Sayings of Jesus: “Ask, and it will be given to you”
These words of Jesus are from the discourse known as The Sermon on the Mount, which is found in Matthew chapters 5-7 and is—in the wise words of BibleProject (may its name be praised)—“Jesus’ most well-known teaching and one of history’s most famous speeches ever.” The fuller version (Matthew 7:7–8) reads:
7 ‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.’
For some reason I am attracted to blogging about awkward questions and difficult biblical passages. Every time I think “Let’s go with something nice and easy this week,” something in me seems to say, “No, that’s puerile—or at least, lazy—because if you think something’s difficult the chances are that others do as well, so you owe it to them to take it on, not do a swerve around it.” OK—I get that. It’s too easy to stick to the easy and pretend that the difficult doesn’t exist (plenty of writers and speakers have made a living doing exactly that). But that doesn’t mean to say that I will “get it right” if I take something on. Please bear that in mind: I will always be offering personal thoughts, not slam-dunk answers. They may be part of an answer (to why the Bible said something it said, and what the writer meant by it) but they are unlikely to be the whole answer, not least in this case, where Jesus’ words are clearly enigmatic.
Regarding this passage, I took a look at eleven online commentaries (my book collection was not to hand). Without wishing to be judgemental—I say that largely because the other passage in the Sermon on the Mount that I was considering writing about was “Do not judge …”—they were all, basically, useless. The stark staring obvious problem in the passage, evident above, is that for most of us our experience is not consistently “Ask for something and you will get it.” To which problem, none of the eleven had anything helpful to say.
In essence, though I’m paraphrasing, it was universally taken for granted in all eleven that the “promises” offered would be fulfilled if (i) that which we were asking for was in line with God’s will, and/or (ii) we had enough faith to believe for it to happen. Which offers two credible—if not almost guaranteed-to-be-the-case—excuses for if it doesn’t happen. Most of the time, we have no real idea whether what we’re asking for is “in God’s will”—after all, we know full well that “‘My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 55:8). Which doesn’t leave much room for quibbling. And if there’s one thing we’re all painfully aware that we don’t have enough of, it’s faith. Especially when we read what Jesus said in Matthew 17:20, “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move” and we assume he is shaming us for how little faith we clearly must have, when so little is apparently required. I’m not saying that’s the right way to read Matthew 17:20 (I think it’s not), but it’s the easy and obvious way to read it, and you’ve probably heard a few sermons “teaching” it like that.
Our Word of Faith friends (actually, to my knowledge I don’t have any Word of Faith friends …) would no doubt subscribe to that view: that the problem is not the promises, it’s me. And given that they would believe faith is a cosmic formula (if you have enough, you’re guaranteed to get what you want—health, wealth, and prosperity in abundance), then I suspect they would simply say it’s just faith that I’m lacking in. God’s will is always to give me those things (they would believe) and apparently without limit (certainly the prosperity of the health-and-wealth, name-it-and-claim-it televangelists would support that it “works” at least for them). But then, since that prosperity has come from milking the finances of their followers, I wonder whether it can really be a divine faith formula that’s at work here.
Anyway, back to the problem passage. If it doesn’t “work” as a formula (or at least, if most of our experiences are that it doesn’t work all of the time or even most of the time) and if we sense that the (a) and (b) options on offer to explain that away don’t feel quite right, how perhaps ought we to be reading it?
One of the irksome things about the Sermon on the Mount (sorry, Matthew) is that because it probably collates a collection of sayings that Jesus said at different times and places (not all said at one time, in the order they appear in Matthew 5–7) we don’t glean anything much from the context to help us interpret this particular passage; with one exception—the verses immediately following:
9 Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? 10 Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? 11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’
Of the many names and images of God that we encounter in Scripture, that of “Father” is highly prominent. That cannot be an accident. I am not suggesting that there were options in terms of how the relationship of the first and second Persons of the Trinity would be presented to us for our understanding of God, but there’s no doubt that its manifestation as Father–Son pictures and models relationship with God in those intimate, familial terms. God is presented to us as not only the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ but potentially our Father as well (in a relational not simply creational sense). It is probably no coincidence that not only does Jesus use an Aramaic word for “Father” (Abba) for relationship with God (Mark 14:36) but so, too, does Paul: “You have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.” Romans 8:15–16. (See also, Galatians 4:6.) It seems likely that Paul was alluding to a similarly intimate familial relationship in his choice of the same Aramaic word (bearing in mind that virtually all of the New Testament was written in Greek, not in the Aramaic that was spoken by Judean people day-to-day). Although Abba doesn’t mean “Daddy” (that’s just an evangelical myth that does the rounds—sorry!), it does speak of father-child intimacy.
How does any of that help us with our passage? It places the encouragement—to ask, search, and knock—within a parent-child context. And not just any old parent, but a divine parent, who adopts us into his family. Moreover, the tense of the Greek here is not once, one time, but keeping on asking, searching, and knocking—it’s continuous. Hence, I think in these verses Jesus is advocating not so much a formula for results but a characterisation of the nature of a relationship. The framing of verses 7–8 in the context of verses 9–11 invites us to think of 7–8 in terms of a child’s requests to a parent, where the child does not always get what they want, but the parent always wants the child to feel able to ask and able to keep on asking—delighting where possible to “give good gifts.” Also as verses 9–11 indicate, the child will (hopefully) understand that a good, good father (as God the Father undoubtedly is) would never give a child anything harmful or willfully deny them anything they need.
One final thought concerning the genre in verses 7–8. If what Jesus says is intended as an “attention grabber” (intentional exaggeration or hyperbole, rather like in Luke 14:26, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple” or in Matthew 5:30, “If your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away”) then the passage would be challenging us to see the relational principle or value underlying the statement, rather than a recipe to get guaranteed answers to every prayer. Perhaps the only “formulaic” bit in the whole passage is the end: “How much more [than an earthly father] will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’ This encourages us to focus on trusting in God as a good-gift-giving heavenly Father by nature and character, rather than a formula to get things out of him.