And yet it is not only a fact of experience that man, when he is in situations of illness and of precariousness, when he is surprised by a sudden threat, and by fear, in general turns spontaneously to some form of prayer: the Bible itself knows this kind of prayer well. Indeed, the large space that Holy Scripture attributes to this form of relationship with God, we are dealing here with prayer of supplication, of lament and of intercession, is amazing: all the great figures of the Bible were also – indeed first and foremost were – great figures of intercession, for other people and for themselves. One may remember, for example, the question and the lament of Abraham when he did not see fulfilled the promise of God to give him children: ‘Sovereign Lord, what good will your reward do me, since I have no children? My only heir is Eliezer of Damascus. You have given me no children, and one of my slaves will inherit my property’ (Gen 15:2-3). Or when, with admirably intertwined confidence and fear, he intercedes for Sodom and Gomorra (Gen 18: 23-32).

And prayers of intercession are no less present in Moses, whose prevalent image in Biblical tradition remains that of being a mediator between God and the community, of being a model of the person who intercedes (e.g. Ez 17:8-13; 32:11-14; 30-34; Nm 1:4, 10-20; etc.).

Amongst the great prophets it is Jeremiah who in the writings allows us to see more than anything else the feelings that animate his relationship with God: his confessions and prayers reveal disappointments, sufferings, the crises of an authentic man of faith. He discusses with God, he calls upon Him with a vigour and a trust that are striking: he complains about his marginalisation by men and the silence of God, who, however, had assured him at the moment of his vocation: ‘Do not be afraid, I will be with you!’(1:8, 18-19).

But it is the Book of Job which in this context should be read in its entirety, where, from the serene and we could day ingenuous trust at the outset – ‘I was born with nothing and I will die with nothing. The Lord gave, and now he has taken away. May his name be praised’ (1:21) – we move, in the conclusion, to a mature and admired acceptance of the true face of God: ‘I spoke foolishly, Lord. What can I answer? I will not try to say anything else’ (40:4); ‘I talked about things I did not understand, about marvels too great for me to know…In the past I knew only what others had told me, but now I have seen you with my own eyes’ (42:3,5). What had happened in the meantime? The intermediate part of the Book of Job portrays the drama of Job who from the depths of his humiliated and painful condition never ceases to knock at God’s door, praying, beseeching, even inveighing in order to obtain an answer from the Almighty. And God took that lament seriously, He took it upon himself and introduced Job to the discovery of His true identity: prayer was the setting of the move from what Job ‘thought’ God was to what God really was.

    The Book of salms, which contains to the utmost the prayers of Israel and reflects the dramas and the joys of the entire people, both individuals and society, are prayers which arise from life, from its fundamental expressions: praise, joy and thanksgiving; pain, lament and supplication; reflections on circumstances and on the problems of existence. Psalms of supplication and lamentation, therefore, cover almost a third of the Psalter. And if those that ‘give praise’ in a certain sense are the ‘noblest and most perfect’ because they express the pure gratuitous desire for worship, for joy and for thanksgiving because of the simple fact that God exists, the psalms of dismay and prayer are the most consonant with the existing condition of being creatures who have not been fully redeemed and are still on a journey towards completion, dealing every day with the illnesses, the calamities, the malice and the wickedness of men…and their inconsistency and lack of faithfulness.

The Gospels, for their part, are brim full of episodes of individuals and groups who call upon Jesus to engage in acts of liberation from illnesses and misfortunes. Indeed, it should be said that in the gospels faith is born from situations of need and of necessity and thus from requests and pleas.

Those people who turn to Jesus because they are afflicted with fears and threats do not even know that they have faith: it is Jesus who brings out their faith which is hidden inside their troubled pleas: ‘For the father of the boy with epilepsy to express his faith, Jesus has to first refer to it: ‘Everything is possible for the person who has faith’. ‘The father at once cried out: “I do have faith but not enough. Help me to have more!”’’(Mk 9:24) (J. Guillet).

The faith of the Twelve is also born and advances within situations of crisis and comfort: ‘Teacher, don’t you care that we are about to die’, they cry out to him when the sea is heaving in a storm. And Jesus replies: ‘Why are you so frightened? Have you still no faith?’ (Mk 4:38,39). Peter, who is frightened by the violence of the wind while he is walking on the water together with Jesus, exclaims ‘Lord, save me!’ and receives the rebuke ‘How little faith you have!’ (Mt 14:30-1).

     For that matter, although the gospels present Jesus to us as the ‘teacher of prayer’ when the disciples, seeing him at prayer ask him to teach them how to pray (Lk 11:1), it is nevertheless during the hour of tribulation and trials – at Gethsemane – that they reveal him to us totally immersed in that dialogue of pain and hope with ‘Abba-Father’: a moment that is highly revealing about his divinity through the most dramatic expression of his humanity, but equally a culminating moment of his salvific mission. The Letter to the Hebrews, when it returns to this episode, sees in that troubled and trusting prayer the determining moment of Christ’s itinerary because it was then that ‘he was made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey him’ (Heb 5:9). Now Jesus would remain for ever in a position of intercession: ‘he lives for ever to plead with God for them’ (Heb 7:25). The Spirit also ‘intercedes’ for us, indeed within us: Rom (8:26-7).

It appears, therefore, that one must say that the situation experienced by man when is struck by suffering and anxiety, where prayer first and foremost is supplication and intercession, a request for help and healing, constitutes an opportunity for him to learn to really pray, to enter, that is to say, the world of God. For this reason, one can say that the world of suffering and pain can become a setting that acts to introduce us to – or advance us within – the world of prayer.