Ask, seek, knock

A word for the week

What do you actually expect when you pray? Be honest about it. Do you expect to be heard, the way a child expects a parent to look up when they speak? Or do you pray the way people knock on the door of a house they believe is empty, out of habit, with no real thought that anyone is home?

Jesus gives three short commands here. Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened. But before you can obey any of them, you have to answer the question hiding underneath all three: what kind of God do you think is on the other side of the door?

Notice that Jesus argues his answer with questions of his own. Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will hand him a stone? If he asks for a fish, who will give him a snake? He does not lecture about the generosity of God; he asks you to consult what you already know. Would you trick your own hungry child? No? Then why do you keep assuming heaven is colder than you are? And then the question that carries the whole teaching: if you, being what you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father give good things to those who ask him?

How much more. Do you believe those three words? Not as a doctrine you would assent to on paper; in practice, at the level of what you actually do. When did you last ask God for something plainly, expecting good? When did you last seek, meaning you got up and looked, and put some effort into the finding? When did you last knock more than once?

And why do the three verbs climb the way they do, from asking to seeking to knocking? Is it not because a prayer that quits after one polite request never really believed the door was answerable? Asking is a word; seeking is a search; knocking is a body standing at a door, staying there, because it knows someone is home. Which of the three is your prayer life right now? Does anything you bring to God survive the first silence? A caution belongs here too: a good father does not hand a child everything the child names, and some of what you receive will not be the thing you asked for. But is unanswered the same as unheard? The child who trusts the father keeps asking; only the child who has given up on him goes quiet.

Then the strange turn at the end. Whatever you want others to do for you, do also for them, he says; this is the law and the prophets. Why does the golden rule sit here, at the close of a teaching about asking? Could it be that a person who has finally believed in a generous Father has no reason left to be stingy? You have been given to; so give. You hope, right now, to be received with kindness when you knock; so open your own door that way. What would this one week look like if you treated every person you met exactly the way you are hoping God will treat you?

He is not teaching a technique. He is describing a Father. Ask. Seek. Knock. The door is not what you feared it was.