Dear Raffaele,

This is an important question, and the answers depend on what you understand the nature of both Jesus and prayer to be.  Many in the church today pray to Jesus in a way that is identical to the way they pray to God.  This is not surprising since many believe that Jesus and God are one and the same, or “God from God” and “consubstantial with the Father” as the Nicene Creed puts it.  Yet this is, and has always been, a heresy in the church (Docetism).

The danger here is the belief that when Jesus was alive, he was just masquerading as a human being--that his suffering was not real, or that when he prayed to God, he was really praying to himself.  Taken to its logical conclusion, Docetism would mean that on the cross, Jesus wondered aloud why he had abandoned himself, or that he committed his spirit into his own hands.

So, when you say, in your question, that Jesus was a man (albeit fully human, and therefore divine), I assume you mean that all humans are made in the image of God and therefore divine?  I assume you do not mean that Jesus was God or that God is Jesus?

This is a complicated and divisive theological issue in the church, but it seems wise to me to take our clue from the historical Jesus, who prayed to God, and is reported to have said in Mark’s gospel, “Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone?”  Or you might be saying that one can pray to the spirit of Jesus, as it revealed the love of God?  My suggestion, however, is that we pray to God, as Jesus did, but not to Jesus as God.  Otherwise, are we not polytheists who confuse our prophet and teacher with the One he prophesied and taught about?  Is that not idolatry?  That’s why praying in the name of Jesus is so different from praying to Jesus.

~ Rev. Dr. Robin Meyers