Completeness

Kallis­tos (Ware) Bishop of Diok­leia

The­o­log­i­cally, as the Russ­ian Pil­grim rightly claims, the Jesus Prayer "holds in it­self the whole gospel truth"; it is a "sum­mary of the Gospels". In one brief sen­tence it em­bod­ies the two chief mys­ter­ies of the Chris­t­ian faith, the In­car­na­tion and the Trin­ity. It speaks, first, of the two na­tures of Christ the God-man (Thean­thro­pos): of his hu­man­ity, for he is in­voked by the human name, "Jesus", which his Mother Mary gave to him after his birth in Beth­le­hem; of his eter­nal God­head, for he is also styled "Lord" and "Son of God". In the sec­ond place the Prayer speaks by im­pli­ca­tion, al­though not ex­plic­itly, of the three Per­sons of the Trin­ity. While ad­dressed to the sec­ond Per­son, Jesus, it points also to the Fa­ther, for Jesus is called "Son of God"; and the Holy Spirit is equally pre­sent in the Prayer, for "no one can say "Lord Jesus", ex­cept in the Holy Spirit" (1Кор. 12:3). So the Jesus Prayer is both Chris­to­cen­tric and Trini­tar­ian.

De­vo­tion­ally, it is no less com­pre­hen­sive. It em­braces the two chief "mo­ments" of Chris­t­ian wor­ship: the "mo­ment" of ado­ra­tion, of look­ing up to God’s glory and reach­ing out to him in love; and the "mo­ment" of pen­i­tence, the sense of un­wor­thi­ness and sin. There is a cir­cu­lar move­ment within the Prayer, a se­quence of as­cent and re­turn. In the first half of the Prayer we rise up to God: "Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God..."; and then in the sec­ond half we re­turn to our­selves in com­punc­tion: "...on me a sin­ner". "Those who have tasted the gift of the Spirit", it is stated in the Macar­ian Hom­i­lies, "are con­scious of two things at the same time: on the one hand, of joy and con­so­la­tion; on the other, of trem­bling and fear and mourn­ing". Such is the inner di­alec­tic of the Jesus Prayer.

These two "mo­ments" - the vi­sion of di­vine glory and the con­scious­ness of human sin - are united and rec­on­ciled in a third "mo­ment" as we pro­nounce the word "mercy". "Mercy" de­notes the bridg­ing of the gulf be­tween God’s right­eous­ness and the fallen cre­ation. He who says to God, "Have mercy", laments his own help­less­ness but voices at the same time a cry of hope. He speaks not only of sin but of its over­com­ing. He af­firms that God in his glory ac­cepts us though we are sin­ners, ask­ing us in re­turn to ac­cept the fact that we are ac­cepted. So the Jesus Prayer con­tains not only a call to re­pen­tance but an as­sur­ance of for­give­ness and restora­tion. The heart of the Prayer - the ac­tual name "Jesus" - bears pre­cisely the sense of sal­va­tion: "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his peo­ple from their sins" (Мф. 1:21). While there is sor­row for sin in the Jesus Prayer, it is not a hope­less but a "joy-cre­at­ing sor­row", in the phrase of St. John Cli­ma­cus (+649).

Such are among the riches, both the­o­log­i­cal and de­vo­tional, pre­sent in the Jesus Prayer; pre­sent, more­over, not merely in the ab­stract but in a viv­i­fy­ing and dy­namic form. The spe­cial value of the Jesus Prayer lies in the fact that it makes these truths come alive, so that they are ap­pre­hended not just ex­ter­nally and the­o­ret­i­cally but with all the full­ness of our being. To un­der­stand why the Jesus Prayer pos­sesses such ef­fi­cacy, we must turn to two fur­ther as­pects: the power of the Name and the dis­ci­pline of rep­e­ti­tion.