Lent Midweek: “Your Will Be Done”

“Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” I don’t suppose there is any petition in the Lord’s Prayer that presents more thorny difficulties than this one about God’s will. We bump up against it any time there is a tragedy—whether it affects us directly or not. You read in the paper about a three-year-old boy drowning in a fountain, and you want to cry out, “Why did that happen?” What does it mean to pray “your will be done” in a world where things like that happen?

Of course this theological problem is not unique to Christianity and Judaism; most religions have a sense of God’s will, and a sense that it raises big questions. It is said that the Greek philosopher Thymaridas was about to depart on a lengthy sea voyage. One of his friends said, “May the gods do for you whatever you will!” He replied, “God forbid! May I will whatever the gods do for me!” So you see, this matter of God’s will is not a new problem; it has been around as long as people have thought about God and how God acts in the world.

Yet in Judeo-Christian thought, there is an important difference. For most religions, God’s will is but another name for “Fate.” The Stoics counseled submission to the will of God, but the advice grew out of the conviction that we human beings don’t have any choice in the matter. What will be, will be, and the best response is simply to accept it. That’s even how we use the word “stoic” today, isn’t it? A stoic is someone who simply accepts, without emotion or feeling, whatever cards are dealt.

There is a strong element of this thinking in popular belief even today. We hear phrases like, “When your number is up, you have to go,” or “What goes around, comes around,” or “Que será, será.” But that is not the approach of our faith. No, Christians believe that not everything in the world can be blamed on God. God’s will for us, Luther wrote, is good and gracious—and much in the world is not good and can hardly be called “gracious.” It is not God’s good and gracious will that a young child drown. It is not God’s good and gracious will that dozens are killed by an Iraqi suicide bomber, or that a friend dies from cancer, or that a home is destroyed by fire or hurricane. These things happen because there is evil in the world—and because God has chosen, in a wisdom we cannot understand, to allow the effects of evil to be felt.

And yet we know as well that God somehow works through evil, bringing about his will even in the midst of trouble and disobedience and tragedy. We sang that remarkable hymn tonight, “What God Ordains is Good Indeed.” This is the translation from the new ELCA hymnal, and it is a good one; but I have always particularly loved a line from the LBW version: “He makes the best of all the stumbling turns we take.” To go once again to the Catechism, Luther writes that “God’s will is done when he hinders and defeats every evil scheme and purpose of the devil, the world, and our sinful selves.” God’s will, it seems, does battle with the evil in our world—and even with the evil in our own hearts—so that, in Paul’s words, “all things work together for good for those who love God.” But sometimes that good takes a long time to discern; sometimes we never do discern it.

Now when we say the words, “Your will be done,” I think everything depends on our tone of voice. There are at least three different ways the prayer can be prayed. The first is with resentment. Sometimes people pray, “Your will be done,” and they are so filled with anger that they can hardly get the words out. Friedrich von Huegel called this “sulking through the inevitable.” The attitude is, “God, I can’t do anything about this except take it, so I’m taking it. But I’m not going to like it.”

William Barclay tells the story of Beethoven, the great composer who, for most of his creative years, was absolutely deaf and who could never hear the masterpieces he composed. It is said that when he was found dead, his fists were clenched, “as if he would strike God, and his lips were drawn back in a snarl, as if he would spit his defiance and his bitterness at God.” I don’t know if that is true or not, but surely there are many people who know they must accept the will of God, but who spend their lives in better resentment about it. Surely that is not the spirit of the prayer that Jesus taught us.

It is also possible to pray the prayer, not with resentment, but with resignation. This comes close to the Stoic attitude I mentioned earlier: “I can’t do anything about it, so I might as well accept it.” Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the 20^th century’s greatest theologians, told the story of asking his young daughter to go for a walk with him. She really didn’t want to go, but he told how good for her the exercise would be, how much she would like it if she just came, and in the end she agreed. When they finished, he turned to her and said, “Now aren’t you glad you decided to come along?” “I didn’t decide,” she replied, “you were just bigger.” Well, sometimes that’s our attitude toward God. He’s bigger than I, so I might as well do what he wants even if I don’t like it! And while that kind of resignation is perhaps better than resentment, it still isn’t what Jesus had in mind.

The third approach is to pray the petition “your will be done” with trust and peace. It is to be able to say—and to mean—that God’s will is good, and that we accept it with peace and thanksgiving. This is what Jesus meant in this prayer. When we pray that God’s will be done, he intends for us to acknowledge that God’s will is good and right—even if it is not always easy.

Prayer, of course, is the proof of faith. What we believe is accurately reflected in what we pray. So how did Jesus pray these words? We know that he not only taught them to the disciples, and to us, but he prayed them himself, in Gethsemane. What does that prayer teach us about how he prayed and believed?

Well, certainly his prayer was no Pollyanna acceptance of the will of God. Jesus had his own human ideas about what lay ahead, and he didn’t like it. He didn’t just pray, “Your will be done”; first he prays, “Let this cup pass from me.” Praying “your will be done,” you see, does not mean just passively accepting what comes. It may involved struggling and questioning and agonizing; it may involve wrestling with God—wrestling so hard that, as Luke says of Jesus, your “sweat becomes like great drops of blood falling down on the ground.” You cannot read about Gethsemane and still believe that accepting God’s will is something that one can just do without thinking. No, even for Jesus, God’s will was mysterious, difficult, and sometimes agonizing.

But having prayed that the cup might pass from him, Jesus went on to pray, “Your will be done.” And that is the key. As one writer has put it, the purpose of this prayer is not to bend God’s will to our own, but to bend our will to God’s. And that means, not resignation or resentment, but acceptance and trust. After his prayer, Jesus gets up and goes resolutely forward. From then on there is no trace of anxiety or worry; there is, in the midst of all that follows, a sense of peacefulness and serenity about him. It is a serenity that does not avoid struggling and questioning, but a serenity that comes out of the struggle.

Now what does all this mean for our praying? I think we could summarize it like this: It means that the purpose of our praying is to let God’s will be done in us. It is not to try to change God’s mind, or to force him to bring about miracles. Rather it is to teach us to trust him in all things, even the incomprehensible—much like Abraham learned to trust, even when asked to sacrifice his son. In Luke’s story of Gethsemane, we hear Jesus pray that what is about to happen may not happen, and we know as we listen that his prayer is not going to be answered affirmatively. But Luke tells us that “an angel from heaven appeared to give him strength.” That was an answer, in a way—perhaps not the answer he had in mind, but an answer nonetheless.

And it is instructive for us. We pray, “your will be done,” and we are really asking for God’s help in discerning and trusting his will. “And his will is done when he strengthens our faith and keeps us firm in his Word as long as we live,” Luther comments. “This is his good and gracious will.”