Last week we ended by saying that Jesus redeems his mother Mary (and all creation) by relying on her. Jesus grew in wisdom and stature. God learned. He learned from his mother. Perhaps the most important thing he learned from her was how to pray.Specifically to pray like this: “Not my will, but yours be done.”
This is Mary’s prayer upon receiving the news that she will conceive and give birth to Jesus: “Let it be unto me according to your word.” Not my will, but your will be done. Jesus learned that prayer from his Mother and repeats it in the garden of Gethsemane.
But where did Mary learn to pray like this? The short answer is from the Psalms. “Not my will, but your will” is what Israel’s scriptures say on every page. Especially the Psalms.
In other words, Mary’s faithful prayer that she teaches her son is the prayer she learned from the psalmist David.
To see more clearly the uniqueness of the Psalms we spent some time looking at an essay by German philosopher Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy entitled “Hitler and Israel, or on Prayer.” Rosenstock-Huessy compares Hitler’s speech-making with the speech that Israel canonizes in the Psalms.
Hitler’s will and his God’s will are nauseatingly one. The great art of speech has made Hitler crazy. Since he has the privilege of speaking, of inflaming the masses, he spellbinds. And so he hovers as a ghost from the abyss of paganism, a ghost of the days before God touched Israel’s lips with his fiery coal: My will, O mortal, not thine, be done.
[The Psalms are] the white heat of speech, during which man’s will is separated from God’s will, and men come to know God’s will as differing from their own wishes and from their leader’s will.
The Psalms teach us that true prayer recognizes God’s divine “No.” This is what Hitler’s speeches cannot allow. Hitler is a spellbinder precisely in that he collapses God’s will with his own will; God’s desires with the desires of the masses. Hitler cannot say “Not my will, but yours be done.” That is the spell that he casts and it is a spell that everywhere surrounds us today.
The only way for that spell to be broken in us is if we go to school with Israel and learn to truly pray. Or as Rosenstock-Huessy puts it:
True prayer breaks spells.
This is what David the psalmist teaches us and the entire world: how to hear God’s “No.” This is the white-hot heat of true prayer embodied in the Psalms and ultimately in Jesus of Nazareth.
Chris Green interacts with Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay in his newest book The Fire and the Cloud, which I highly recommend! You can also listen to one of Chris’s podcast episodes on Rosenstock-Huessy’s essay here: “True Prayer Breaks Spells”
You can read the full essay by Rosenstock-Huessy here:
