So that whatever you ask the Father in my name he may give you.
John 15:17.
This and other statements like it about the name of Jesus suggest to many a sort of Christian magic. Ask for anything, so the logic goes, and God must grant it so long as you end with “IN JESUS’S NAME!” On this account, the name of Jesus becomes a spell one casts, an abracadabra commanding the powers of heaven. Put like this, of course, the claim is silly. So what, in fact, does it mean to invoke the divine name?
The answer is clear from the context of the very quotation we began with:
You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.
ibid.
Our asking “in Christ’s name” presupposes that Christ has already willed what we ask for, that is, to ask in his name means to ask for something precisely as already willed. We see in this the absolute contrariety of magic and prayer: magic seeks spells that conform the will of the god or the genie to our own, but invoking divine name seeks to conform our will to what God has already willed.
So we ask in God’s name not as a sorcerer casting a spell, but as a representative defending the interests of one in power. So how do we defend divine interests? Christ answers this question in the very next sentence:
This is my command: Love one other.
ibid
We know what to love another means: to will his highest good, even at a cost to yourself. So what will make us bear the cost? Only this: the desire for our neighbor to know the divine good we have already glimpsed in our own contemplation. If we haven’t already seen the highest good, how can we will it to another? What value is our love for someone if the good we will them is less than God, or if the “love of god” we will them to experience is, for us, like eating our peas?
So what we see in John 15: 17 is a rejection of magic and an insistence that, we rather desire to conform our desires to the divine. This desire, however, arises only to the extent we have already experienced the sweetness and ineffable goodness of divine love, which alone sets us on fire for others to know about it. Our love of neighbor is for the neighbor to experience the same truth and joy that we ourselves received. We share the faith like we would share a movie we loved.
All this deeply convicts my heart. Looking at the weakness of my own contemplation, I worry Christ might judge me in the same way as the Pharisees: Woe to you, blind guides! If I haven’t experienced the joy and ecstasy of Christ, how could I ever love my neighbor, i.e. lead him to his highest good, even at a cost to myself? How would I even know what it is to love him? How blind am I when, in the face of the wicked, I want to “score” converts, or when I pray for them to be silenced by divine power! All these desires arise out of wanting christianity to be magic, and this desire for magic itself arises from my love of lower goods, like physical pleasures or my own will. Let’s pray for a spirit of ecstatic prayer and contemplation, so we might enjoy the supreme good, and, from our desire to enjoy it, desire that others share in it. And we pray this in JESUS’S NAME! AMEN!