17th Sunday 2022
Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:12-24; Luke 11:1-13
Afficionados of Dr. Who may remember the Matt Smith episode entitled “The Doctor’s Wife” in which the Tardis, the Doctor’s time machine, takes on human form in the person of a woman called Idris. Immediately, she and the Doctor fall to bickering, with the latter complaining “You didn’t always take me where I wanted to go,” to which Idris/the Tardis retorts “I always took you where you needed to go”.
Can this shed some light on the vexed question of unanswered prayer? “Ask, and you shall receive” says Jesus, and I cannot be the only person who winces at that. I once met a lady who told me that she never asks for anything in prayer, but prays only “Thy will be done”; yet, although that undergirds all our prayer, Our Lord clearly tells us to ask, and we shouldn’t attempt to be more Christlike than Christ.
Yet we know that we don’t always receive what we ask for in prayer. Sometimes, that doesn’t affect us greatly. We are fully entitled to pray for a fine afternoon for the parish Summer Fair, but our faith is unlikely to be shaken if it pours with rain. (Mind you, as a child, I used to spend half the year praying for a fine Whit Monday for the Garstang procession and fairground, the highlight of my year, and the other half saying “thank you” prayers because the sun invariably shone. Since I stopped praying about it, I notice that they have suffered some miserably wet such Mondays.)
What, though do we make of those deeply serious prayers which apparently go unanswered? We pray for the recovery of a sick child, who nevertheless dies. Twice recently, I, along with a host of others, have prayed for falsely accused priests who yet have been convicted in the teeth of all the evidence. It is difficult to reconcile situations like that with Our Lord’s words.
In facing this question, we must be careful not to be glib. It is far too easy, it insults the person who has prayed, and it does God no favours to say “Ah, well, it was obviously better for that prayer not to be answered”. How dare we?
Yes, of course God sees the full picture of which we perceive only a tiny fragment. Yes, of course there are situations which, in the long term, are resolved positively, in spite of an apparent short term “No”. Yet there are prayers which are made with real fervour, where it is extremely difficult to perceive a positive long term outcome when they appear to be denied. What then?
Ultimately, I think that we are brought to Gethsemane. There, in the Garden of the Agony, Jesus asked His Father for something very reasonable and, from His point of view, almost definitely necessary: “If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” Yet it seems that the Father said “No”. Was this a case of a father giving his son a stone instead of bread, a snake in place of a fish, a scorpion for an egg?
Our Lord Himself was confident that it was not so, concluding His prayer with the words “Nevertheless, let it be as you, not I, would have it”. He knew that He faced suffering beyond all human imagining, yet He was willing to trust His Father to give Him the ultimate reward, the salvation of the human race. He was committed to complete faith in His Father. This was not faith in His own prayer, but faith in the person of the Father and in His total goodness.
That is the attitude which we must bring to our own prayers of petition—that God will take us, not always where we want to go, but always where we need to go. That does not excuse us, however, from storming heaven, not only on our own behalf, but also on behalf of others, nor does it give us permission to downplay their suffering, or to fob them off with easy answers. The answers are to be found only in the sufferings of the Redeemer, and it is not our business to attempt to give people simplistic or unreal comfort.
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