, and they just couldn’t get it, no matter how many times and ways you tried? That kind of frustration.
Be amazed at His self-control in this situation, at His gentleness, and at His patience.

If we are amazed at His resurrection and ascension, we should be equally amazed at the church that emerged at Pentecost from this motley bunch; and astounded that today it is still continuing His mission, albeit at some times in history much better than at other times in history.

Jesus knew what was going on, with the one-upmanship game, and He had a plan.
But it didn’t get sprung until they were behind closed doors at Capernaum, where they felt safe.
He could have given them a public scolding about being unteachable and about how one-upmanship decreases love and trust.
but He chose to do it in private, to not humiliate them publicly.

But He still got the message across that even if they thought they could hide what they were up to from Jesus, He knew the whole without being told.

He waited patiently, and took this teachable moment when the opportunity was ripe, and then whammied them with a lesson in kingdom values that they would never forget.

Humble service is the yardstick of greatness in the kingdom of God;
the exact antithesis of the world’s yardsticks of money, power, attractiveness and pleasure.

What is the challenge for us in this Gospel?

Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus difficult questions.
Don’t be afraid to ask Jesus to tell you more when He shows you something that is beyond your current levels of understanding and comprehension.

If you are game, pray with me…

Dear Jesus, there is probably something in my life, or something about my future, that you have been trying to show me, and I just haven’t grasped it. I may not have even picked up on Your signals. I am truly sorry for not having been attentive enough to You. I am sorry for the many times I have not recognised the ways You have tried to gain my attention. I am sorry for the times I have said to You in my words, or by my actions, ‘oh no, I don’t want to go there, I don’t want to know that’. Please forgive me. I trust that You only want to show me things – especially when they are difficult things – to bring about greater good in my life and in the lives of others – and that You know me and love me too much to give me anything that I can’t handle (with You and Your grace to assist me). In Your goodness, please help me to recognise the messages and teaching You are so graciously offering to me. Help me to engage with You on those matters, and to courageously ask You questions about those matters, and to wait for Your answers and to act diligently upon them. Help me to believe You the first time, and to take what You say seriously. I want to be a much better student and disciple of Yours, better than I have ever been before. Amen.
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Holy Mary, mother of Jesus, please intercede on my behalf for this. Amen.
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The Gospel for this Sunday, the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, is taken from the end of Chapter 8 of St Mark. Between last Sunday and this Sunday (Mark 8:1-26) there has been a second multiplication of loaves, a demand for a sign, a warning against the leaven of the Pharisees and the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida. In this part of Mark:8, while they are on their way to the villages around Caesarea Philippi, Jesus interrogates His disciples.

But before we get to that, if the ministry itinerary of Jesus seems strange, well it kind of is. Why would Jesus push on to Sidon after going to Tyre, and why is He off to Caesarea Phillipi?

The answer is in the map of Israel at the time of Joshua, and where the territory of the various tribes were apportioned within Israel.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e6/a6/de/e6a6dec8f6ced5c5fcc09f40fe6df877.jpg

Tyre and Sidon are where the tribe of Asher settled, and the area around Caesarea Phillipi is where the tribe of Dan settled. In the time of Jesus these places were foreign territory, but if you were looking for descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, you would look in these places. This speaks of an incredible commitment of Jesus to seek out the lost, and of God giving a message through these missionary journeys that God has not forgotten His covenant with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even if they have forgotten Him.

Jesus opens up this deliberate interrogation by asking ‘Who do men say I am?

The answers are interesting:
John the Baptist is one answer, recognizing that Jesus and John preached the same message ‘The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the good news.’
Elijah is another answer, recognizing that with His miracles Jesus is on a par with the greatest prophet of Israel. Remember that at the Transfiguration, Moses represented the law, and Elijah represented the prophets.
Or one of the other prophets was the third answer the disciples provided, recognizing that Jesus carries a powerful message from God, and is a catalyst for the destiny of Israel, and this will bring Him into conflict with those who do not fear God and don’t walk in God’s ways.

Then Jesus puts them all on the spot and asks;
‘Who do you say I am?’
Peter responds, ‘You are the anointed one’.

When Israelites were hoping and longing for the anointed one of God, the Messiah, what did they expect the Messiah to be and to do?
-That the Messiah would usher in a new covenant. Jeremiah 31:31
-That the Messiah would be a prophet like Moses. Deuteronomy 18:15-19
-That the Messiah would be the Son of Man. Daniel 7:13-14
-That the Messiah would be greater than David. Psalm 110:1-4
-That the Messiah would be a descendant of David. 2 Samuel 7:12-16
-That the Messiah would be the coming one to whom the scepter belongs. Genesis 49:10
-That the Messiah would be the descendant of Abraham through whom all nations would be blessed. Genesis 12:3

When David was King, an extraordinary king who took God as His commander, Israel was united, and Israel had rest from the enemies that normally besieged or enslaved them. David carried that triple calling of priest (worshipper of God), prophet and king; and was seen as a type of the Messiah to come.

Peter and the others were likely to be hopeful of being close retainers of king Jesus in a new earthly Davidic kingdom following a swift and painless overthrow of the Roman occupation.

But Jesus starts teaching them about the Messianic prophecies they’ve never ever considered before. All of that suffering servant stuff in Isaiah, and some of that gruesome stuff in Psalm 22 and other places.

Whoever we think Jesus to be
Jesus Himself insists that God’s plan for the Messiah is rejection, suffering, death and resurrection
and that to belong to Him
and indeed even necessary for salvation,
we have to be willing to walk exactly the same path.

That’s exactly what the scriptures have foretold that the Messiah will be.

In effect Jesus is saying here we are at A, the destination is B.
You think getting from A to B will unlock lots of glory with little effort.
Whatever you think B is, the B is bigger than you can ever possibly imagine.
God’s plan isn’t earthly and temporal, it is divine and eternal.
You are thinking far too small if you are thinking about a terrestrially based kingdom.
You are thinking far too small if you are only considering the salvation needs of this generation.

Getting to the fulness of the kingdom of God is going to take total commitment from Me, the pathway is not straight forward, and it is going to require significant suffering and rejection, and yes even an ignominious death, to get there.

The requirements for you to enter into the fulness of the kingdom of God are no different.

If you are going to come with Me from here on in,
this is what it is going to cost you.
No compromise is possible.

Either you are 100% with Me, and do it 100% God’s way,
no matter how heavy the ultimate personal cost turns out to be,
or you walk away now.

I will follow God’s path for Me even if none of you stay as My disciples.

It is decision time.

To stay with Me you have to accept this path of the Cross,
you have to live it wholeheartedly.

Are you coming with Me all the way?
Or do our ways part now?
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On your answer hangs the salvation of countless others.