Text: "Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you." --Luke 11: 9
In this time of political campaigns, I was reminded once again of an incident in a former campaign. It was recorded nearly 40 years ago by the journalist Theodore White in his account of The Making of the President: 1960. It seems that the Kennedy staff frequently kept themselves amused and alert while on the campaign trail by playing a game they called "The Question Game." The rules were simple: someone gave an "answer," to which all others were invited to make up an appropriate question. It's a little like the game show "Jeopardy," except that in this case the winning question is the one that is the cleverest, not necessarily the most correct. Mr. White cited one example. As some of the staff members were driving north one morning up the Hudson River on New Jersey Route 9-W, someone exclaimed, "All right, the answer is 9-W!" Mr. White does not record all of the questions proposed on that occasion, but he reported the winning question as follows: "Mr. Wagner, do you spell your name with a V?"
This story led me to recall another that involved the expatriate American author Gertrude Stein. At the end of her life as she lay dying in her Paris apartment, according to this account, she was approached by her dear friend and long-time companion, Alice B.Toklas. "Well Gertrude," she gently inquired, "did you find the answer?" Her reply, according to the story, was terse and poignant: "What was the question?"
Well, both of these stories came to my mind as I was studying the passage from St Luke's Gospel that I read earlier this morning, the one from the 1 1th chapter. One word kept catching my eye; it stood out, drew attention to itself. There it is, right in the heart of the passage: "importunity." It is a strange word, not one that we are accustomed to using in everyday speech. It's a little too stiff, a little too formal for normal discourse. It is defined as "troublesome pertinacity in requesting or demanding," and "obstinate persistence." And it seems to dominate the passage.
Here is the context: Jesus is praying, when his disciples approach. "Teach us to pray," they implore him. And he replies by saying, "When you pray, say this." Then he opens in that startling way: "Abba," which is Aramaic for "Father. Not "O Thou in whom and through whom and by whom we have our being. . .," but "Abbe. . . Father." As if he were addressing one who is close, who he believes is as interested in each one of us as our own parent, our father or mother might be. But notice that lest this implies that we are on ground too intimate and familiar, he follows immediately with the phrase, "Hallowed be thy name." That is, he invokes an image of sacredness and awe. And so he begins the prayer with a personal address followed immediately by an ascription of mystery and honor and of deep respect.
Now let us note that Luke's account of this story proceeds with a somewhat modest version of what we have come to know as "the Lord's Prayer." It omits many of the phrases with which we have grown familiar. It consists only of this opening address and four brief petitions: "Thy Kingdom come," "Give us this day what is needful (e.g. our daily bread)," "Forgive us our sins," and "Lead us not into temptation." That's it! Shakespeare I believe said, "Brevity is the soul of wit." I know it was Dorothy Parker who said that "Brevity is the soul of lingerie." But here Jesus seems to imply that brevity is also the essence of our stance before God. Brevity gets down to brass tacks; it gets to the heart of the matter more efficiently than all of our verbose piety. To an age that seems to communicate less and less even as it talks more and more, this brevity is refreshing. Beyond this, the heart of this matter seems to concern something Jesus insists on calling "importunity."
In order to drive home his point Jesus tells his followers a brief parable. A man is in a jam. It is late at night and an unexpected guest has arrived. The larder is bare, so he goes to his next-door neighbor. "Friend, can I trouble you for three loaves of bread?" he inquires. It is of course after midnight-not a great or opportune time to make such a request. "The neighbor's reply is not encouraging. "Go away!" he cries. "We are all asleep!" Palestinian homes, you must remember were small, and with perhaps only one room. A family commonly slept in one large bed. So imagine the master of this household fast asleep with his children and wife, and having taken the side against the wall. He will have to crawl over his whole family to answer the door and probably wake everyone up in the process. So of course he tells his friend to go home and quit bothering him.
But the neighbor persists. He will not be rebuffed so easily, and now he threatens to wake the entire neighborhood. So finally the householder relents. Not,. as Jesus takes pains to point out, because he is generous, or being neighborly. But rather because of the neighbor's "importunity." There's that word again! So, what is this importunity? Sheer persistence? A mulish refusal to take no for an answer? Not friendship, mind you, but desperation to salvage some decent rest out of an interrupted sleep, prompts the donation. So what is this all about? Does Jesus imply that God can be moved by a dogged determination to get whatever we want? at any cost?
Well, not quite. In fact what Jesus does is to reverse this entire ludicrous situation.
God, whom he addresses as "Abba," is not like this groggy neighbor who must be browbeaten into giving up the goods that we demand. He is just the opposite. God is already attentive, waiting to respond to us, already knows better than we ourselves what we need. This God is like a loving parent who wants to give whatever is needful, if only we thought to ask.
Aye, there's the rub! And then he goes on to punctuate this point with those three brief injunctions that we readily associate with Jesus' teachings:
Ask, and it will be given you; Seek, and you will find;
Knock, and it will be opened to you.
And the heart of the matter seems to have something to do with "importunity." Not as if he were articulating some New Age theology: "Ask for whatever you need and the universe will cough it up!" And not as if importunity only meant mere persistence or pertinacity or demand-as if God were some kind of cosmic bell hop waiting to carry our luggage.
Now when we think about these three injunctions it does not take long for us to take offense. When we are told that "everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him that knocks it will be opened," our first response is shock and incredulity. Is it not more to the point that we experience a great gap between what we ask for and what we receive? This, after all, is one of the great lessons of experience. How many doors have we knocked upon only to find them as firmly closed as ever? Nearly a century and a half after the Emancipation Proclamation many black people still feel they are not really accepted as full citizens in their communities. Nearly 80 years after "The War To End All Wars," we seem to have done little to "cure mankind's warring madness." Or what of the unanswered prayers of all those millions who were herded into the gas chambers at Buchenwald and Belsen and Dachau and Auschwitz?
One of the first problems, of course, the text forces us to recognize is that most of us really do not yet know what to ask for. This seems to be especially true in the case when people are specifically seeking 'religious" answers. There is another story about a celebrity close to death, a parallel story to the one concerning Gertrude Stein. It was W.C. Fields who was deathly ill, and not expected to live through the night at one point in his career. Now, you may recall, that Fields was not especially charitable toward religion or its practitioners. And so it was with some astonishment that a close friend entered his bedroom to find him leafing feverishly through a Bible. "Bill," he cried, "what on earth are you looking for?" Fields mad a one word reply in that characteristic hoarse staccato voice: "Loopholes!"
Fields' problem, of course, is the problem most of us have. We think we already know what it is that we are looking for, and therefore what we ought to find before we get there. This is a special problem it seems for religious folk especially at prayer. For we are apt to believe that our asking is itself deserving of special notice; our asking becomes a kind of pleabargaining with God. In exchange for our piety we ought to be given a special charge account with heaven. Therefore, when we take Jesus' words literally we believe we have a special right. And we are bound to be disappointed. But surely that is not what Jesus is driving at here.
Many of us, with a passing acquaintance with the Bible believe the heart of its message to be in the imperative mood. It is essentially about an authoritative God who orders us around and commands that we shalt do this, and that we shalt not do that. There are some imperatives in Biblical religion, that is true. But I believe the most characteristic grammatical form in Biblical literature is the question. Think of the Genesis narratives that turn on the great questions:
Adam and Eve hiding in the Garden of Eden; God approaches and asks: "Where are you?
What have you done? To Cain, after he slew his brother Abel:
Where is your brother?
To Jacob wrestling with the angel:
What is your name? Who are you?
These are the great, profound questions of every person's life. And notice that they are God's questions addressed to each one of us, the ones before which we all stand and our lives are measured: Where are you? What have you done? Where is your brother? Who are you?
Tolstoy once wrote that unto each of us are posed certain questions that do not yield themselves precisely to answers, but rather force us to struggle with them throughout a lifetime. The very quality of our lives is shaped by the questions we choose to struggle with (or refuse to entertain). It is not so much that we articulate an answer as that we live our lives into the answer. Jesus, I believe, was such a man that knew something of this mystery, for the Gospels bear witness to the life of a man who, far from being a religious know-it-all, lived with patient intensity the central questions of his life and into the answers: the question of God's will, his identity, his vocation. So that when he said, "Ask and it shall be given you; seek and you will find; knock and it will be opened unto you," he was speaking about that mystery. And it was in this sense, and this sense only that he believed "importunity" to be of critical importance.
Importunity-the kind that is implied in these three injunctions "Ask, Seek, Knock" is deeply grounded in a recognition of our own need, of our own longing, an awareness that we do not yet possess that for which we long, and are willing to acknowledge that condition in our beseeching. But here too is a great mystery. Why is it that Jesus needs to instruct his disciples in this matter? Is it not that for all of our yearning, all of our longing, none of us is really accustomed to ask for anything? to seek after anything? to knock before anything? Are there not some subtle forms of resistance that impede our way in these matters? As I pondered this it seemed to me that at least three impediments occur to our asking, seeking, and knocking.
Many of you know that I make my living primarily as a psychotherapist and pastoral counselor. Among other things I see couples for marriage counseling. I frequently hear spouses complain about their partners that, "He (or she) never does such and such." I sometimes innocently inquire, "Did you ask for what you need?" The question is frequently met with disbelief. It is as though "If I have to ask for what I want, it is not worth getting." And so I came to conclude that most of us seldom ask our intimate partners for very much. We expect, we demand, we require. But rarely do we ask.. And I further concluded that the first reason we fail to ask for what we need is that we already feel entitled to what we do not have. In this case importunity implies that we have no implicit right, no righteous claim, no demand, to whatever we think we require. And if there is no entitlement, then all we have is our asking, our seeking.
But as soon as I discern this reason, another, almost the opposite, also appears. I note in my practice and work with people that just the opposite is as frequently true. Many people never ask because they feel no entitlement whatsoever. People do not dare ask or share their longing because they feel themselves to be undeserving. They do not feel entitled to any good thing at all. When Jesus bids us to ask, seek, knock, he is addressing this condition as well: ask from the place of your deserving, as ones who know they do not deserve.
There is yet one further impediment. To seek after that which is deeply furfilling, for which we yearn may require us to search in unfamiliar territory, to go to places within or without that seem scary. There is a story told about a hapless motorist who lost the keys to his car. It is late at night in an unfamiliar city, and he searches for a very long time beneath the street lamp. After a time a policeman approaches and after watching him for a long time walks up to him and remarks, "You seem to have lost something." "Yes," says the man. "I've lost the keys to my car." "Do you remember where it was that you first missed them?" the policeman asks. "Yes," replies the motorist. "It was down there at the end of the block." "Well," says the astonished policeman, "Why on earth have you been searching so long up here?" To which the frustrated searcher responds, "As anyone can plainly see, this is the only place there is any light."
I suppose that most of us at one time or another are a little like that character, which is why he strikes us as so comical. We have a vague sense that we have lost something or are in quest of something, and desire to retrieve it. But we are looking in the wrong place. We persist in looking in the place that feels familiar and safe. We continue to use whatever we already presume will provide light. But there are times in one's experience-and certainly Jesus knew about such times-when to seek requires that we plunge directly into the darkness, into the unknown. And at those times we must be prepared to relinquish our goal, even our cherished outcome. "If it be possible," Jesus prayed in Gethsemane, "to let this cup pass, let it be so. Nevertheless, not my will but shine be done." And so in this spirit he bids us to ask, seek, and knock. Ask from the heart of your deserving, as ones who know they do not deserve. Seek in the rough and unfamiliar places; plunge into the darkness as ones who know that they do not yet possess the light. Knock continually. That is, I believe, what he meant by "importunity." So that we do not come to the end of our lives asking, "What was the question?" But in each sign)ficant moment along the way we continue to inquire: "What is the question?" Copyright AllSouls 2000.