What Did Jesus Pray?

by Fred Vilbig

I want to consider for a moment something that I think is very interesting: Jesus prayed. Jesus prayed throughout His ministry. He would get up early in the morning and go pray. (Mark 1:35, Luke 5:16.) Jesus prayed before major events such as the miracles of the loaves and the raising of the dead. (Mark 6:46, John 11:41-42.) He prayed all night before choosing the apostles. (Luke 6:12-13.) In addition, Jesus thought that prayer was so important that He took the time to teach his disciples how to pray, and He gave us the Our Father. The Evangelists thought this was important enough to mention in the Gospels.

But this also raises a question: what did Jesus pray? The only thing that the Gospels say is that Jesus went off alone to pray, but it doesn’t really tell us anything more. I am sure that he was in deep contemplative prayer being fully human. I don’t know how accessible that would be to us. But I think there is another possibility.

When Jesus was hanging on the Cross, he cried out, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken me?” That troubled me for a long time. How could God the Father have forsaken His Son, Jesus, with whom he was united in his very substance? That made no sense to me. Our God is One and Three, but He is still One. How could the Son be separated from the Father?

But if we look at the footnote for that verse, it refers us back to Psalm 22. Psalm 22 starts off with those very words: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” This is a Psalm that starts off with a lamentation of the Psalmist’s rejection by God and by man. The middle part of the Psalm is a prayer for deliverance. The end of the Psalm is a song of thanksgiving and victory. So in a way, Psalm 22 is a prayer of hope during a crisis.

That was when it dawned on me that Jesus would have prayed the Psalms. I realized that this made perfect sense since the Psalms would have been the liturgical prayers of the Jewish communities when they gathered at the synagogues. I would assume that in school the children would have learned by memory some of the Psalms, if not all of them. In fact, I think that Jesus came to understand who He was and what He was destined to do through praying the Psalms. So, of course, Jesus would have prayed the Psalms, and I believe that He was praying the 22nd Psalm while He hung on the Cross.



During the time of the persecution of the Church by the Roman Empire, some Christians escaped to the desert. Many others were attracted to this way of life. These desert solitaries (“monachoi” in Greek, monks in English) took to heart St. Paul’s advice to pray always. 1 Thess. 5:17; Romans 12:12.

Focusing exclusively on God through fasting and prayer, many of them would pray all 150 Psalms each day. Since that interfered with things like farming and cooking, that practice was relaxed to praying them on a weekly basis. The custom of praying all of the Psalms on a regular basis spread throughout the Church but was relaxed to a 4 week schedule so that parish priests and nuns in active ministry could pray them. This is what has come to be known as the Divine Office or the Liturgy of the Hours which consist of seven times of prayer daily.

As Catholics, we are called on to pray without ceasing. Praying the Office (or maybe just parts of it) is a good way to achieve that. There is a 4 volume set available, but the Office is also available on our smart phones. An abbreviated version called Christian Prayer is also available. I realize that people’s lives are busy, so maybe just taking the time to pray a Psalm or two a day is all we can fit in, but even then, we are praying with Jesus. And that’s always a really good thing.