In My Name

We’re using the Heartlines series on SABC as a discussion focus for the confirmation class. This week’s episode is about Faith who comes from rural Natal to Jo’burg after her mother’s death. She comes hoping to earn enough to pay for her sister’s tuition at school. She prays fervently for success but ends up being raped and losing her job cos she was away from work recovering. She ends up being taken in by a Chinese man who helps her recover her hope and she in turn helps him. Because of her ordeal she finds leaving the little shop, where she lives and works with Mr. Lin, impossibly frightening. She becomes trapped in the shop because of her fear.

The scene that seems to me the centre of the story is powerfully symbolic, though I’m not sure if the writers intended it this way. She is cleaning the shop when a pigeon flies in. It is trapped and panics, fluttering across the delicate china on the shelves. Eventually Faith manages to catch the pigeon and slowly walks out with the bird in her hands. When she releases it with a smile on her face, she only then realises that she has walked quite some distance beyond the safe confines of her prison. Though she flees, panic-stricken back into the shop, the healing has begun.

It seems to me that this is metaphor for prayer and an answer to the theodicy question (“Why does God allow suffering?”). In order for God to love, God must be vulnerable, for love by its definition, requires vulnerability. One cannot love someone who is impregnable. One can only love that which one is capable of hurting. So, by creating humans who can love, God creates the possibility of God’s own destruction. God is trapped. God is like the pigeon in the china shop and the only person who can set God free is the one who is trapped there too.

As Faith walks out the shop to her freedom – and the pigeon’s freedom – it is difficult to distinguish whose freedom is being won and who is doing the liberation. In fact, it seems more appropriate to say that Faith and the pigeon need each other.

And so it is with God and humanity.

Jesus says, “Whatever you ask in my name, God will grant you.” We ignore the phrase “in my name” too easily or we make it a rubber stamp on the prayers we send to heaven as if the right postage stamp will guarantee the success of our supplication.

Jesus is asking us to do something very specific. For the ancients a name was the sum of a person’s character. Jesus’ name in Hebrew (Yeshua) means Saviour / Salvation / Redemption / Freedom. When Jesus asks us to pray in his name, he is asking us to pray in that character - the way he lived his life. Prayer is not what we do before a meal or before bedtime, or a superstition to garner God’s favour, or a shopping list of our fears and dreams. I

Prayer is a life lived for freedom – ours and God’s.