In the gospels, Jesus is seen praying frequently, but it’s interesting, the disciples, not so much. Maybe after some time together they finally noticed this, and in today’s gospel, they asked Jesus to teach them to pray.
And in response, although he does give them a prayer to memorize, and we have all dutifully done that for centuries, in response what he really tells them are a couple of stories, and the stories aren’t really about exactly how to pray. What Jesus wants them to understand is not so much about how, but about who, something about who the God they are praying to actually is. Because if we get that right, maybe we’ll get prayer right.
So who is it exactly that we’re praying to when we pray? Jesus is reminding us today in the gospel that we have one big mistake that we make in this area. We think God is a human being, and more to the point, we think God is a like a human who isn’t really that eager for other human beings like us to be contacting him. We think God is like some other human authority figures we might know, maybe a distant parent we can’t completely please, or maybe like a busy employer who’s got thousands of other people to worry about. Or maybe God is like that homeowner we hear about in the gospel with someone knocking on his door, who answers, Sorry, it’s really late right now, and I really don’t know you very well, do I?
We don’t mean to picture God this way, but if we’re honest with ourselves, we know that we can. And if that’s the way we picture God, we’re at a disadvantage we’ll never recover from when it comes to prayer. Fortunately for us, what Jesus tells us today, and over and over, is that this may be the way human authority figures are, distant and difficult to please, but God is the opposite. God is trying to give us things in the same way that we all want our children to have things, trying to give them just because we are who we are. This isn’t a stingy God who drops gifts off for us now and then at our door, it is a God who simply wants our personal attention.
In that amazing second reading today it says we were all dead and we were all raised up, all the legal documents against us were just thrown away through no merit of our own, God did this for us but it doesn’t say why. It turns out the why is this: It’s because all God wants is to continue creating, for this world to turn more towards him, and that means God wants our lives to head in the direction that brings more freedom, more liberation, more connection with God. So God doesn’t need to be convinced to listen to us, or for us to ask just the right way. God can’t wait for us to turn in God’s direction. God simply wants us to flourish.
Sometimes we have an image of prayer as something difficult and athletic, like it’s climbing a mountain towards something we can’t see, but really the hard part is not that it’s like a mountain, it’s more like taking fences down that we’ve built between us and the God who is looking for us. It’s clearing away all the clutter that we have allowed to block the sun. It’s opening a door that God is already waiting at, not banging on a door that God won’t answer. God wants a relationship with us whether we think we’re worth it or not. And so we pray. We ask, we listen, we talk, we watch for signs in our ordinary daily life, we say what is on our mind, we ask for the grace we need to live this life. That’s prayer. God doesn’t need a special approach in order to get his attention, God is not at a great distance. God is with us in this life that we are actually living and not some other one.
It isn’t that prayer is always easy, or that it solves everything. This life has battles for all of us that prayer can’t make go away as if they never happened and won’t still happen. The wounded Jesus knows that better than anyone. This world has injustice that prayer alone won’t fix, and Jesus knows that about the world too. And God might tell us in prayer that we have projects ahead of us that we are certain we’re not ready for. All that is part of prayer. But what isn’t part of it is God being absent, not ready or willing, to be with us where we are, wherever that might be. Knock and the door will be opened, says the gospel. Or maybe, it’s been open all along.