The passage: They ought to pray, and not to faint.
“How should any design of the All-wise be altered by prayer of ours?” How are we to believe such a thing?
By reflecting that he is the All-wise, who sees what lies ahead and will not block his own path. The objection springs from the poorest idea of God in relation to us: it supposes he has plans for our part of creation irrespective of us. What is the whole system of things for but our education? Does God care more for suns and planets and ordered harmonies than for his children? I venture to say he cares more for oxen than for those. He lays no plans irrespective of his children; since he means them to be free, active, living things, he keeps space for them: room to struggle out of the chrysalis, to undergo the change that comes with the waking will, and to enter on the divine sports and labours of children in their Father’s house. He may keep his plans in a measure unfixed, waiting the free desire of the individual soul. The first course of his children’s education is meant to bring them to pray: shall the system appointed to that end be so hard and fast that he cannot answer the prayer it exists to produce? Often the prayer itself is God’s end; but how will the further end, oneness of the child’s heart with the Father’s, be reached if the child knows the Father cannot answer? Will not may be for love, but a self-imposed cannot? How could he be Father who would keep no room for his children’s babbled prayers? There must be a Godlike region of choice, as there is a human, however little we can conceive it. It would be a glory in such a system that its suns themselves wavered and throbbed at the pulse of a new child-life.
What perfection in a dwelling would it be if everything were fitted like the pigeon-holes of a cabinet? What stupid perfection would leave no room to change the plan when the facts change, even by the mighty change that his child is praying! See God’s freedom in his sunsets, never one like another, and in his skies and ever-changing earth: all moves not by dead law but by the vital law of liberty, ordered from within. A fine perfection, where a thing had only one way! I may move my arm as I please: shall God be unable to move his? For himself he might desire no change, but he is God for his growing creatures, and change is the necessity of their existence. They need a mighty law of liberty, with not one atom of chance in it. Creation’s one idea is the begetting of a free, divine will in us: shall that will, praying with the Father’s, find itself manacled by foregone laws, and not rather be a new-born law, working new things? No man is so tied by divine law that he cannot modify his work; shall God not modify his? Law is but a mode of life-action, and Life’s slave. Is God only the prisoned steam in the engine, ordered by valve and piston, or an indwelling, willing power, as a man’s soul in his body dimly typifies? If you say he made things to go and left them, I say that if his machine interfered with his answering a single child’s prayer, he would sweep it away, not to bring back chaos but to make room for his child. But order is divine and cannot obstruct its own higher ends; free order, neither chaos nor law senseless and unpossessed, is the home of Thought. If you say there can be but one perfect way, I answer that the perfect way to a certain crisis can hardly be the perfect way beyond it; and since the crisis depends on a will, not all can be exactly prepared. God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds, suns, forces and waves; these are his workshops and tools for bringing out righteous men and women to fill his house of love. Would he have let his Son die for a law of nature? They exist only for the birth of sons and daughters, who must be born again from above. Those whose doom, to grow or perish, implies their inability to lay hold of the perfect must be given many a modification of the ideal; the best means cannot be the ideal Best. Truth embodied for the low cannot equal that for the higher, else it will fail; but as the low ascend, their revelation will ascend also.
That God cannot modify his plans without changing a single law of his world is to me absurd. If we can change, God can change, or he is less free than we: his plans, I say, not his principles or ends, God forbid! He changes them in a divine fashion, above ours as the heavens are higher than the earth. Since in his miracles Jesus did only in miniature what his Father does in the great, I will take from them an instance of answer to prayer that bears importantly on my subject. Poor was the making of wine in the stone water-pots compared with its making in the vine, whose live roots gather water from the earth; but it is precious as the interpreter of that, and as the outcome of our Lord’s sympathy with ordinary human rejoicing. It is more precious to me for another element in its origin: the regard of our Lord for a wish of his mother. Alas, how often it is misunderstood!
His mother had suggested that here was an opportunity to appear in his greatness, the potent purveyor of wine for the failing feast. It was not in his plan, as his words show; the Lord never pretended anything, to enemy or mother. He lets her know they have different notions of his work: “What to me and thee, woman? My hour is not yet come.” But there was that in his look and tone from which she knew her desire, scarcely half-formed into a request, was granted. What am I to conclude, worthy of the Son of God and the Son of Mary, but that at his mother’s prayer he made room in his plans for what she desired? He did for her what he would himself rather have left alone. He did not always do as she would have him; here he could, since it did not interfere with his Father’s will. Was the perfect son to be the only son of man who did nothing to please his mother but what fitted his own plan? Not so could he be the living heart of the children’s great response to the Father, or the grand family become real. Alas for the son who would not willingly do for his mother something he would rather not do! Had it turned from his Father’s will, he would not have done it, for that would have been to answer her prayer against her. The Son could change his intent and spoil nothing; so can the Father, for the Son does nothing but what he sees the Father do.
Granting that God may answer those who pray for themselves, what of prayer for others? It would surely be selfish to pray only for ourselves; but the question is of the use of the act, so let us pray for all we can. But here the ground is changed, if the fitness for answer lies in the praying of the one who prays: the attitude needed for reception belongs not to those for whom prayer is made but to him by whom it is made. What fitness, then, in praying for others? Will God give to another, for our asking, what he would not give without it, or, if it could be done without the person’s own part, would he not do it without a second person? If God were a tyrant whose heart anxious love might soften, or one who could be informed and reasoned with, or one whose interest a showing of character, need, or claim might awaken, prayer for another would have plain reason, though prayer to one so unworthy would be degrading. But if we believe that God is the one unselfish, good being in the universe, whose one design is to make his children perfect as he is perfect; that he is always giving himself to us for our life; that he does his best for every man (which once I heard a bishop decline to acknowledge); and that he knows every man’s needs and, for love’s sake, will not spare one pang that may purify one of his children, how can we think he will alter his way with one because another prays for him?
I do not know how to answer the argument. I can only, feeling the difficulty, say again: “Yet I believe I may pray for my friend, for my enemy, for anybody! There must be some genuine good and power in one man’s prayer for another to the maker of both, just because their maker is perfect.” I shall not bring authority to bear, for authority can at best make us believe reason is there, not see it. The difficulty is the same when we hear the Lord himself pray to his Father for those the Father loves, with a special love from the deeps of divine approval, because they have received his Son. Those who believe in Jesus will be satisfied that reason and right lie in what he does, but that is not understanding. Though I cannot explain, I can show some ground on which, even untaught, a man left alone with his heart might pray for another.
If God has made us to love and long to help like himself; if there are people for whom we would give our lives to lift them out of the evil gulf of their ungodliness; if the love in us would, for the easing of the love he kindled, give them a gift; if amid a sore need to bless we find utter impotence, the fire burning and unable to get out; and if all our hope lies in God: what can we do but go to him with this our own difficulty and need? Where the natural refuge is, there must be help; the best argument that he has help is that we have need. If I can be helped through my friend, I think God will take the thing up and do what I cannot, helping my friend that I may be helped, perhaps helping me to help him. In praying for another we pray for ourselves, for the relief of the needs of our love; so this comes under the former kind. Would God give us love, the root of power, and leave it helpless in us? Where he could not alter, he could perhaps at least expedite something, in view of some help we might then give. If he desires that we work with him, that work surely helps him!
Some things are argued for by the very possibility of supposing them; but I think I can go farther and imagine at least the where, if not the how, of help for another in answer to prayer: the divine conditions in which it is born.
God is ever seeking to lift us into sharing his divine nature; God’s kings, those who have borne witness to the truth with Jesus, share his glory even on the Father’s throne. See the grandeur of the Holy One’s creative love: nothing less will serve it than that his children, through his suffering and theirs, share the throne of his glory! Does such perfection bind him with difficulties, or set him freer to do what he would amid opposing forces? If his glory is in giving himself, and we must share it by giving ourselves, why should we not begin here and now? If he wills that other children be brought to his knee and fireside by the help of the children born from above through his eternal Son, why should he not have kept some margin of room in which their prayers may work for those they have to help, who are of the same life? I cannot tell how, but may not those prayers in some way increase God’s opportunity for working his best will, the good ones adding to his means of helping the not yet good? One way is clear: the prayer will react on the mind that prays, which will shine brighter and enlighten more. But there must be more in it. Prayer in its perfect idea is a rising into the will of the Eternal: may not the Father’s help become one with the child’s prayer, and for the prayer of him he holds in his arms go forth for him who wills not yet to be lifted to his embrace? God cannot bring his children to his bosom at once, and not at all except through his own suffering and theirs. But will not any good parent find some way of granting the prayer of the child who says, “Papa, this is my brother’s birthday: I have nothing to give him, and I do love him so! Could you give me something to give him, or give him something for me?”
“Still, could not God have given the gift without the prayer? And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another?”
I can only answer with a question: why should my love be powerless to help another? We must not tie God to our measures of time, or think he has forgotten a prayer that we, seeing no answer, have forgotten. Death is not an impervious wall; the prayers go through it. We may have some to help in the next world because we have prayed for them in this: will it not be a boon to them to have an old friend to serve them? What I venture to say is this: if in God we live and move and have our being, and the very possibility of loving lies in our existing in the live air of love, God himself, then we are nearer each other than by any bodily nearness; and if prayer is a pulse that sets this atmosphere in motion, it brings us closer than the parts of our body are by their nerve-telegraphy. Surely in the Eternal hearts are never parted! Surely the system of things would be incomplete in relation to love, its best thing, if love had no help in prayer. If I love and cannot help, does my heart not move me to ask him to help who loves and can, him without whom I would neither love nor care to pray? Will he answer, “Child, do not trouble me; I am already doing all I can”? Then who that loved would not be content to be nowhere in the matter? But how if the limitless Love, the self-forgetting devotion that demanding all gives all, should say, “Child, I have been doing all I could; but now you are come, I shall be able to do more! Here is a corner for you, my little one: push at this thing to get it out of the way”? How if he should say, “Pray on, my child; it goes through me in help to him. We are of one mind about it; I help and you help. I shall have you all safe home with me by and by! Only we must work, and not lose heart. Let your light so shine that men glorify me by knowing I am light and no darkness”? What then? Oh that lovely picture by Michelangelo, with the young ones and the little ones come to help God to make Adam!
But the answer to prayer may come in a shape that seems a refusal, even in an increase of what we seek deliverance from. I know of one who prayed to love better: a sore division came between, out of which at length rose a dawn of tenderness.
Our vision is so circumscribed, our theories so small, our faith so continually fitted to our dwarf intellect, that there is endless room for rebellion against ourselves. We must not let our poor knowledge limit our intellect, our intellect our faith, or our faith our divine hope; reason must humbly watch over all, reason, the candle of the Lord.
Some argue for prayer not from any answer to be looked for but from the good gained in the spiritual attitude of praying. Some who believe in no ear to hear or heart to answer will yet pray; they say it does them good; they pray to nothing at all, but get spiritual benefit.
I will not contradict their testimony. So needful is prayer to the soul that the mere attitude of it may encourage a good mood. To pray to what is not is in logic a folly; yet the good they say comes of it may rebuke the worse folly of their unbelief, for it indicates that prayer is natural, and how could it be natural if inconsistent with the very mode of our being? Theirs is a better way than that of those who believe there is a God but not that he will answer, yet pray to him; that is more foolish and more immoral than praying to the No-god, and mocks him, themselves, and the truth.
On the other hand, though God give no assent to the individual prayer, and the prayer be for something not good enough to be a gift of God, the soul that prays will get good of it, if only in being brought a little nearer the Father and making way for coming again. Prayer reacts for good on the praying soul irrespective of answer. But to pray for the sake of the prayer, regardless of there being no one to hear, would indicate to me a nature morally false and not merely illogical, did I not suspect a vague apprehension of a Something diffused through all existence, and some shadowiest communion with it.
There are moods of such satisfaction in God that a man may feel nothing is left to pray for and he has only to wait for what the Lord will work; moods of such hungering that petition is crushed into an inarticulate crying; and a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything. This last is the very essence of prayer, though not petition. A man may believe, not in God, but that there is a God, and yet not desire communion with him; but he who prays and does not faint will come to recognize that to talk with God is more than to have all prayers granted: it is the end of all prayer, granted or refused. And he who seeks the Father more than anything he can give is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.
Even those who ask amiss may sometimes be answered. The Father will never give a stone to the child who asks for bread; but I am not sure he will never give a stone to the child who asks for a stone. If the Father says, “That is a stone; it is no bread,” and the child answers, “I am sure it is bread; I want it,” may it not be well he should try his bread?
Now for another point in the parable, where I think I can help: the Lord’s apparent recognition of delay in answering prayer. The structure of the parable takes delay for granted, yet he says, “He will avenge them speedily!”
The reconciling conclusion is that God loses no time, though the answer may not be immediate.
He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask; we are not ready. To give before we could truly receive would destroy the heart and hope of prayer, and cease to be our Father. The delay itself may bring us nearer our help, deepen the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.
Again, time may be needed to work out the answer, not from any straitening in God but from our own condition and capacity, or our friend’s. God is limited by regard for our best; our best implies education, in which we must have a large share, and being human it takes time. Perhaps the better the gift, the more time it needs. To give us a spiritual gift God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much that we can be aware of only in the results; our consciousness is to our being as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf it issues from, and God works in that gulf, behind our consciousness. He may be coming toward our consciousness from behind with his own presence, the one thing we most earnestly cry for, long before we are aware that he has answered and is visiting his child. To avenge speedily must mean to make no delay beyond what is necessary, to begin the moment it is possible. Because the Son of Man did not appear for thousands of years after men began to cry for a Saviour, shall we imagine he did not come the first moment it was well he should? To come sooner would have delayed his kingdom, not hastened it. God does not put off like the unrighteous judge, until irritated by the needy; he will hear while they are yet speaking; before they call he will answer.
The Lord uses words without anxiety about their misuse by those who do not search for his will in them; the word avenge may be kept from the parable without its special meaning there, yet it suggests a remark or two.
Of course no prayer for revenge that would gratify the selfishness of our nature, which God’s fire must burn out of us, need think to be heard. Be sure, when the Lord prayed his Father to forgive those who crucified him, he uttered his own wish and his Father’s will at once: God will never punish according to the abstract abomination of sin, as if men knew what they were doing. “Vengeance is mine,” he says; rightly understood, we might as well pray for God’s vengeance as for his forgiveness. That vengeance is to destroy the sin, to make the sinner abjure and hate it; no vengeance that seeks or effects less is satisfying. The man himself must turn against himself, and so be for himself. If nothing else will do, then hell-fire; if less will do, whatever brings repentance and self-repudiation is God’s repayment.
Friends, if any prayers are offered against us, if God’s vengeance is cried out for because of some wrong you or I have done, God grant us his vengeance! Let us not think we shall get off!
But perhaps the Lord was thinking here not of persecution or any human wrong but of the troubles that most trouble his true disciple. That comforts those whose foes are within them, for then he recognizes the evils of self against which we fight not as parts of ourselves but as our foes, on whom he will avenge the true self at strife with them. No evil is, or could be, of the essential being of the creature God made! What is not good, however associated with our being, is against it, its enemy. When we fight, he will avenge. Till we fight, evil has dominion over us, to make us miserable; no one can be other than miserable under the yoke of a nature contrary to his own. Comfort yourself, then, who find your own heart and soul too much for you: God will avenge his own elect. He is not delaying; he is at work for you. Only pray, and do not faint. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek most the best things; to ask for them is to have them; the seed of them is in you, or you could not ask.
But from whatever quarter our troubles come, outside world or inside, let us still pray. In his own right way, the only way that could satisfy us, God will answer our prayers with help. He will avenge us of our adversaries, and that speedily. Only let us be adversaries to no man, but fountains of love and forgiving tenderness to all. And from no adversary, whether on the way with us or haunting the secret chamber of our hearts, let us hope to be delivered till we have paid the last farthing.