God does know what we mean

Prayer is not meant to be said parrot-fashion according to
the Pope - and Jesus. But God understands our halting words

“I know what you mean”: it’s a phrase that we trot out whenever anyone is having difficulty explaining or describing something. Sometimes it’s true; their stumbling words are enough to convey their true meaning. At other times, it’s an empty platitude, meant to encourage but possibly insulting. It’s not worth saying; we can’t enter into someone’s mind, feelings or experience.

It’s a relief, therefore, to discover that God really does know what we mean when we attempt to address him in prayer. Paul wrote to the Roman church, “We do not know what to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God” (Romans 8:26,27).

In other words, the Holy Spirit interprets what we’re trying to say and incorporates it into the language of heaven. He knows what we mean. This removes from us the pressure to choose the “right” words or formulae that we think God needs in order even to hear us, let alone answer us. God doesn’t need words at all, in fact, just the trusting, believing, earnest desire to see his will being done in the situations that concern us.

Interpretation in the realm of human language is an art, not merely a science. It’s not just a matter of finding equivalent words in the second language which match those of the first. The interpreter not only needs to have a strong understanding of the subject matter being spoken about, but also  of the speaker’s intention and underlying meaning. S/he needs to “know what you mean”, not least because the idioms of one language do not always transfer easily into another. One of the fundamental principles of Bible translation is to search for “dynamic equivalents” in the culture of the intended readers; there’s not a lot of point in referring to sheep in an island culture entirely focused on fishing.

One extreme example of how God translates prayer is the bizarre Old Testament story of Balaam. He was a seer or perhaps witchdoctor from the region of modern Iran. He was hired by Balak, the king of Moab, who was a near neighbour of Israel which he feared would over-run his country. Balak asked Balaam to curse Israel for a fat fee, which the “prophet” gladly accepted.

But two things happened. First, he nearly didn’t get to Israel at all. His stubborn donkey refused several times to carry him further. Then, the narrative says, “the Lord opened the donkey’s mouth” and it complained at his rough treatment trying to force it on. In other words, Balaam realised that it wasn’t the donkey’s fault; that God was using the donkey’s behaviour to get through to the even more stubborn prophet and warn him off his plans.

Then, when God failed to deter him and he eventually arrived in Moab, Balaam tried to curse but all that came out was a blessing on the Israelites across the border. Three times. After that he went home without his fee. (See Numbers 22-24.) God had told him how to pray and turned the potential curse into an actual blessing. The divine interpreter knew better than the prophet how to express the will and purposes of God.

This hides an important truth. Our prayers usually stem from what we can see, what we feel. They are genuine expressions of need or desire. But they don’t always correlate with God’s wider purposes, which we cannot usually see. The bigger picture is hidden from our view. That doesn’t invalidate our prayer. Each is incorporated into “Thy will be done” even if what we think should be done is not exactly what God proposes. Each prayer is translated into something effective by the Divine Interpreter.

Align with the Spirit

Several times in the New Testament we are urged to avail ourselves of the help of the Holy Spirit as we pray, so that our prayer is better aligned to God’s wider purposes. “Pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people (Ephesians 6:18). “But you, dear friends, by building yourselves up in your most holy faith and praying in the Holy Spirit, keep yourselves in God’s love as you wait for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ to bring you to eternal life” (Jude vv. 20-21).

Keeping in step (with the Spirit) requires
discipline and practice

In practice, this means “keeping in step with the Spirit” (Galatians 5:25), listening to God to prompt us with his concerns and submitting ours to his. It means learning to see “reality from God’s point of view”.¹ James Houston explains, “Through the leading of the Spirit in prayer our intercession becomes one with the intercession of Christ, our minds become attuned to his, and his concerns become ours.”²

Or, as the earlier theologian C.H. Dodd put it, “true prayer is the divine in us appealing to the divine above us”.³

For some Christians, including the current Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby, praying “in the Spirit” may include “praying in tongues”, a spiritual language given by God which the speaker does not understand.⁴ Many can testify that this usually gentle gift mostly exercised in private aids them in worship and to bring before God the needs of themselves, their church and their world. The Spirit interprets their desire and concern by using his own language.

Helpful as tongues is, it is not portrayed as a necessity in Scripture. To use the words of the poet William Cowper in a slightly different context, “God is his own interpreter, and he will make it plain.”⁵ God knows what we mean, whatever words and language we use.

This also means that no prayer is wasted; it might be a bit off-message as far as God’s purposes are concerned, but if it’s a genuine expression of our concern at the time of uttering it, then it can be interpreted and caught up into the great stream of prayer that flows around the throne of God. He knows what we mean, and he’s not going to waste our breath.

In his story of the 24/7 prayer movement, Pete Grieg reproduces an email he sent after taking part in a meeting of young people in Spain nine years after he had begun to pray for a Spanish “army” of intercessors. At that moment, he realised that God never forgets “a single prayer that his children utter, even if they do.

“The very idea that the living Lord might diligently have treasured up every little prayer I had ever prayed, even all the ones I had forgotten, and that he might still be weaving their fulfilments, was almost too much to take in. It means that there must be answered prayers most days that I never even recognise as such, and casual requests I have uttered that continue to marshal the very hosts of heaven.”⁶

There is, of course, an inevitable caveat.

Silence the parrot

“When you pray,” said Jesus, “do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him” (Matthew 6:7,8). Such divine knowledge doesn’t remove the need to pray – it’s one of the laws of the spiritual universe that if we don’t ask, we don’t often get; our prayer is an expression of a two-way relationship.

(The paradox that God knows what we want before we ask is dealt with beautifully in the novel The Shack, and the film based on it. It pictures its main character, Mack, in conversation about his family with the three persons of the Trinity. “You already know everything I’m telling you, don’t you? You’re acting like it’s the first time you heard it,” he says. And Sarayu (the Holy Spirit) responds, “As we are listening to you, it is as if this is the first time we have known about them, and we take great delight in seeing them through your eyes.”⁷)

Pope Francis suggested early in 2019 that many Christians “speak to God as if they were a parrot”, reciting words such as the Lord’s Prayer that they mistakenly believe have some inherent power to endear God to them.⁸ Readers of Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale may recall the shop with prayer machines. “There are five different prayers: for health, wealth, a death, a birth, a sin. You pick the one you want, punch in the number, then punch in your own number so your account will be debited, and punch in the number of times you want the prayer repeated.”⁹ If only it was that simple!

“No, praying is done from the heart, from within,” the Pope added. Harry Emerson Fosdick, an American Baptist minister in the first half of the 20^th century, wrote “Our prayers are often unreal because they do not represent what in our inward hearts we sincerely crave.”¹⁰ Note that word crave. Cravings aren’t expressed in nice polite words. They don’t even need words. But they do represent what we most want.

So we find the Psalmist craving God: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, my God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. Where can I go and meet with God?” And this craving isn’t articulated in clear words but in deep, emotional cries: “My tears have been my food day and night … I pour out my soul” (Psalm 42:1-4).

We find Jacob clinging with all his strength to God despite his physical pain and injury and refusing to let go, craving God’s blessing (Genesis 32:22-32). And in a rare example of silent prayer in the Bible (it was treated with suspicion in the ancient world) we find the childless Hannah pouring out her heart in tears to God, craving the child without which she was regarded by her neighbours as cursed (1 Samuel 1).

Fosdick takes this thought further, which helps, perhaps, to illuminate further the story of Balaam and Balak. “We are hunger points in the universe; the elemental fact in every human life is desire. To the man who disclaims any act of prayer we may retort, ‘Your life is an organized prayer. Your body craves food, your mind craves knowledge, your affection craves friendship, your spirit craves peace and hope.’” So here, perhaps, is a reason why fasting is sometimes advocated as an adjunct to prayer; it elevates the craving for God above the craving for food or anything else.

However, Fosdick goes on to suggest that “prayer may be either heavenly or devilish”. Balak’s was devilish; Balaam’s was translated into something heavenly. He highlight’s Gehazi’s craving for money (2 Kings 5), David’s lust for Bathsheba (2 Samuel 11), and the prodigal son’s hunger for wealth and the freedom it could bring (Luke 15) as examples of craving that are really self-centred prayers.¹¹ Jesus’ condemned Pharisees who craved the attention of others by practising their piety ostentatiously in public: “They have received their reward in full” (Matthew 6:5). That is, their desire to be seen by people was granted; but their prayers weren’t heard by God.

Parrot owners know that to silence a chattering bird they must cover the cage with a dark cloth. Perhaps some of our prayers need to be silenced, while we align ourselves afresh with God, and refrain from bursting into his presence with a list of demands. Instead, like the four apparently wordless friends who lowered a paralysed man to the feet of Jesus and left him there (Mark 2:1-12), it might be better to lay the real desires of our hearts before God and let him work out what needs to be done.

Don’t worry about the words; God knows what we mean. But if we don’t mean it, there’s not much point saying it. Unless we’re parrots.

Think and talk

1.  Look up the Bible references quoted in the text and consider what you can learn from them.

2.  Think about what people (including yourself) really crave. Why do we let such cravings control us?
3.  Put in your own words what “keeping in step with the Spirit” might mean, and how this might be practised.
4.  Many people find written prayers helpful. Discuss how you can make such prayers, with their often well-chosen words, your own so that you are not merely reading or hearing them, but actually praying them.
5.  What do you think about when reciting the Lord’s Prayer?

References

1.  Philip Yancey, Prayer, Hodder & Stoughton, 2008, p.21
2.  James Houston, The transforming friendship, Lion Publishing 1991, p.157
3.  C.H. Dodd, no source referenced, quoted by Houston, op. cit. p.127
4.  Justin Welby has stated this on more than one occasion, including in a media interview in January 2019.
5.  These are the final words of the hymn which begins “God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform”.
6.  Pete Grieg, Dave Roberts, Red moon rising, David C Cook, Third edition 2015, p. 151
7.  William Paul Young, The Shack, Hodder 2007, p.106
8.  Reported in The Times, 5 January 2019
9.  Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Vintage 2016, p.257. In the same story, the Bible is kept locked up so that the girls cannot read it for themselves.
10.  Harry Emerson Fosdick, The meaning of prayer, Association Press 1917, p.133
11.  Op. cit., p.143

© Derek Williams 2019