What Are Your Expectations?
Twenty-Fourth Sunday Scripture Readings
In today’s gospel reading, Jesus teaches his disciples a valuable lesson and, in doing so, teaches us one as well. If we pay close attention to what’s being said in this gospel passage, we might come to a new understanding of prayer. Jesus asks a simple question: Who am I? He asks it of three different audiences: those outside his circle of intimates, those inside—his disciples—and us, the community of believers. The outsiders identify Jesus with the religious roles they’re most familiar with—the prophets like Elijah and John the Baptist. The insiders have a more profound understanding of Jesus’s identity, as Peter recognizes him as the Messiah, connecting Jesus with their hopes and aspirations. As for us, the hearers of the good news, we’re involved in an ongoing effort to define what being followers of the Christ means for us in any given context.
What’s most disturbing about this passage is how quickly Peter is shifted from the man of faith, proclaiming his recognition of Jesus as the Messiah to the fellow Jesus calls the Satan—the accuser—the man who doesn’t get it at all. What happened? Peter’s mind was closed. He was locked inside a prison of assumptions and expectations. He’d been taught about the Messiah and told what the Messiah’s role and function should be, but Jesus’s teachings about himself went contrary to those strongly held beliefs, and Peter couldn’t adapt. Like Peter, when we approach God with expectations, we’re setting ourselves up for disappointments. That’s so ironic because when we allow ourselves to be surprised by the Spirit, what we receive always exceeds our imaginings. A wise man once told me, “Expectations are premeditated resentments.”
Can we now apply this to the way we pray? Haven’t we been taught that, if we want or need something badly, to pray to God for it? I’m afraid that most people who’ve attempted this have come away disappointed. Is God even listening? Or maybe you did wake up one day to find that pony in your backyard. I don’t know. What’s gone wrong? There are two fundamental problems with praying for something we want or need. The first problem is that we’re notoriously bad at diagnosing what’s wrong with us or our situation. We charge forward on the assumption that we know what’s really wrong with us or what’s lacking from us, but much of the time, we misjudge. We assume we know what’s good for us and what would make us happy, but often we’re running on appearances and emotion alone. We seldom get it right.
Now, if we’re terrible at diagnosing our own needs, and even worse at predicting what would be good for us, then how can we ever know what to pray for? And that’s our second problem. Since we’re asking God to answer our misguided prayers, it’s no wonder that, like Peter, God’s answer doesn’t look like we expect it to. If we find ourselves resenting God because we didn’t receive what we expected to receive when we expected to receive it, chances are, we’re misusing prayer. Don’t get me wrong … there’s no such thing as a bad prayer. All prayer creates and maintains our connection with God and that’s always and everywhere a good thing. Still, learning to use prayer differently can free us from a lot of unnecessary frustration and resentment.
Since we’re not capable of diagnosing what we truly need, and therefore can’t prescribe an effective cure for what ails us, we might just want to leave the diagnosing and prescribing to God. If we come to prayer open and without expectations, there’ll be no possibility of disappointment or resentment. Isn’t that what we commit to when we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done?” So, if there’s nothing specific that we need to pray for, what’s the use of prayer? The one thing all of us need most of all is guidance in everything we do. Success comes from aligning our will with God’s. That’s why we pray for knowledge of God’s will for us. Yet, often, we can see the right thing to do, but it seems to be too hard for us. So, we pray God for the power to do what we discern to be his will. That’s it. That’s all we really need. We pray for the knowledge of God’s will for us, and the power to carry that out.
What about praying for others? Can’t we do that? Oh, yes—so long as we refrain from pretending that we know what they need and telling God how to fix it. You see, we have a mystical connection that we’re seldom aware of. We believe that we’ve been given the gift of the Holy Spirit—that’s the life Spirit—of God. When we’re in prayer in the Spirit, we’re sharing God’s consciousness itself. When we call someone to mind in prayer, we bring them forward and make them present not only to our minds but to the mind of God that we share. The Greeks had a term for this special calling-to-mind, this making-present, they called it anamnesis. It’s anamnesis when the Jewish people make present the exodus at the Passover meal. It’s anamnesis when we make present the Last Supper, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus in the Eucharist, and it’s anamnesis when we make present to us in prayer our families and friends, living and dead. In so many ways, then, turning to God in prayer brings us into closer communion with our Heavenly Father and with one another.
Saint Paul summed up our understanding of prayer in his letter to the Romans when he wrote, “In the same way, the Spirit, too, comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes with inexpressible groanings …” [8:26] without assumptions and without expectations. So, let us pray.
Get articles from H. Les Brown delivered to your email inbox.