So, it’s straightforward is it? Ask, seek, knock – and you will get some kind of response – not necessarily the response you were hoping for; but at least a response. And if we ask for the gift of the spirit, Jesus is saying God will always give us that gift. It sounds like a transaction – right words in, right results out, a bit like a vending machine! Yet prayer, and Jesus’s teaching about prayer, is not as straightforward as it might appear, or perhaps as we might hope. On the one hand in this passage Jesus sounds very reassuring – God will treat us better than we treat our own children; we can be assured of God’s care for us and God’s responsiveness to our needs. Keep it simple – ask for what you want and you will receive it, search and you will find, knock and the door will be opened. But on the other hand, it really is not quite like that, is it? We all know of others if not ourselves, who have prayed for help, for healing, for relief from suffering in all kinds of terrible circumstances, and it seems as though their prayer has fallen on deaf ears. So, what then? – was their prayer not ‘good enough’; their faith not ‘strong enough’; their moral calibre not high enough? Surely this is not how it works? Yet I have known folk despair of God’s love for them and reject themselves as unworthy and unfit, simply because God has not appeared to answer their legitimate, heartfelt prayers. This is not the kind of God I want to know or associate with – and it is not good enough to say; ‘it’s all a mystery and one day we will understand!”...
I really don’t have any answers to this. So perhaps it is to the actual prayerful practice of Jesus that we should turn, rather than to these words. For I do not recall Jesus anywhere in the gospels telling his disciples,’ I prayed for Mrs. So and So and she got better’, or instructing them to ask for a good tethering spot for the donkey on the temple mount when they went there to teach. But I do remember him praying one Thursday night that the cup might pass from him – and that he was crucified the next day. His solidarity with us in the common human lot of suffering is what counts when it comes to prayer. So how did he pray?
There are two things I notice about Jesus’s own practice of prayer and his teaching – the first is that it is all about relationship. That is why he teaches his disciples to begin their prayer with the intimate and personal address, ‘our father’. Now that of course is not always the most helpful way to think about God, especially if our earthly fathers have been less than wonderful, but it does signal that close, healthy relationship with God is possible.
Prayer covers the full gamut of human interactions – saying ‘thank you’, saying ‘I’m sorry’, sharing the ups and downs, the dreams and the hopes – wanting to know what is important to the other. Our conversation with God mimics our close human conversations – and the Lord’s prayer covers all these things. When Jesus’s disciples ask him to teach them to pray, it was not because they did not already know how to pray – they were faithful Jews, they prayed five times a day. It was because they saw a different, intimate quality in Jesus’s prayer that they wanted to emulate. And perhaps they could see that when Jesus prayed he was doing more than just asking or saying sorry – he was actually enjoying an intimate conversation with one he loved. And like all intimate conversations, Jesus prayer needed time and solitude. This is the second thing I notice about his practice of prayer. Jesus spends a lot of his prayer in silence and solitude, out on the hillside before it gets light or long into the night. This prayer does not seem to be about asking. It seems to be about presence – Jesus’s presence to the Creator and the Creator’s to Jesus. And somehow in that encounter, things change.
Very often our intercessory prayer can be about seeking change in others – more peace among leaders, more faithfulness among disciples, more health among the sick. But this prayer of presence is about allowing change in ourselves – our attitudes, our way of being in the world. When we stop trying to bargain with God or tell God what to do, there is simply more space for God to act in our lives. Like love, such prayer is not so much an activity as an attitude – a choosing to be in a space and place where God can act within us.
So, prayer on the pattern of Jesus is about relationship, intimate constantly renewed relationship; and about presence sought in times of silence and solitude. In an era of fractured relationships and constant distraction and noise, it is not surprising that we find it difficult. Yet the most important thing is that we persist.
One day when I was confessing to my spiritual director that my prayer was somewhat lack lustre, she remarked, ‘but you keep turning up – even if sporadically and unwillingly, you show up. And that’s what matters’. As today’s parable suggests, persistence in prayer has effect over time. If we read that parable, not as being about ourselves and a God who is reluctant to give us what is essential, but eventually gives in if we nag enough (put enough coins in the vending machine, give it a good a thump as it were!); if instead we read it as being about two parts of ourselves, the part that wants to pray and the part that can’t be bothered and has already locked the door and gone to bed, I think it becomes more helpful. The faithfulness that enables us to keep turning up and giving it a go, will eventually move us to a place where relationship with God and deeper presence become possible.
So let’s not worry too much about how God answers prayer. Let’s concentrate instead on how we make ourselves open to the action of God in and through us. And let’s keep turning up – and God will do the rest. In whose name. Amen.
by Penny Jones, for Pentecost 7 Year C , 28 July 2019
There are two things I notice about Jesus’s own practice of prayer and his teaching – the first is that it is all about relationship. That is why he teaches his disciples to begin their prayer with the intimate and personal address, ‘our father’. Now that of course is not always the most helpful way to think about God, especially if our earthly fathers have been less than wonderful, but it does signal that close, healthy relationship with God is possible.
Prayer covers the full gamut of human interactions – saying ‘thank you’, saying ‘I’m sorry’, sharing the ups and downs, the dreams and the hopes – wanting to know what is important to the other. Our conversation with God mimics our close human conversations – and the Lord’s prayer covers all these things. When Jesus’s disciples ask him to teach them to pray, it was not because they did not already know how to pray – they were faithful Jews, they prayed five times a day. It was because they saw a different, intimate quality in Jesus’s prayer that they wanted to emulate. And perhaps they could see that when Jesus prayed he was doing more than just asking or saying sorry – he was actually enjoying an intimate conversation with one he loved. And like all intimate conversations, Jesus prayer needed time and solitude. This is the second thing I notice about his practice of prayer. Jesus spends a lot of his prayer in silence and solitude, out on the hillside before it gets light or long into the night. This prayer does not seem to be about asking. It seems to be about presence – Jesus’s presence to the Creator and the Creator’s to Jesus. And somehow in that encounter, things change.
Very often our intercessory prayer can be about seeking change in others – more peace among leaders, more faithfulness among disciples, more health among the sick. But this prayer of presence is about allowing change in ourselves – our attitudes, our way of being in the world. When we stop trying to bargain with God or tell God what to do, there is simply more space for God to act in our lives. Like love, such prayer is not so much an activity as an attitude – a choosing to be in a space and place where God can act within us.
So, prayer on the pattern of Jesus is about relationship, intimate constantly renewed relationship; and about presence sought in times of silence and solitude. In an era of fractured relationships and constant distraction and noise, it is not surprising that we find it difficult. Yet the most important thing is that we persist.
One day when I was confessing to my spiritual director that my prayer was somewhat lack lustre, she remarked, ‘but you keep turning up – even if sporadically and unwillingly, you show up. And that’s what matters’. As today’s parable suggests, persistence in prayer has effect over time. If we read that parable, not as being about ourselves and a God who is reluctant to give us what is essential, but eventually gives in if we nag enough (put enough coins in the vending machine, give it a good a thump as it were!); if instead we read it as being about two parts of ourselves, the part that wants to pray and the part that can’t be bothered and has already locked the door and gone to bed, I think it becomes more helpful. The faithfulness that enables us to keep turning up and giving it a go, will eventually move us to a place where relationship with God and deeper presence become possible.
So let’s not worry too much about how God answers prayer. Let’s concentrate instead on how we make ourselves open to the action of God in and through us. And let’s keep turning up – and God will do the rest. In whose name. Amen.
by Penny Jones, for Pentecost 7 Year C , 28 July 2019
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