Vulnerable Verbs

Matthew 7:7-11

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

Tom Wright, Matthew for Everyone (Vol. 1)

Maybe our refusal to [ask, seek and knock] actually makes God sad or puzzled: why aren’t his children telling him how it is for them, what they’d like him to do for them? . . . [F]or most of us, the problem is not that we are too eager to ask for the wrong things. The problem is that we are not nearly eager enough to ask for the right things (72).

We may well say that we’ve tried it and it didn’t work. Well, prayer remains a mystery. Sometimes when God seems to answer “no” we find it puzzling. . . . Some of the wisest thinkers of today’s church have cautiously concluded that, as God’s kingdom comes, it isn’t God’s will to bring it all at once. We couldn’t bear it if he did. God is working like an artist with difficult material; and prayer is the way some of that material co-operates with the artist instead of resisting him (73).

A. Orendorff

Taking prayer seriously is scary work. Asking, seeking and knocking are all unavoidably vulnerable verbs. They exposed us, first to the desperateness of our need and then to the free and incoercible grace of God. All real prayer begins with the bald admission of our own personal powerlessness as well as our culpable inability to “manage” life alone. Helplessness is never a comfortable feeling. Yet is here, at the moment of our deepest vulnerability and need, that God shows himself as “Father,” ready with “good gifts” to answer our asking, disclose to our seeking and open to our knocking.