I woke up thinking this morning about how Jesus interacted
with folks.
As I was wandering towards wakefulness, I was praying for
some folks in my mind, silently. That’s a little unusual for me; I usually pray
out loud (it keeps my mind from wandering) and while I’m walking (it keeps me
from drifting off).
But I was still snuggled in my bed, two-thirds asleep, so I
wasn’t walking anywhere and I wasn’t yet able to speak out loud. I was just
remembering a few folks before God, asking his blessing, very specific
blessings, on them.
For some of them, I’m asking for healing. Fairly often when
I’m praying for healing, I reflect on how the Great Physician did his healing,
cuz I want to be more like him.
And I realized that when Jesus was on Earth, he didn’t real
often respond to silent prayers, unspoken requests. In fact, there are only a
couple of stories where that could maybe have been what he was responding to,
but even then, that’s only a guess: the text doesn’t say that. (Consider Luke
7:13 & John 5:6.)
And even in those situations, he interacted with the folks
before wielding power on their behalf. This wasn’t an anonymous, drive-by
intercession.
The vast majority of times, Jesus was responding to people
face-to-face, to passionate people. Often tears were involved. Most (but
significantly, not all) of the time, Jesus responded to people who came to him,
who interrupted his day, and even then, he sometimes grilled them on what it was
that they really wanted (as in Mark 10:51). Specificity, apparently, is good.
It appears that Jesus wanted folks to come to him; maybe it’s
my imagination as I read the stories, but it looks to me like he seemed to
enjoy the audacious ones (like Mark 2:4 & 10:48).
I observe that Jesus sometimes went way the heck out of his
way with the apparent intent of making himself available to be interrupted by
people’s passionate petitions (Mark 7:24 & Luke 19:5).
I also observe that Jesus never turned a single person away
who had come to him for healing, even when it resulted in delaying his ministry
to someone else (as in Matthew 9:20); he stopped for the one, and then went on about
the task after fully responding to the interruption, even though it was now a “bigger”
job (Mark 5:36).
And then there’s that time that Jesus heard about the need,
and did nothing for a couple of days. (John 11:6. Note that the message said, “Lazarus
is sick,” but it had taken several days to get the message to Jesus: by the
time word reached Jesus, Lazarus was already dead. Jesus waited to respond so
that he could be raised after “four days,” a thing that had not been done before.)
I learn from this story that Jesus doesn’t always answer
prayers real quickly, and yeah, sometimes things get worse while I’m waiting
for that answer. That’s never comfortable, for me or for him (John 11:35).
The conclusion I came to, as I drifted awake, was that Jesus
pretty consistently responded to people getting his attention and asking for
something. He didn’t generally just see the need and make it happen, and he
didn’t appear to respond to polite, delicate, or hidden prayers from comfy
places.