The Words and Their Variants

“Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” This file examines the standard formula of the Jesus Prayer word by word — the fullness of Christological confession compressed into a single breath — together with its longer and shorter variants, its history as a formula, and the tradition’s own insistence that the words are a vessel for a living invocation, not an incantation whose wording works of itself.

Tradition: Pan-Orthodox

The Standard Formula

The form of the Jesus Prayer most widely used in the Orthodox Church today is:

Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

In Greek: Kyrie Iēsou Christe, Huie tou Theou, eleēson me ton hamartōlon. In Church Slavonic: Gospodi Iisuse Khriste, Syne Bozhii, pomilui mia greshnago (feminine greshnuiu). The final words “a sinner” are a comparatively late expansion, characteristic above all of Russian usage; the Greek practice has more commonly kept the shorter ending “have mercy on me” (Ware, The Power of the Name, SLG Press, 1974, on the forms of the prayer; cf. the survey in the hub article The Jesus Prayer).

The formula is not a legal text, and the tradition has never treated its wording as fixed by dogmatic definition. Metropolitan Kallistos Ware, the prayer’s best-known modern expositor in English, lists the common variants: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”; “Lord Jesus, have mercy”; the simple “Lord, have mercy” (Kyrie eleison); and, at the other end, expansions such as the addition of “the sinner” with the definite article (ton hamartōlon — “me, the sinner,” as though the one praying were the only one), a reading with clear precedent in the publican’s prayer in the Greek of Luke 18:13, where the article is present: hilasthēti moi tō hamartōlō (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; on the Lukan article, the Greek text of Luke 18:13). St. Gregory of Sinai in the fourteenth century recommends alternating half-formulas — “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me” and “Son of God, have mercy on me” — so that the mind is not dulled by unvaried repetition, while warning against changing the words too often, “for plants which are frequently transplanted do not put down roots” (Gregory of Sinai, On Prayer: Seven Texts 2, in The Philokalia, vol. 4, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber, 1995; the horticultural image is Gregory’s). The wording, in other words, has always had a certain liberty around a stable core: the Name of Jesus, and a plea for mercy.

The History of the Formula

The two elements of the prayer — invocation of Jesus by name, and the cry for mercy — are each ancient; their union in a single fixed sentence took centuries to crystallize. The scholarship of Irénée Hausherr and Kallistos Ware has traced the development in detail. In the fourth- and fifth-century Egyptian desert, the counsel was for short, frequently repeated prayer, but with no single obligatory formula: Abba Macarius, asked how to pray, answered, “There is no need at all to make long discourses; it is enough to stretch out one’s hands and say, ‘Lord, as you will, and as you know, have mercy’” (Apophthegmata Patrum, alphabetical collection, Macarius the Great 19, trans. Ward, Cistercian, 1975; Hausherr, The Name of Jesus, trans. Cummings, Cistercian, 1978; Ware, “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai,” in The Study of Spirituality, ed. Jones, Wainwright, Yarnold, SPCK, 1986). St. Diadochus of Photike in the fifth century speaks of giving the intellect the “remembrance” of “the Lord Jesus” as its one occupation, but without prescribing a complete sentence (Diadochus, On Spiritual Knowledge 59, in The Philokalia, vol. 1, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber, 1979). The letters of Barsanuphius and John of Gaza in the sixth century commend the invocation of Jesus in a variety of short forms (Barsanuphius and John, Letters, trans. Chryssavgis, CUA Press, 2006–07; Ware, “Origins,” 1986, on the Gaza evidence).

The earliest surviving text in which the full standard formula appears is generally identified as the Discourse on Abba Philemon, an Egyptian text of perhaps the sixth or seventh century preserved in the Philokalia, where the elder instructs a brother to say inwardly and continually, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy upon me” (A Discourse on Abba Philemon, in The Philokalia, vol. 2, trans. Palmer, Sherrard, Ware, Faber, 1981; Ware, “Origins,” 1986, identifying this as the first attestation of the standard form). Even after this, the formula coexisted for centuries with variants, and the further addition “a sinner” belongs to the later, especially Slavic, development (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974). The history matters for a precise reason: it shows that what the tradition transmits as “the Jesus Prayer” is not a verbal talisman whose exact syllables carry the power, but a practice — the continual, penitent invocation of the Lord Jesus by name — which found in this sentence its most adequate and enduring vessel. The formation of the desert practice into the Sinai and Athonite traditions is treated in Section 03 and Section 04.

The Theology in the Words

The genius of the formula, as its expositors from Theophan the Recluse to Kallistos Ware have observed, is that it holds together in one short sentence the two poles of the whole Christian life: the confession of who Jesus is, and the confession of who I am (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Theophan’s teaching in The Art of Prayer, ed. Igumen Chariton, trans. Kadloubovsky and Palmer, Faber, 1966).

“Lord” (Kyrios). In the Septuagint, Kyrios renders the divine Name revealed at the bush (Exodus 3:14–15); to call Jesus Kyrios is therefore not politeness but the primitive Christian confession of His divinity — “no one can say ‘Jesus is Lord’ except by the Holy Spirit” (1 Corinthians 12:3), and “God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name… that every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord” (Philippians 2:9–11). The first word of the prayer thus already places the one praying within the Trinitarian life: the prayer is addressed to the Son, but can only be truly said in the Spirit, to the glory of the Father (1 Corinthians 12:3; Philippians 2:11; Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974, on the Trinitarian shape of the invocation).

“Jesus.” The human, historical, personal name given at the Annunciation — “you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21), the Greek form of the Hebrew Yeshua, “the Lord saves.” The prayer addresses not a concept of God but the concrete person of the incarnate Word; this is what most decisively distinguishes it from every impersonal technique of meditation (see Not a Mantra).

“Christ.” The Anointed One, the Messiah of Israel — the confession of Peter, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16). The word binds the prayer to the whole economy of salvation: the promises to Israel, the anointing of the Spirit, the threefold office of prophet, priest, and king.

“Son of God.” The dogmatic heart of the formula. It is the confession of Nicaea in two words: this Jesus is Son of God not by adoption or honor but in truth — and thus the prayer, said with understanding, is a perpetual act of Orthodox faith. Writers on the prayer regularly note that the first half of the formula contains implicitly the whole of Christology: true God (“Lord,” “Son of God”) and true man (“Jesus”), one person (“Christ”) (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet], The Jesus Prayer, rev. ed. with foreword by Kallistos Ware, SVS Press, 1987).

“Have mercy on me.” The turn from confession to petition — and to the only petition that contains all others. Eleēson, the tradition observes, is related to elaion, oil: the mercy asked for is not a judge’s acquittal only but the healing oil poured into wounds, as by the Samaritan (Luke 10:34) — a wordplay noted by the Fathers and by modern expositors, though it is a homiletic association rather than an etymology (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974, on eleos; the association is traditional). The petition is in the singular and the first person: the prayer is irreducibly personal, the publican’s own cry (Luke 18:13).

“A sinner.” The last word places the one praying in the only posture from which the Name can be safely invoked: the publican’s, not the Pharisee’s. The tradition is emphatic that this clause is not rhetorical self-deprecation but the prayer’s anchor against delusion — the whole warning literature on prelest (see Section 08) can be read as commentary on the necessity of this word (Ignatius Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, trans. Lazarus [Moore], Watkins, 1965, on repentance as the foundation; Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974).

The formula thus descends, as expositors have noted, from the height of divinity to the depth of human need: it begins with “Lord” and ends with “a sinner,” and the whole Gospel — God’s condescension and man’s repentance — lies between (Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974; Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987).

One Prayer, Not a Formula-Magic

Two boundary-stones should be set at the outset of the whole collection. First, the Jesus Prayer is a prayer of the Church, not beside her: it presupposes the faith of Nicaea which its words compress, and the sacramental life within which alone the tradition envisages it (Brianchaninov, On the Prayer of Jesus, 1965; see The Prayer Rope and the Rule). Second, the power invoked is the person of Jesus Christ, not the sound of the syllables. When, in the early twentieth century, a party on Athos was accused of teaching that the very name — its letters and sounds — was God, and the opposing party of teaching that the name was a mere human label, the Church was thrown into a controversy that remains formally unresolved; that dispute, and the careful distinctions it forced, are treated at length in Section 07. Here it is enough to say what the mainstream teaching masters say: the words of the prayer are venerable and should not be casually altered, but they are the vessel of an invocation whose content is a living Person and whose condition is repentance — “the Jesus Prayer is not a magic formula; it acts not automatically but through faith” (so, in substance, Ware, The Power of the Name, 1974, and Gillet, The Jesus Prayer, 1987; the formulation here is a summary, not a quotation).

The Prayer in Other Languages

Because the prayer’s core is the Name and the plea, it translates without loss, and the tradition has always prayed it in the vernacular: Greek, Slavonic, Arabic, Romanian, Georgian, English. At the multilingual Monastery of St. John the Baptist in Essex, founded by St. Sophrony (Sakharov), the prayer is recited communally in several languages in turn, precisely because its substance is not bound to any one sacred tongue (Sakharov, I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony, SVS Press, 2002, on the Essex practice; see Silouan, Sophrony, and the Athonite Revival). This portability is itself a theological datum: what is invoked is the Name in the biblical sense — the person and power of Jesus — not a phoneme (see The Invocation of the Name).

References

Ware, Kallistos. The Power of the Name: The Jesus Prayer in Orthodox Spirituality. Oxford: SLG Press, 1974 (rev. ed. 1986). (The standard formula and its variants; the word-by-word exposition; the Trinitarian shape; the prayer as invocation not magic.)
Ware, Kallistos. “The Origins of the Jesus Prayer: Diadochus, Gaza, Sinai.” In The Study of Spirituality, ed. Cheslyn Jones, Geoffrey Wainwright, and Edward Yarnold. London: SPCK, 1986. (The historical development of the formula; Abba Philemon as earliest attestation of the standard form.)
Hausherr, Irénée. The Name of Jesus. Trans. Charles Cummings. Cistercian Studies 44. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1978. (The scholarly history of monologistos prayer and the formation of the formula.)
The Philokalia: The Complete Text. Trans. G. E. H. Palmer, Philip Sherrard, and Kallistos Ware. Vol. 1 (Faber, 1979): Diadochus, On Spiritual Knowledge. Vol. 2 (Faber, 1981): A Discourse on Abba Philemon. Vol. 4 (Faber, 1995): Gregory of Sinai, On Prayer: Seven Texts.
The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. Trans. Benedicta Ward. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1975. (Macarius the Great 19.)
Barsanuphius and John. Letters. Trans. John Chryssavgis. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006–07.
A Monk of the Eastern Church [Lev Gillet]. The Jesus Prayer. Rev. ed., foreword by Kallistos Ware. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1987.
Brianchaninov, Ignatius. On the Prayer of Jesus. Trans. Father Lazarus [Moore]. London: John M. Watkins, 1965.
The Art of Prayer: An Orthodox Anthology. Compiled by Igumen Chariton of Valaam. Trans. E. Kadloubovsky and E. M. Palmer. London: Faber and Faber, 1966.
Sakharov, Nicholas V. I Love, Therefore I Am: The Theological Legacy of Archimandrite Sophrony. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2002. (The multilingual Essex practice.)
Scripture: Exodus 3:14–15; Matthew 1:21; 16:16; Luke 10:34; 18:13; 1 Corinthians 12:3; Philippians 2:9–11.