Ask, seek, knock

A word for the week

There is a way of knocking on a door you believe is empty. Out of habit, half-hearted, already turning away as your hand comes down. A great deal of praying is like that, and most of us know it from the inside, the words going out of the mouth while some older part of us has already settled it that the house is dark and nobody is coming. Jesus goes straight at that, because before you can ask him for anything you have to settle what you think is standing on the other side of the door.

He gives three short commands. Ask, and it will be given you. Seek, and you will find. Knock, and it will be opened. And the three verbs climb. Asking is a word. Seeking is a search, getting up and looking. Knocking is a body standing at a door and staying there, because it believes somebody is home.

Then notice how he argues for it. He does not lecture about the generosity of God. He hands you your own experience and asks you to consult it. Which of you, he says, would give his son a stone when the boy asked for bread, or a snake when he asked for a fish. Nobody would. You would not trick your own hungry child, and you know that in your hands before you know it in your head. So heaven is not colder than you are.

And then the line the whole teaching rests on: if you, being what you are, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father give good things to those who ask him. How much more. Most of us would agree to those three words on paper and go on living as though we had never heard them. The proof is not in what you would say about God. It is in whether you have asked him plainly for anything lately, and got up and looked for it, and gone back to the door a second time and a third instead of taking the first silence for your answer.

A caution belongs here. A good father does not hand a child everything the child names, and some of what you are given will arrive in a shape you did not ask for and would not have chosen, and will only look like a gift much later, if it ever does. Unanswered is not the same as unheard. The child who trusts his father keeps asking; the one who has given up on him goes quiet.

Then the strange turn at the end. Whatever you want others to do for you, do also for them, he says; this is the law and the prophets. The golden rule looks bolted on to a teaching about asking, until you find the hinge. A person who has finally believed in a generous Father has no reason left to be stingy. You have been given to, so give. You are hoping, right now, to be met with kindness when you knock. What would one week look like if you opened your own door the way you are hoping his will open?

He is not teaching a technique. He is describing a Father. Ask. Seek. Knock. The door is not what you feared it was.