“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is”
What is prayer really all about? Is it about bartering and badgering, bargaining and begging God to get something we want? What does it mean to pray?
It means quite simply to want God’s will to be done in our lives. It is what we pray in the prayer which shapes and governs all prayer, the Lord’s Prayer. In a way, the whole attitude and approach to prayer and to our lives in faith is captured in the words “thy will be done.”
These words reverberate throughout the Scriptures, especially in the New Testament where they take on a new kind of intensity of expression. They are there in Mary’s great ‘yes,’ her wonderful and active acquiescence of her whole being to the divine will. “Be it unto me according to thy word;” in short, she prays that the divine will be done. Her words are the prologue to the most intense expression of this concept and idea voiced by Christ in the agony of the Garden of Gethsemane; “not my will, but thine be done” and then, captured on the Cross in the last word of the Crucified; “Father, into thy hands, I commend my spirit.”
In other words, our prayers are grounded in the Son’s prayer to the Father in the bond of the Spirit. “When you pray,” Jesus tells us, “say, ‘Our Father’,” which is itself an amazing thing. His Father becomes our Father to whom we have access through the Son and in the Spirit.
The Collect for today locates our prayer in the “bountiful goodness” of God. We pray to be “[kept] from all things that may hurt us”. That divine and bountiful goodness also inspires our “being[made] ready both in body and soul” in order to realize in our lives “those things that thou wouldest have done”– not the things that God would have done himself but the things that he would have us do out of his goodness and by the power of his grace.
To seek God’s will in everything that we do is the essence of prayer. It suggests that what God wants for us is able to be grasped and realized by us in our lives, not without God, but by virtue of our wills being at one with his will. God’s will is made visible in the life of Jesus. There is something understood about God and his will for us that underlies and shapes our prayers.
This is an absolutely astounding thing, a world revolutionary thing. I don’t mean that we can take God captive to our hearts and minds – we can’t – but that God intends that we are to love him and serve him and seek his will knowingly. In other words, we are not talking about blind faith. In a way, blind faith is a denial of God and a betrayal of faith. Faith, after all is really a form of knowledge, undemonstrated knowledge, to be sure, but a form of knowing nonetheless that always requires us to seek understanding. Fides quarens intellectum. Faith seeking understanding.
This is the great maxim of Anselm which in so many ways underlies both education and spiritual life in general. The self-conscious assumption is that there is something that can be known and known and loved. Without this assumption, we can make no sense of what Paul is saying to the Ephesians and what Jesus is saying in Matthew’s Gospel this morning. Paul is exhorting us to be wise, “understanding what the will of the Lord is.” In Matthew’s Gospel, we are invited to “a marriage” feast which is likened to “the kingdom of heaven.” Notice that. Jesus says, “the kingdom of heaven is like unto a certain king who made a marriage for his son.” We are invited to that marriage feast. We are invited to the kingdom of heaven. What is our response?
In many ways, this Gospel story, coming near the end of the Trinity season, complements another Gospel story told by St. Luke read near the beginning of the Trinity season on the Second Sunday after Trinity. Both are about an invitation to “a great supper” or “a marriage.” In both, the supper or the marriage feast is an image of “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven.” In both it is said that “all things are ready.” In both the question is about our response to the invitation. In the story read on the Second Sunday after Trinity, at issue are our excuses – the ways we absent ourselves from the heavenly banquet, turning to the ground of our all-too-human preoccupations.
Today, on the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity, in St. Matthew’s Gospel, the issue is somewhat different. There is more than our indifference to the invitation, ignoring it and “making light of it,” as it were. No. There is our willful rejection of the invitation and its messengers, the servants of God, “entreating them spitefully and killing them.” While the divine response to our indifference is to “go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled,” here the response is the divine wrath which “destroy[s] the murderers of his servants and burn[s] up their city.” Only then, is the instruction given to “go ye therefore into the highways and as many as ye shall find bid to the marriage.” And yet, that is not the end of the story either.
No. We confront an even more disturbing and disquieting thing, namely, the matter of the “wedding garment.” Those without the “wedding garment,” we are told in the parable in no uncertain terms, are “[bound] hand and foot, [taken] away and cast … into outer darkness” where “there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” Wow. Tough stuff. This is clearly an invitation that can’t be ignored except at our peril! How then is it an invitation, we may wonder. What exactly is meant by the “wedding garment?”
It is, I think, quite a remarkable image. It has altogether to do with our understanding. We are meant to respond to the invitation not only willingly but knowingly. We are meant to come prepared to enter into the meaning of the feast. In a way, our liturgy of Holy Communion prepares us for the importance of what we are about to receive. We are invited to the marriage feast, the great supper of the Lamb, the heavenly banquet. And it is not as if we can be unaware of what God wants for us. It has been declared and shown to us in the witness of the Scriptures and in the life of the Church. We are, actually, without excuse, but not without malice and wickedness in our willful rejection of the divine will for our humanity, it seems.
“Love bade me welcome,” the poet George Herbert wonderfully says in a poem which comments upon these invitations to the divine banquet. But it is in another poem that he makes the point about our understanding as being fundamental to prayer.
The poem is called Prayer (1). It offers a wonderful sequence of images, some biblical, some historical, some natural, some domestic, some exotic. There is no active verb in the whole poem; the verb ‘is’ is implied in the last phrase which sums up what is meant in all of the rich images of prayer that Herbert names. Prayer is “something understood.”
“Prayer the churches banquet,” the poem begins, alluding to these gospel stories and others about the kingdom of heaven seen as a feast, further described as “Angels age”– suggesting that in such a banquet we are at one with the angels and are part of something which transcends time; it is sempieternal. “Therefore with angels and archangels,” as we pray in the liturgy. “Gods breath in man returning to his birth,” recalling us to our creation as the dust into which God has breathed his spirit in the paradise of Eden. “The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage”– lovely images which capture the quintessence of prayer as belonging to our identity with God and to the dignity of our journeying to God in prayer. It is, he suggests, “the Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth.” Prayer is the measure of our lives connecting us to heaven while on earth. “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” as we pray in the Lord’s Prayer.
The poem continues through two more four-line stanzas of intense and rich and powerful images. They are all images of the activity of prayer, ways of thinking about prayer as belonging to the very substance of our lives in all of our thinking and desiring and doing. The poem ends with a couplet. Prayer, Herbert concludes, is “Church-bels beyond the stares heard, the souls bloud,/The land of spices;” and finally, “something understood.”
Prayer is “something understood.” It requires our attentiveness. God is constantly inviting us into his heavenly presence, to the banquet of divine love which is the measure and truth of Christian faith and of Christian lives. We are not meant to come unawares but always seeking to know in order to love more dearly and more clearly. Our lives and our liturgy are about the wedding garment of the understanding, each according to our capacities, to be sure. We can neither be indifferent nor ignorant about what God seeks for us.
Let me add, too, that this is not just about attending Church. It is about the radical message of divine love that challenges us in every part of our lives – our marriages, our friendships, our commitments to one another and our world in so many ways. Of course, the liturgy of the Church is the fullest and most consistent reminder to us of that love, a love which is understood in some sense or another by all of us. And more than a reminder, here that love is realized and communicated to us; if only we will be wise and “understand what the will of the Lord is.”
“Wherefore be ye not unwise, but understanding what the will of the Lord is”
Fr. David Curry
Trinity XX, 2010