7 `Ask, and it shall be given to you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you;
8 for every one who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it shall be opened.
9 Anyone among you, if his son asks for a loaf of bread, surely he will not give him a stone?
10 and if he asks for a fish, surely he will not give him a snake?
11 if therefore you, being bad, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your Father who [is] in the heavens give good things to those who ask him?
12 `All those things, therefore, that you may want men to do to you, so also do to them; for this is the law and the prophets.
I am taking these passages together, because they seem to be linked in the text; but the links are not always completely evident.
The opening two lines state a truth. As it stands, it is a comforting truth to be told. If we pray (which is what, in relation to our heavenly father, asking, seeking and knocking are), our prayer will be granted. Simple.
And moreover, it is reinforced, as is so often the case with Yeshua’s sayings, by two examples, which lead to an a fortiori emphasis. If we do not disappoint our children asking for food, why should we not trust God to do at least as much for us? Simple.
Except. Except that the majority of petitionary prayers are not granted, and Christians have spent two thousand years working out excuses for that fact. The usual explanation is that we can only ask for spiritual benefits (I have written a number of posts on the impropriety of praying, as Huck Finn did, for “fishhooks”), and some add that such prayer also needs to be intense and only for oneself.
My recent posts on prayer discuss all this at greater length. I believe that intercessory prayer – prayer for, on behalf of, others – is valuable, for two reasons and on two conditions. First, such prayer helps the beneficiary whether or not its specific requests are granted. If I know that X is praying for me, my own healing powers will be strengthened, partly because I know it and partly because X’s prayers add to an energy field maintained by prayer. The conditions, I think, are that we must first pray for Y’s spiritual wellbeing, and only then, “if it be Thy will”, for Y’s physical, mental or social health; and secondly, that we do so with as much concentration and intensity as we can muster.
One is tempted to think that the only prayer we can really utter is “Thy will be done”. And yet that doesn’t chime with the image of the child asking for bread or with the “good things” our heavenly Father is said to have in store for us. I do think, though, that when one is going through a great trial the appropriate prayer is always for faith and strength to undergo it as God wills; and that applies also to those for whom we pray. And we need to remind ourselves that whatever enemies or Nature throw at us, our Father does, really and truly, love us.
The final surprise of this passage is that it ends with the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule, than which nothing could be less exclusively Jewish and than which nothing could be less original to Yeshua. Not only that: he claims that that same Golden Rule “is the Law and the Prophets”, i.e. is the Torah. How? Why?
Because, I think, in this simple and rather banal way Yeshua is in fact saying something enormous: the essential, the necessary, symmetry of Love. What, after all, are the two Great Commandments? One: that we should love God with all our heart, all our mind, and all our strength – as He loves us. Two: that we should love our neighbour – as ourself. If you distil these two commandments, which really are “the Law and the Prophets”, you find a symmetry. Loving God on our part will simply return His existing love for us and thus complete the circle; loving our neighbour, both spiritually and also practically, as we love ourself – doing for him what I’d do for myself, no less – not only highlights one existential symmetry but provokes another: loving him may well make him love me and complete that circle too.
And finally, by putting this in the terms of the ubiquitous Golden Rule Yeshua reminds his hearers once again that his completed Torah is for everyone, for the goyim as well as for the Jews, for the Nations as well as for Israel.
No comments:
Post a Comment