Jesus’s Lazarus prayer.

John 11.41-42.

I’m going through the Lazarus story, and just before Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, he prays. It’s an odd little prayer, and from it we can learn a bit about both Jesus and prayer. Goes like so.

John 11.41-42 KWL

41So they take away the rock

{which is at the place the dead lay},

and Jesus lifts up his eyes to the sky and says,

“Father, I give you¹ thanks that you¹ hear me.

42I knew you¹ always hear me,

but I say this because of the crowd around,

so they might believe you¹ send me.”

It’s odd because y’notice Jesus doesn’t make a prayer request. Usually when a Christian’s about to try to cure someone, or even raise the dead, they ask the Holy Spirit, “Can I do this? Can you make me able to do this? Would you cure this person? Is this your will that they be cured? Please do this.” There’s a whole lot of requesting going on. Some begging. Sometimes even some deal-making.

And Jesus does none of that. It’s only, “Thank you, Father, for hearing me. Yeah, I know you already hear me; I’m just saying this for their sake.” Gotta be honest! But in this prayer, he doesn’t ask the Father for anything. It’s solely acknowledgement the Father is here with Jesus—and the Father sent Jesus.

And then Jesus raised Lazarus.

Why doesn’t Jesus beg the Father to empower him to pull off this miracle? Because he doesn’t need to. We already know from other scriptures Jesus prayed a lot. He was all prayed up. When he tells his students elsewhere, right after he threw an evil spirit out of a boy, “This kind can come forth by nothing, but by prayer and fasting,” Mk 9.29 you notice Jesus couldn’t just start fasting right then; he had to already have a lifestyle of fasting. Same with the prayer: Jesus could start praying his head off right at that moment, but what good is that when you don’t already have a conversational relationship with your Father? And Jesus undoubtedly had that already.

So when it came time to cure Lazarus of death, Jesus didn’t need to stand before the sepulcher, lift his hands to heaven, pray for three hours, and maybe Lazarus might come forth. Jesus spent his entire life patterning every action after the Father’s will. Today was no different. And Jesus spent his entire life praying, almost constantly, often intensely, to his Father. He’d been all prayed up since childhood.

If we’re all prayed up, and we step into a situation where someone needs to be cured of illness, we don’t need to drop to our knees and beg God for hours to grant our request. We’ve already been talking to him. We already know what he wants us to do. We already know whether he’ll empower us to cure this illness or not—and if not, we don’t give the poor person false hope that God’ll cure them immediately. We just remind ’em to keep praying, like the widow in Jesus’s Persistent Widow Story.

But if so, we don’t need to pray any more than Jesus did in this situation: “Hey, Father? Thank you so much for hearing me. You always do.” Then, “In Jesus’s name, I order this illness to go away.” And it will.

So the crowd can see.

Ordinarily when we pray, Jesus wants us to do it privately, and not use this opportunity to show off how devout we are. Nor pretend we’re more devout than we truly are.

But sometimes we gotta pray in public, and when we do this, we wanna resist the temptation to make a show of it. We want it to be earnest and honest. Jesus always does a great job of demonstrating how to do this in his public prayers, and here’s another good example—where he straight-up admits he’s saying this stuff to the Father for the crowd’s benefit.

Some preachers likewise do a good job of this. They’ll use their prayers to teach things about God, sorta like a mini-sermon disguised as prayer. It’s not necessarily appropriate to do this, but preachers do like to take advantage of every opportunity. But an honest preacher is gonna acknowledge this is what they’re doing. “Father, I just want the people to know you’re such a loving, caring, kind, generous, compassionate God…” and admit to God, and to us the listeners, they’re slipping a little teaching into the prayer. Since they have a captive audience, who’s hopefully listening and agreeing in prayer, may as well impart some knowledge, right?

In his Lazarus Prayer, Jesus similarly imparts the knowledge his Father hears him. Always hears him. And that his Father sent him; Jesus is there to represent and teach about the Father, same as always. Everything Jesus does—including raise Lazarus, which he’s about to do next—is meant to glorify the Father, demonstrate his love for us, and demonstrate we have access to his power when we trust him. The Father has the power to bring the dead to life, no matter how long they’ve been rotting in a cave. Jesus has this power too. Christians have this power too. And if we’d simply trust God more, and pray way more, we’d see more Christians delaying work to the morticians. Oh they’ll get ’em eventually—but not just yet.

But regardless of why we pray, and what kind of requests we’re making, we should always be honest about why it is we pray what we do. Jesus prayed over Lazarus’s sepulcher because the crowds expected him to; Jesus didn’t need to because he was fully conversant with his Father; but Jesus needed to remind everyone his Father sent him. And that’s what he prayed. That’s an honest prayer. Let’s only pray honest prayers.