Text for the Week: Giving Good Things

Scripture: Matthew 7:7-12

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. ⁹ Is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for bread, would give a stone? ¹⁰ Or if the child asked for a fish, would 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!

¹² “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.

Questions

1. What is the connection between the three verbs of verses 7-8 “seek”, “ask”, “knock”?
2. If verses 7-8 are about prayer how are we to understand these verses in times when prayers are not answered?
3. Does the metaphor of a child asking in verse 10 directly equate to prayer, or is it meant to relate to parent child relationships more generally?
4. What does Jesus mean by “you who are evil” in verse 11, clearly the fathers in his crowd were not evil by our definitions?
5. How does the “Golden Rule” in verse 12 relate to the preceding paragraph about relating to God and God’s provision for us?

Background

Related Scriptures: Psalm 37; Luke 6:31, 11:1-13;

The verbs of verse 7 are imperatives meant to convey these actions are part of the duty of Jesus’ followers.

Each of the verbs in verses 7-8 demonstrate a level of intentionality, each of these activities involves determined effort on the part of an individual.

The imagery of father in verse 9 is meant to take our attention back to the instructions for prayer 6:6 and the opening of the Lord’s prayer in 6:9

The imagery of verses 9-10 are meant to convey God’s protection and provision more than being directly connected to answering prayers.

Evil in this passage is meant to serve as a hyperbolic take on flawed or people who do not always know what is the right thing to do, rather than morally corrupt or evil.

The structure of verse 12 demonstrates that Jesus is emphatic about the need to treat everyone in a manner that corresponds to how we want the world to work, not with how the world does work.

Reflection

One of the things I had to unlearn in understanding this passage is that Jesus is not talking about prayer, at least not directly. Some interpreters like to focus on the term “ask” in verses 7-11 to the exclusion of everything else resulting in a version of this paragraph that has Jesus talking about God answering prayers. I have difficulty with this because Jesus uses three verbs, seek, ask, and knock; all three work together to help us understand God. I also find that reading this paragraph in terms of God answering prayers creates some real problems when it comes to how we experience answers to our prayers. If Jesus is speaking of prayer in this passage then what are we to make of the times that our prayers are unanswered or the situations we prayed about end badly. This is where so many people feel lost because they have been told that if they ask God will answer, because God only gives good things. And so when people pray and they still walk through distressing or evil outcomes, they begin to wonder about their theology. Jesus himself was not delivered despite his prayers for God to take away the cup of his suffering, and whatever the passage means to say to us must recognize the fact that there are times when we do not receive good in this life.

Instead of thinking about this paragraph in terms of prayers we make to God which God answers, we should consider this through the lens which has shaped our entire reading of the Sermon thus far, the Kingdom Heaven is here. The Sermon is about what life is like in God’s kingdom and how we are to behave upon entering it. So here when we see Jesus using the imperatives of “seek”, “ask”, and “knock”, we should insert the kingdom as the predicate of each command. Seek for the kingdom and you will find it, ask for the kingdom and it will be given to you, knock at the entrance of the kingdom and it will be opened to you. Jesus wants us to recognize that when our priority is God’s kingdom God will certainly provide the kingdom. To illustrate this he compares God to good fathers. It is easy to miss Jesus’s analogy but while fish would have been a staple in the diet of his hearers, snakes were unclean and not good for food, further there are symbolic links with evil. It is not simply about giving the child what is requested (as in answered prayers) the illustration is asking us to think about how a father preemptively provides for the child’s needs.

Jesus is telling us that God has not simply provided us with the daily food we need when we ask (a reference back to the Lord’s prayer) but also that God has done something even better. Now if we commit to looking for, asking for, and knocking at the door of this better thing, God will give it to us. God wants to do more than simply provide us with food, God wants to open up life in the kingdom to us and give us the lives we were made for.

Jesus follows this up with verse 12—commonly called the Golden Rule—as another simplified expression of life inside this kingdom God wants to provide. Once we understand that in verses 7-11 Jesus is telling us to peruse the Kingdom of God his words in verse 12 take on added weight. “Anything and everything you might desire people do to you, this also you must do to them. Because this is the Law and the Prophets.”, becomes a way of practicing God’s kingdom. It is easy to instinctively understand that living out Jesus’ Golden Rule is a good thing for Christians, but too often it is detached completely from the rest of the passage as if it is some arbitrary piece of wisdom Matthew stuck here because he had no other room for it. Instead it provides an easy reference for living out the rather ambiguous ideas immediately above it. We show ourselves to be seeking God’s kingdom when we provide the good for others that we desire and that we know is true of God’s kingdom. This is Jesus’ way of tying mind and body, beliefs and actions together. We seek we ask we knock with our spirit communing with God and in how we treat others. Taking seriously Jesus’ idea that we are to treat others according to how we want treated leads us to ask about the state of the world. Living out this command will cause us to grow weary of any world that is not the kingdom and be the impetus that drives us to search for where God is. The goal of verse 12 is to help us understand better what the kingdom of God looks like and to seek that kingdom more authentically. Jesus wants us to learn to reflect on our needs and desires in a way that we see them as universal to human needs and desires, when we take this task seriously we begin to see the world as God does. And when we act to help others in these needs we act as God does and begin to see God’s kingdom more clearly. And it is then that God takes us more and more into the kingdom.