Divine Interventions

‘And this is the boldness we have in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us’ (1 John 5.15, NRSVue)

Over the last few weeks Marci and I have been re-watching Peter Capaldi’s ‘Doctor Who episodes’. One common theme during the Capaldi years is that it’s a complicated thing for a powerful being to interfere in the time line, even with the best of intentions. Rescue someone from trouble, alleviate or remove their suffering, and your act can have enormous consequences a century or two later. Maybe that particular piece of suffering helped shape the future in such a way that God brought great good out of it—good which will now no longer happen. In ‘Doctor Who’, the Doctor can see this, because he’s a time-traveller and can hop in and out of the timeline at different points. So often, he has to tell people that no, he’s very sorry, but he can’t give them what they ask. He knows what the consequences would be if he did.

So when John says, ‘if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us’, I appreciate the ambiguity of that word ‘hears’: he listens, he takes our requests seriously, even if he has to say, “No, I’m so sorry, but I can’t do that.” I don’t know if that’s what John intended when he chose the word ‘hears’. Maybe not; in the very next verse he goes on to talk about knowing that we ‘have obtained the requests made to (God).’ Well, the reality is that often we don’t obtain them, at least not in any recognizable form. That’s the reality most Christians experience, deny it though they may.

And as I get older, I find I’m more acquiescent of that reality, even though I haven’t stopped praying for things, and have no plans to stop. But I find I have a deeper appreciation for the half-truth expressed in the Twelve Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which recommend ‘praying only for knowledge of (God’s) will for us and the power to carry that out’ (Step 11). I say ‘half truth’, because I’m sure most AA members do make requests to God, or their Higher Power, from time to time. But they also know that the most fruitful form of prayer is the prayer for wisdom and strength.

God ‘hears’ us, yes—but God also hears the prayers of millions of other people, past, present, and future. Time is a complicated thing—the unfolding of history on the large scale as well as the small. I will keep praying, because Jesus has encouraged me to do that. But I won’t be surprised if, on a regular basis, life doesn’t turn out as I would have preferred. After all, as Gandalf says to Bilbo at the end of The Hobbit (I paraphrase), I’m a little person in a great big world. I’m not the centre of the universe, and one of the goals of prayer is to teach me to accept that reality, and to take my place humbly in the sweep of God’s purposes for the whole world and the whole of history.