Prayer

Reading these passages

Jesus' clearest instruction about prayer concerns furniture: But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret.

The word rendered closet is tameion, a storeroom or inner chamber. In a first-century house it was the one room with no window onto the street — where grain and oil were kept, and where nobody could see in.

The point is not that private prayer is holier than public prayer; the same chapter assumes people pray together. The point is that an audience changes what you are doing, and this instruction was aimed squarely at people who prayed in order to be seen praying. The advice is architectural because the problem was social.

Two promises that do not sit easily

Scripture keeps two things about prayer that resist being reconciled, and it makes no attempt to reconcile them.

On one side, Matthew: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. And Mark, which goes considerably further: What things soever ye desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.

On the other, John, who is noticeably more careful: And this is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask any thing according to his will, he heareth us.

Readers have arranged those in different orders for two thousand years. Some treat John as the interpretive key that qualifies everything else. Some treat the broad promises as primary and John as a description of what asking rightly looks like. Some hold that the difference is between what is promised to the church and what is promised to an individual.

What is worth noticing is that the New Testament preserves all of them without smoothing anything out — and that any account which makes prayer fully predictable has quietly dropped one.

Three words

Paul's shortest instruction on the subject is two words in English: Pray without ceasing.

Read as a discipline it is impossible, and people have exhausted themselves attempting it — schedules, hourly bells, techniques for keeping a sentence running under everything else.

Read alongside Philippians it looks different: Be careful for nothing; but in every thing by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God. In every thing. That is not a description of duration but of scope, and it makes the instruction less like an athletic feat and more like the ordinary condition of talking to someone you live with. Nobody practises continuous conversation with a person in the same house.

Romans puts it in a list of three, and the archaic word is worth translating: Rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer. Instant here means persistent, not immediate. All three items are things you keep doing while the situation remains unresolved.

What confession has to do with it

James joins two things most people would keep well apart: Confess your faults one to another, and pray one for another, that ye may be healed.

The result is attached to both halves. Whatever James means precisely, he is not describing prayer as a private transaction between an individual and God — it involves other people knowing what is actually going on with you, which is a far higher cost than the praying and is invariably the part left out when the verse gets quoted.

He then makes a claim about effect without making one about outcome: The effectual fervent prayer of a righteous man availeth much. Availeth much is strong. It is also not a guarantee about any particular request, and the distinction matters to anyone who has prayed hard and been disappointed.

In truth

The psalm adds a qualifier that is easy to skip and does real work: The LORD is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth.

The verse says all twice, and then narrows. Not all who call — all who call in truth. The Hebrew emet carries the sense of firmness and reliability rather than factual accuracy; it is the word for something that holds.

Which is not a demand for eloquence or correct theology. It is closer to a requirement that the person calling actually means it — and it is notable that this is the only condition the psalm attaches, given how many other conditions it could have chosen.

What is actually promised

Jeremiah's invitation is the broadest on the page, and its last clause is the one to read slowly: Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and shew thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.

Which thou knowest not. What is promised is not the answer you had in mind, nor confirmation of the thing you were already leaning toward. It is something you did not have — which means, if the promise is taken seriously, that prayer answered will involve being told something unexpected.

That reframes the whole page. The passages here promise a hearing, a nearness, an effect, and a disclosure. What none of them promises is that the answer will match the request, and the one verse that comes closest to promising it is also the one that has caused most of the disappointment.

Which is perhaps why the instruction that opens this page is about a room with the door shut. Whatever prayer is for, the passages treat it as something done in private with somebody who already knows, rather than as a mechanism operated correctly for a result.