The Essence of the Prayer of Jesus

The essence of the prayer of Jesus entailed dedicating every moment of every day to loving God with every part and with every fibre of his being (Lk 2:29. Jn 4:34). All his prayer was directed to this end. Pledging himself to love his Father come what may, day in day out, might be simple, but it certainly wasn’t always plain sailing. In fact on occasions it became close to hell on earth for a person of such a delicate and sensitive nature, and sometimes excruciatingly painful, both physically and mentally. What is interesting is that on two of these occasions ‘though he was alone in his prayer, Jesus took the trouble to tell others of how he prayed, and the inner anguish that this caused him, otherwise we would never have known.
Quite evidently he did this so that we could be in no doubt that prayer can be at one moment ecstasy, and at another moment agony, and all stations in between. That is why he told us, through his disciples, that at the prelude to his public ministry, when he prayed in the desert for forty days it was not one long prolonged ecstasy , far from it. He encountered terrible temptations, as the power of evil threatened to divert him from his purpose. The sufferings that he experienced there were intensified later when, in three terrible hours in the garden of Gethsemane, he had to endure three hours of spiritual and physical pain and suffering. Here his prayer became so agonising, so excruciating, that he sweated blood, not just at the thought of the terrible ordeal that was ahead of him, but much more. It was at the thought of how little, what he was about to endure, would affect those for whom he would suffer and die.  read on...