Matthew 20:21

Matthew 20:21

(with Luke 9:38)

These are two examples of intercessory prayer. All the principles on which we explain or defend prayer, as the communing in Christ's spirit of submission, refer also to those prayers which we offer for others.

I. Take first the prayer of Salome for her sons. There were two entirely false conceptions lying at the root of her prayer. (1) She was wrong as to the nature of the kingdom of their Lord. She thought of it as an earthly kingdom, like that of David. (2) She was mistaken, also, as to the principles of Divine election and reward in Christ's kingdom. She evidently thought that places of high honour the right and left hand of some real throne were to be bestowed according to some caprice of favouritism. And her idea of prayer was, that it could win something of this kind from the Lord.

It may have seemed to the mother at the moment as if her prayer had been refused. It was notgranted according to her own narrow, fatal estimate of what she desired for her sons. It was granted with a fulness and a power that she did not conceive then, but which may have dawned upon her as, with Mary, she stood beside the cross on Calvary. The opportunity of serving and suffering for Christ was given them. That was the only way the prayer could be granted. St. James was the first Apostle Martyr and St. John the last.

II. There were petitions for others offered to Christ while on earth of a different kind to those which Salome presented for her sons prayers that were answered and granted by the Lord just as they were prayed.

In that other instance of a parent's prayer, given in St. Luke 9:38, it was, indeed, for a child to be delivered only from bodily infirmity; but yet as we fondly believe that all Christ's healing of bodily diseases has a sacramental significance, and points to the deeper healing of the sickness of the soul, we may trust that He will ever thus still answer our prayers for others.

T. T. Shore, Some Difficulties of Belief,p. 61.

Reference: Matthew 20:21; Matthew 20:22. F. W. Macdonald, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxxii., p. 200.