BREAD, STONE, FISH, SNAKE

Franz von Defregger (1835-1921)

 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.  

 

 

PRAYING FOR ANASTASIA, OR, FISH-HOOKS REVISITED

"Human freedom is an essential, aspect of God's creation and as such [J.R.] Lucas argues that there must be an infinity of possible plans. He likens God's providence to the Persian rugmakers who start at one end of a carpet while their children start at the other: the skill of the father is able to accommodate the children's work to create a rug of great beauty." (James Wood, "The Theology of Prayer and Intercession")

 I have written earlier on what to me is the perennial problem of intercessory and petitionary prayer: what can one properly ask for, and what is the meaning of praying for others? The answer to the second question must depend on the way the first is answered; and both, as Lee Rayfield suggests, depend on one’s concept of, and one’s relation to, God. Several theologians have pointed out that early in the Old Testament, petitions to God played out in the language of commerce, of the market-place: the great example is the irresistible story of Abraham’s bargaining with God for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrha. (What is sometimes left out is the sequel: even though God acceded to Abraham’s final request to be merciful if even ten just men were found there, the cities did end up being destroyed. Clearly there was no minyan. But more relevant is the fact that Abraham did stop at ten, and did leave the decision up to God.)

            Since the coming of Jesus, however, the language of petition has been the language of love. Jesus taught us to call God Abba, Father: not obvious, when you think of Him as the Creator of the entire universe now revealed by Hubble. He taught us how to pray, how to ask, and suggested we do it as simply as a child asks its father for a bun. He also told us that if and when we ask, and ask insistently, we will receive (though he did not go into detail about what and how we will receive). Moreover, he showed us how he himself prayed: and, as one theologian pointed out, the most relevant of his prayers for this question is in Gethsemane, when he prayed God to let the cup of the Cross pass from him – “yet not as I will but as Thou wilt”.

            Which, of course, leads us to micro-management, and to Huck Finn’s fish-hooks. Does God micro-manage the world? In one sense I don’t think so. Jesus tells us that He sees the fall of every sparrow; but He doesn’t prevent it. Magic may stop the arrow dead in its flight; but God does not. On the other hand, I don’t think God stays aloof from the beautiful watch He has made and wound up. John Polkinghorne, a physicist and theologian, has reminded us that the Deist (and sometimes atheist) view of God is based on a mechanistic universe, and that in a quantum universe, where uncertainty plays a major role, a far more dynamic and subtle view of God is possible.

            We do not, usually, receive fish-hooks if we pray for them, though sometimes we do – which should make us think seriously about the relation between petitionary prayer and thanksgiving. But what interests me more today is prayer of intercession for others. We pray for a sick acquaintance. What do we pray? The simplest version is, “God, heal Anastasia (or Mrs X) and make her well again.” This may or may not happen. If it does, we give thanks, usually without questioning what that implies. If it doesn’t, there are several explanations: our faith wasn’t strong enough; or her healing at this time was not part of God’s will for her. The former, though in some places Jesus seems to sanction it,  almost reduces prayer to magic. The latter is very hard for us, with our love for the patient, to understand.  Some theologians solve the problem by saying that God’s sense of time is not ours; others, that God moves in mysterious ways.

            Yes, well, did we think we would grasp God and His ways? Does the child understand all its father’s circumstances and considerations? We are told that the great theological virtues are Faith, Hope, and Love. So why not apply those to our prayer of intercession? We pray that she may be healed. In that prayer, we do not attempt to bind God’s Will. We do apply Faith – we trust in God’s love, we trust Him to act out of the love He has for her. We do apply hope – the true Hope, which is itself a form of faith, a faith that points to a future, to an outcome. And we do apply Love, for the very fact of our praying for her is a putting into motion of the energy of Love. And that is enough. We cannot do more; we need not do more. As my mother, old and deep into Alzheimer’s, said to me one night before going to sleep, when I asked her what she thought about death and after: “I don’t think we’re meant to know, or to think about that. That’s what faith is for. You go into the dark, trusting.”

            But we have a restless and a questing mind, and some things I think we are allowed, indeed encouraged, to think about. If intercessory prayer “works,” how does it work? If a hundred people pray for Anastasia, what happens? And a couple of things I read recently gave me an idea about that. First, a sermon I heard said that God’s love for us is poured out constantly – not only at certain times of His choosing or our asking. It pours down upon us like the sun’s light. And if it does not efficaciously reach us, it is because we are blocking it. So what we can and should pray for is help to stop blocking God’s love. My second reading was the interview with Jean Vanier, and his insistence that we regard those unregarded by everyone else or the world in general.

            Those two ideas produced, in my mind, a third: that apart from my blocking the flow of God’s love for me, there may be more general and/or objective blocks that prevent that love from reaching me – or you, or Anastasia. And that praying for her, by one person but especially by more persons, may create a metaphysical energy that helps dissipate those blocks. What sort of blocks might they be? Well, as Vanier says, in a class, look at, regard, the kid everyone else makes fun of. Or, he mentions a 40-year-old paraplegic who has always so far been treated like something thrown out with the garbage. So one block might be the world in general, a person’s environment. Or a person’s circumstances. Or, indeed and startlingly often, a person’s own nature and its idiosyncrasies. I know several elderly women living alone, of varying prosperity but none of them poor. All of them have the physical problems that come with age. Three of them live rich, satisfying lives; two are profoundly and enduringly miserable, in spite of intelligence, education and talent. 

            Intercessory prayer for such people may create or fuel and augment an energy, deeply pleasing to a loving God, that helps to remove the screens blocking His love from pouring into their hearts and souls. We can only ever pray that He may lead them to the knowledge and love of Him, and that His will be done; but we are asked to do that often and insistently and also, I believe, smilingly (on His part) allowed to wonder, and ponder, how.

BEST WISHES?

“Then Miss Watson she took me in the closet and prayed, but nothing come of it. She told me to pray every day, and whatever I asked for I would get it. But it warn’t so. I tried it. Once I got a fish-line, but no hooks. It warn’t any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow I couldn’t make it work. By and by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never told me why, and I couldn’t make it out no way.”

Huck Finn’s predicament is both more general and more subtle than Twain makes it seem. Most prayer is beseeching. We ask for something. Usually, we are grown-up enough not to ask for fish hooks, or a video game, or a Corvette. But we have no problem asking to be allowed to get the job we are applying for, or a better grade on the exam, or for the person we are in love with to agree to have dinner. More importantly, we feel encouraged to pray for others: for our best friend’s mother to be healed of her cancer, for a 40-year-old acquaintance to recover mentally from being raped at 16, for an elderly lady’s arthritis to cease torturing her, for a friend’s husband in the last stages of Parkinson’s to be allowed a swift and not too painful end. Beyond that, moreover, we are encouraged to pray for peace in the Middle East, for reconciliation in the Ukraine, and for the end of murderous civil wars in a number of faraway countries.

“Ask, and you shall receive.” Really? The answer to all of the above prayers seems utterly arbitrary. Sometimes it’s yes, more often it’s no. Why? No one can tell us. Those who say that it is God’s Will are not only wrong, they are obscenely wrong. It is not God’s will that men torture and slaughter one another. But then, what is the answer to the enigma? It is difficult not to conclude that all those prayers are for fish hooks. That we are all Huck Finns, in church or out. As the French would say, our problem remains entire.

Thanksgiving – the impulse, not the festival – complicates matters. Most of us feel the need to give thanks when good things happen to us. But if the good things come from God, does that not mean that the bad ones do, too? Which would lead us to either a micro-managing but arbitrary Deity or to a kind of theistic fatalism that says that whatever is, is God’s will and therefore good, whatever we think it is.

After many years of pondering this, my provisional conclusion is that the answer was given by Jesus on that serenely beautiful hill above the Sea of Galilee which I had the privilege of visiting when my daughter was married in Nazareth. Having told people to stop worrying all the time about what will happen tomorrow, about having enough to eat, about having decent clothes, so forth, He said “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.”

If we apply this to prayer, it will show us – as, alas, it did not show Huck – what Miss Watson meant. “Ask, and you shall receive” is not a test to see if you know the password. It is the description of a law of God that works like a law of nature: a law of God’s nature, if you will. If we seek first the Kingdom of God; if we ask to know and love Him better; if we yearn to be filled with the Holy Spirit, whatever the cost; if we do that constantly, and go on doing so; then we shall  receive what we ask for, because the receiving is always already inherent in the constant asking.

And if we want to pray for others, once again we should ask for the same thing: that they may come to know and love Him better. For there is no good that we can ask for that is better or more important than that.

I cannot believe that God micromanages Creation. Microbes do their work just as mosquitoes do. Things live, things die. We live, we die. The difference is that we have a consciousness of love, which means that we have free will, which means that we are free to refuse love, i.e. to sin. So we have the capacity to add sin to death, which is horrible. On the other hand, if we seek the Kingdom of God – His reign, in us and elsewhere – and his righteousness, the integrity that is its hallmark, then all kinds of good attend us, because we will have become a certain kind of person, the kind that attracts good things like a magnet. It’s not a reward, it’s a consequence.

All the rest is fish hooks.