Ask, Seek, Knock
Dear Reader,
Ask, seek, knock. The sermon I heard this morning explored the parable in Luke of the friend at midnight. Coming at midnight, the friend comes to his neighbour’s house seeking bread. And the neighbour, despite the hour, is expected to answer—how could he not at such a time of urgency? Unlike the grumpy neighbour in the parable, God is ready to meet our needs without hesitation. He is waiting for us, delighting to answer our requests from the depths of his generosity.
Connecting the celebration of communion to the sermon, the celebrant invited us to prepare for communion by thinking about what we needed, and to bring those requests to the Lord. Communion was thus framed as a receiving of the Lord’s generosity, Jesus’ body and blood a sign of God’s willingness to give us all things.
Yet for me, as I sat searching my mind and heart, asking myself, ‘what do I need?” I felt at a loss for an answer. This was not because I felt beyond need, as if I had everything and couldn’t think of anything else. Quite the opposite! Our return from overseas has been hectic, with our schedules packed and all of us fighting off colds. My writing deadlines are weighing on me, as I feel a lack of direction, insight, and simply the right words to use.
As I write all of this now, I realise that I have already named some of the things that I need—time, wisdom, clarity, peace. But at that moment before communion, I couldn’t name any of those things. I only had a deep sense of my neediness—and a sense of my inability to name what I needed.
What I could name, however, was the God who meets our needs. Paul tells us that through the Spirit we are enabled to cry, “Abba, Father,” and that name came to my mind as I prayed. Paul describes the Spirit’s work as helping “us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans” (Romans 8:26-27). The Spirit brings our neediness to God, even when we don’t know what exactly that is.
I often get impatient with my children over their cryptic requests. They beat around the bush, or they use vague language, and I can’t figure out what they’re talking about. Particularly if they are distressed, they are often incoherent. “Tell me what you need,” I coax. “I can’t help you if I don’t know what you need.”
How good that this is not the way God responded to me this morning—or the way he ever responds. A North African bishop in the fourth century, Augustine, wrote to God in his Confessions, “You were closer to me than I am to myself.” God’s knowledge of us does not depend on what we choose to or are able to communicate. He knows our hearts, ‘probing’ them as the Psalms say, and knowing our deepest desires and needs. While it can be helpful for us to be able to articulate what we need in order to seek help or understanding from others, we don’t have to be able to articulate what we need or want before coming to God. All that is required is that we know that we are needy.
This neediness exists whether we have all the material goods of life—house, food and clothing—secured for the foreseeable future, or whether we must seek God daily to provide those things. Our neediness is intrinsic to our being creatures—not a built-in-defect that we will somehow overcome, but a basic part of our being ‘not-God’. C.S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, says that “our whole being by its very nature is one vast need; incomplete, preparatory, empty yet cluttered, crying out for Him who can untie things that are now knotted together and tie up things that are still dangling loose.” And this neediness, this love of God because of what we need and what he can give, “makes a main ingredient in man’s highest, healthiest, and most realistic spiritual condition.”
Despite our prideful desire to move out of neediness, to order our lives so that we are independent and self-sufficient, to do so would be to scorn our creature hood and desire to be ‘like God.’ To exist as creatures is to live in constant need of the sustaining breath of God, breathed out in gracious love for all that he has made.
What needs to do you have today? Whether you can name them specifically, or whether you only have cries of desperation, our Father hears you and delights to give out of his abundance.
This image was also inspired by the church service this morning, as the front and back of the program had art by Japanese artist Sadao Watanabe. As a Christian artist, he created many linocuts of biblical scenes–including the one above, depicting the Canaanite woman beseeching God to heal her daughter. I was reminded of her story as I thought about neediness and coming to Jesus: as a Gentile, she shows audacity in her imposition of a Jewish rabbi. Yet she persists, because she knows that Jesus can meet her needs.
O Lord,
extend your mercy over all your servants everywhere
with the right hand of heavenly help,
that they may seek you with their whole heart,
and obtain what they rightly ask;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.
From the Gelasian Sacramentary
On the road with you,
Laura