Proper 24: “Praying for God’s Will”

22 October 2006

Mark 10.35-45

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Do your prayers ever sound like that? I know mine do. “Lord, do for me whatever I ask.” Of course I don’t ask to sit at his right hand or at his left in his glory. My requests are humbler, and certainly more altruistic. I want him to do things like protect my children, or heal my friend’s cancer, or stop the violence in the Middle East—little things like that, completely different from the arrogant requests of the sons of Zebedee.

And yet not so different, either, because my requests are still all wrapped up in my will. That’s actually the word used here in Mark 10; our translation has it, “We want you to do for us” but the Greek could be translated literally, “It is our will that you do for us . . .” Whether my will is arrogant and self-centered, as we see in James and John, or altruistic and generous, as we would like to see in ourselves, still the problem is the same: I am seeking my will, not God’s will.

Now the problem with seeking my will is twofold. First, my will is always selfish, self-centered, self-directed. This is part of the human condition, and it is at the root of what Christians mean when we say we are in bondage to sin. Anytime anyone asks me what original sin means, I tell them to think of a newborn infant. She is the absolute center of her own universe. Whether she is hungry, or wet, or uncomfortable, she cries. She doesn’t care what you are doing, how important it may be; she demands your attention now. Her will, if we could call it that, is that you drop everything and deal with her problem, and she won’t be put off.

And really not much changes through the ordinary human life. We human beings continue to be mostly selfish, and our will is that the rest of the world might recognize that we are, in fact, the center of the universe. Most of us become very good at disguising this, of course, but the truth of the matter is that we human beings, left to our own devices, are all about our own will. John and James display this so clearly when the first words out of their mouths are, “We want you to do” or “It is our will that you do . . .” For them, “my will” comes first.

This leads us to the second problem with seeking my will: I’m woefully ignorant, even of what might be good for me. Again, James and John become the occasion for Jesus’ lesson: “You do not know what you are asking.” That’s the nub of it right there, you see. We don’t know the big picture. We are like children who want to eat only candy, or want to television instead of doing homework. All we see is the immediate picture; we don’t see, we can’t see, the bigger reality. Only God sees that.

We say the words every time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.” But I wonder how fully we really understand them? For me, that third petition is one of the most radical and difficult lines in the Lord’s Prayer. Luther senses it clearly in the Small Catechism when he asks his ever-popular question, “What does this mean?” “The good and gracious will of God is surely done without our prayer,” he answers, “but we ask in this prayer that it may be done also among us.”

Let’s unpack that just a bit. He says that God’s will is done, whether we ask for it or not. God’s will is not dependent on our making the right requests, as if life were some cosmic game of “Jeopardy” where you win by asking the right questions. No, he says, the point of the petition is that God’s will be done among us.

Now the English translation here loses something. In Luther’s German, that last phrase “among us” is bei uns, and it has a range of meanings that the English doesn’t convey. It could mean we are asking that God’s will be done among us, or in us, or through us, or even by us. So there is an ambiguity which can point in two different directions.

First, it can mean that we ask God’s will to be done in us. This is very much like Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, when he asks his Father to “let this cup pass from me—nevertheless, not what I will, but what you will.” It is, you see, surrendering our own will to God, recognizing that our will may not be God’s will, and asking God to do his will, rather than ours. When we pray “thy will be done,” we are really asking God to transform our will and make it his own. Again Luther puts it starkly: “We’re really praying against ourselves,” he says. “Our will is the most formidable element in us, and against it we must pray.” This, Luther goes on, “is very painful to our human nature . . . nothing is dearer to us than our own will.”

But we’re also asking, in this petition, that God’s will be done through us and by us. We are asking God to make us the instruments through which his will is done. Now that is something that terribly important. Let me see if I can help you see why.

In the Greek and Roman worlds before and after the time of Christ, there was a school of philosophy called Stoicism. It was a complex teaching in many ways, but if we could boil it down to its essence, the Stoics believed that whatever the gods will is what happens. It is fruitless to try to oppose it, so one’s best response is just to accept it without complaint. This, of course, is where we get the word we still use today: someone is “stoic” if, in the midst of adversity, they simply accept whatever happens without question, acknowledging, to use a modern phrase, that “whatever happens, happens.”

But Christianity’s teaching about human and divine will is fundamentally different from that of the Stoics. For Jesus, human beings are not simply the objects of God’s will, the victims of divine purposes that we cannot understand. No, human beings are called actively to embrace God’s will—to see that God’s will is good and purposeful, and to support it, to sign up for it. Human beings are given the great opportunity and challenge to let God’s will be done through them—not to struggle against it, and not simply to accept it passively and with joyless stoicism, but to reach for it, to embrace it.

One of the pleasures of being on vacation is that you can sleep late in the morning, and so you can stay up late at night. In Vancouver this week we were watching some late night television, and we happened upon a fascinating program about an autistic child. This child appeared to be perfectly ordinary at birth, but gradually it became apparent that something was very different about her. As she grew, her frustrations and difficulties increased, and she would spend hours every day and night screaming. Her mother told the interviewer how she had prayed, certainly with no little anger at God: “How could you allow my child to suffer like this?”

And she heard very clearly a response from God: “This child is made in my image.” That was the word this mother needed to find a place of peace and strength in coping with a difficult and trying situation—and what it amounted to, you see, was her recognizing that God’s will might be done, not just to her or to her child, but through her. She could walk through this valley and know that God was using her, working through her, as day by day she surrendered her own will and let God’s will direct her.

One cannot read this morning’s Old Testament lesson without thinking of the passion and death of Christ, of which Isaiah 53 the prophecy. I love that line, “yet we accounted him stricken, struck down by God, and afflicted.” That’s so often the way things look from the human perspective. We see others or ourselves stricken, struck down, afflicted. Yet when we think of the passion of Christ, we should immediately see that Jesus was not passive and stoic. Rather he struggled, his human will wrestling in the garden with God’s will—and then finally he embraced God’s will. He took up his cross. He poured out himself to death. And as incomprehensible as it appeared as it was happening, it was all for a purpose, all for the fulfillment of God’s good and gracious will: “so that I might be his own.”

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Do your prayers ever sound like that? I know mine do. But I know as well that the better prayer, the prayer Jesus gave us, the prayer Jesus himself prayed, says something quite different. It says, “Lord, let your will be done, not mine.” It says, “Lord, deal gently with my ignorance and waywardness, but take my will and make it thine.”