How does the power of the Apostles’ prayer continue in the Church?
The Apostles were the first to pray with the full power of Christ's Sacrifice. Catholics should call on their powerful intercession.
The Apostles were the first to pray with the full power of Christ's Sacrifice. Catholics should call on their powerful intercession.
Editor’s Notes
On the Fifth Sunday after Easter, the Church returns to John 16—which she had been reading on the Third Sunday. For more context on this passage, see here.
In this part, Fr. Coleridge tells us…
How Christ reveals the joy and power of prayer made in his Name, rooted in his Sacrifice.
That this new form of prayer opens a deeper union with Christ, through the Holy Ghost and priestly mediation.
Why the Father’s love for the Apostles—because of their faith and love—makes direct prayer in Christ’s Name effective.
He shows us that the full doctrine of Christian prayer could only be grasped after the Cross, the Resurrection, and the coming of the Holy Ghost.
For more context on this episode, see here.
Parting Words
Passiontide, Part III, Chapter VI
Chapter VI
St. John xvi. 16-33, Story of the Gospels, § 156
Burns and Oates, London, 1886
Why the Church reads the Last Supper discourses in Eastertide
What is the difference between prayer before and after the Cross?
How does the power of the Apostles’ prayer continue in the Church?
‘Ask and you shall receive’
Now He says, ‘Ask, and you shall receive, that your joy may be full.’ For there can be no more perfect joy for Apostolic men than to be continually pleading before God the merits of the Sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross, and to find that their prayers are continually prospered and successful in the impetration of what they have asked.
The petitions which they have made have been for things to the glory of our Lord, which have come into their hearts as matters of prayer by the loving inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The attainment of such requests must be a joy to them in itself, for the service of our Lord and the good of souls is advanced thereby.
The exercise itself of prayer is an act of love and confidence shown to our Lord, Whose blessed merits are thus pleaded in obedience to His own command. It is an exercise of faith in Him and the power of His merits, and an exercise of love and confidence, to the Father in Heaven to Whom He so delights to send us as suppliants in His Name.
It is a fresh joy to see the particular persons or objects for whom the prayers were made benefited and blessed by the granting of the petitions. There is a special joy in the continual exercise of thanksgiving in such cases, for thanksgiving is one of the most joyous exercises and affections of the heart.
And the heart of an Apostle or Apostolic man goes onward to the next design for God’s glory for the good of souls with fresh strength and joy after having received the answer to a petition made in the Name of our Lord, being moved by the Paraclete by Whom the prayer was prompted to conceive greater and greater designs for the honour and service of so good a God, Who gives ever fresh and fresh proofs of the power of our Lord’s Name.
The Apostles to become great men of prayer
Although we cannot doubt that the Apostles were already what is understood to be meant when men are commonly spoken of as men of great prayer, before the time when these words of our Lord were spoken to them, still it is easy to see that after they had witnessed the Passion and Resurrection, and even more after the Ascension and the Day of Pentecost, the whole character of their lives must have been changed in this respect, and it may have been a part of our Lord’s purpose in these last moments of His intercourse with them before closing this instruction, to lay the foundation of their new life in this respect, a life which must have been so full of subjects of the happiest anticipations to His own Sacred Heart.
The light shed by the Passion on the truths which regarded His Sacrifice and its effects; the new powers breathed into them by the Holy Ghost; the new offices of which they became fitted and bound to discharge in His Kingdom; the views opened to them of the magnificence and immense work reserved for them in the world, their new knowledge as to the objects and ways and means which were to be sought and to come into play in that Kingdom,—all must have helped them to rise to the loftiest ideas as to their position in the world as His representatives and emissaries, and the effect of the whole must have been a perfectly new realization of the great things that were to be wrought by them by prayer, and a new intelligence of its power with God.
Why he does not mention fruitfulness
When our Lord had said to them, as we may remember, earlier in this evening, ‘If you abide in Me and My words abide in you, you shall ask whatsoever you will, and it shall be done unto you,’ they may have expected Him to say instead something about their great fruitfulness in the service of God which would have been naturally expected from the form of the sentence to which He was replying by an antithesis.
But He framed the antithesis as we have seen, and in doing so He probably anticipated what they would very soon come to know as the most profitable boon to be conferred on faithful servants of their Master.
Our Lord could now hail with immense gladness the thought of the many thousands of souls, of all nations and generations, who would live this new life of more or less perpetual prayer, and find therein a support and light and strength and elevation which would enable them to have, as the Apostle says, their conversation in Heaven, and which was to be one of not the least novelties and marvels of the new Kingdom, and one of the greatest works of the Holy Ghost in the souls of men:
‘Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmity, for we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself asketh for us with unspeakable groanings. But He that searcheth the hearts knoweth what the Spirit desireth, because He asketh for the saints according to God.’1
Our Lord may have spoken as He did in this place, without further explanation, as knowing how soon the time would come when the treasures of the immense kingdom of prayer would become comparatively familiar to the Apostles.
Speaking in proverbs
‘These things I have spoken to you in proverbs.
‘The hour cometh when I will no more speak to you in proverbs, but will show you plainly of the Father. In that day you shall ask in My Name, and I say not to you that I will ask the Father for you, for the Father Himself loveth you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God.
‘I came forth from the Father and am come into the world, again I leave the world and I go to the Father.’
When our Lord says that He has spoken certain things to them in proverbs, He means that He has put them parabolically or figuratively, or in other ways obscurely and enigmatically.
In the Gospel of St. John the word ‘proverb’ is used in the sense of parable, as in the case of the description of the Good Shepherd in Chapter X. The things which He seems to mean as having been spoken in proverbs may have been many in the course of His teaching, but in this place it seems that He refers to what He has lately been telling them about prayer made in His Name in the sense which we have been explaining.
It seems as if the full doctrine about the power of Christian prayer at which He is here hinting might require many heads of teaching in order to be fully explained—the necessity of the atonement by a Person Who could suffer because He was Man, and the merits of Whose sufferings could be infinite because He was God, all that we are taught in the Epistle to the Hebrews about the priesthood of our Lord, and his perpetual Session at the right hand of the Father to make intercession for us, the doctrine too of the priesthood which is communicated to men, the priests of the New Covenant, and also that of the spiritual priesthood of which St. Peter speaks,2 and the efficacy of prayer made in His Name by those who have a right so to make it.
Christian Priesthood—and what it implies
All these things were perhaps not completely imparted to the Apostles at this stage of the instruction, and yet these and others would require to be unfolded, before they could entirely comprehend the immense power placed in their hands to which our Lord seems to allude in this passage.
The Christian prayer and priesthood of which we speak was perhaps, in all its fulness, one of those doctrines which He said He had to tell them beyond what He had already told them, but which were to be taught them either after the Resurrection or by the Holy Ghost when He came. If this be so, it is comparatively easy to understand how our Lord now says that in that day they are to ask in His Name, with more full intelligence, perhaps, of what they are then doing.
It seems safe to suppose that He is here speaking of the doctrine which He has just laid down on this particular point of prayer. The full doctrine which is here put forward involves the whole truth of the necessity of the Atonement as carried out by our Lord, a Divine Person in human nature, having taken flesh in order that He might suffer, and in order that, being God, He might efficaciously atone for sin by His Sacrifice, with all the fruits of ineffable efficacy which it involved.
It is said by some of the Fathers that He prays for us now in Heaven as He was wont to pray when on earth, though in a different way, for the effects of the redemption can and must still be applied more and more, and they understand in this way the text to the Hebrews, ‘That He is always living to make intercession for us,’3 and that of St. John, that we have Him an advocate with the Father, where he adds, ‘And He is the propitiation for our sins, and not ours only, but also of the whole world.’4
Moreover, the full knowledge of the privileges of Christian prayer is perhaps hardly to be possessed by any one except by experience. The persons who fully understand those privileges are those who have for some time been accustomed to their use, and then they come to know the strengthening and growth of the soul which follow from the faithful and persevering use of this great key of Heaven.
Many things left unsaid
Our Lord may leave a good many things unsaid on this subject, which He may have been sure that the Apostles would soon come to know for themselves in this most blessed way.
It might have been well to explain, for instance, how His own prayer in His Sacred Human Nature would always accompany theirs, and the footing with God on which they were in future to stand, when confirmed and strengthened by the presence of the Paraclete and all the graces which He was to bring with Him, so that they would not need any special and independent intercession on His own part as before.
He had said earlier in this discourse, ‘I will ask the Father and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for ever,’ and now He seems to speak as if that Gift having been won, it was not necessary that He Himself should make a number of particular requests for them, and He speaks also, as has been said, as if the Sacrifice of the Cross had been completed and its effects secured. What our Lord says here is, that He does not think it necessary to tell them that He will ask the Father for them when they ask in His Name.
The Father ready to hear them
This may mean that the Father will be already so ready to hear them that a special pleading of our Lord Himself will not be needed, or that His own intercession will certainly accompany the prayer made by them in His Name.
What He seems to insist on is the reason which He gives for what He says, namely, that the Father Himself loves them, and that for two reasons which He specifies, first, because they have loved Him, and second, because they have believed that He has come out from God, that is, that He is the promised Messias, the Son of God, Incarnate as Man for the salvation of the world.
But the doctrine of which we speak as not fully explained as yet, implies a closer union still of the Apostles with our Lord, for they are branches of Him as the true Vine, they are members of His Body of which St. Paul speaks, their prayers are His prayers, and they have a right to claim that the power of impetration which belongs to His Sacrifice on the Cross may be imparted to them.
In this sense the rights of the Sacred Humanity itself are made over already to the Christian prayer, especially, as we see, in the Adorable Sacrifice of the Altar in the Church. The dignity of the Christian priesthood may have been in our Lord’s mind when He said here that He does not say that He will ask for them, because the Father Himself loves them, and the rest.
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Parting Words
Why does the Church read the Last Supper discourses in Eastertide?
What is the difference between prayer before and after the Cross?
How does the power of the Apostles’ prayer continue in the Church?
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Romans viii. 26, 27.
St. Peter ii.
Heb. vii. 25.
1 St. John ii. 1, 2.