Ask, seek and knock

A recording of today's gospel and reflection can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Matthew 7: 7-12) gives us another extract from the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus commands His listeners to ask God for what they need. At the same time, He assures them that they will receive what they ask for. To prove this, He reminds them that no parent refuses food to a child who needs it, and that since God is so much better than them, He is bound even more to do good to his children. Likewise, as God is good to them, so they must be good to others.

What is this gospel saying to us today? Sometimes, if we look at our prayers, it seems that we think that this passage is Jesus’ invitation to us to write the Father a Dear Santa letter.  We even secretly hope that since in our estimation we have been very, very good, the good Lord should really do the right thing and answer our prayers. I am not saying that we think these things consciously, but do they not look like this in the back of our mind, revealed perhaps by that niggling resentment that arises when what we so hoped or prayed for does not materialise?

Yet this is not the meaning of Jesus' words today. His words offer us so much more than Dear Santa ever could. At the heart of His message are these words:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

Ask for what? we wonder. Ask for the Kingdom of God; this is what Jesus had just told them a few moments before: Seek first the Kingdom of God. We seek then, and it is His righteousness that we will find. And when He bids us knock, there is only one door that He intends for us to approach.

Can we not, therefore, ask for the temporal and material things that we need? This anxiety too Jesus answered just a few moments before:

Do not be anxious about your life, what you should eat or what you should drink, nor about your body, what you should put on.

Of course, we should ask, but only with our eyes on this other, wider horizon. Sometimes, our human pains are great, but even then they are a reminder that we have here no abiding city. We stand in the material world and in so many ways belong to it. Our sinful human nature inclines us, likewise, to choose the privileges and pleasures that other creatures can offer us, rather than the happiness that God holds in store for us. And in all these ways, we stop up our ears to the call, the vocation, that echoes incessantly around us. We are dupes for the fool's gold of temporary satisfaction and misuse those gifts that bring us to the eternal shore. All of us could say these words with Saint Augustine of Hippo:

Before thy eyes, O Lord, we bring our sins, and with them compare the stripes we have received. If we weigh the evil we have done, we find what we suffer to be much less than what we deserve.

And yet, at every moment, we hold the solution in our hands, and here it is in today's gospel:

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.

What are these words of Jesus if not His simple invitation for us to be sensible of our burdens and to come to Him to seek our rest? What should we ask for but His help? What should we seek but Him? On whose door should we knock but heaven’s door? If we seek for a salve to ease the pains of all our anxieties and human frustrations, is it not to be found here in this command of Jesus: ask me?

For He knows full well that all our misguided searching or mistaking the things of this world for our destiny is a sign that beneath the ugly agendas we have given ourselves, there can be discerned all the promise that He associated with us from the moment of our conception. He knows us already by name. And He calls and calls us continually to die with Him so that we might rise with Him. When Jesus commands us to ask, He is in fact telling us to answer Him. For we only seek Him because He has first sought us. We only ask after His name because He has been asking everywhere for us. And we only knock at His door in answer to the knock that He gave at ours.