There is a phrase in this morning’s Collect that I have been sitting with all week: an hearty desire to pray. Not the ability to pray. Not the discipline of prayer, or the habit, or the duty. The desire. And not a faint or occasional desire, but a hearty one — the word means whole, full, coming from the heart’s centre. The Collect assumes that God himself has given us this desire, and asks now only that he defend and comfort those who possess it. The prayer’s logic is circular in the best sense: the God who gave us the desire to seek him is petitioned by means of that very desire to come to our aid.
That logic is the whole theology of the Gospel.
The Seeking God
Our Lord is dining with publicans and sinners — again — and the Pharisees and scribes murmur against him. It is worth noticing that they do not address him directly. They speak to his disciples: Why do ye eat and drink with publicans and sinners? They are not seeking an answer. They are constructing a case. And our Lord answers not the question they asked but the one they should have asked.
He gives them two parables, and they are the same parable told twice. A man has a hundred sheep and loses one. Doth he not leave the ninety and nine in the wilderness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? A woman has ten pieces of silver and loses one. Doth she not light a candle, and sweep the house, and seek diligently until she find it? The details differ — wilderness and housework, shepherd and housewife, one sheep among a hundred and one coin among ten — but the grammar is the same in both. The seeker does not wait. The seeker goes. And the seeker does not stop until the thing is found.
The desire to pray is not our reaching after God. It is the sign that God is already reaching after us.
This is the answer to the Pharisees’ murmuring, and it is a devastating one. They had drawn a line between the righteous and the lost, and positioned God safely on their side of it. Our Lord draws no such line. He draws a circle — the shepherd going out from the fold, traversing the wilderness, returning; the woman sweeping every corner of the house — and at the centre of the circle is not righteousness but joy. Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. Rejoice with me; for I have found the piece which I had lost. There is more joy in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, our Lord says, than over ninety-nine just persons which need no repentance.
He does not say there are no such just persons. He says heaven is less interested in them than we might suppose.
The Hearty Desire
Now hear the Epistle, and see how St. Peter has understood this. Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time: casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you. The movement Peter asks of us is precisely the movement of the lost sheep: to stop pretending we are not lost, to stop managing our own wilderness, to let ourselves be found. Casting all your care upon him — not presenting him with a tidy summary of our most acceptable needs, but casting, the way a fisherman casts a net, with the whole arm, without reserve.
And then Peter adds something that puts teeth in this counsel: Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour. There are two seekers in this passage, and they are not the same. The devil seeks to devour. God seeks to find. Peter is not counselling passivity but a very precise attention: know which seeker you are attending to. The one who casts all care upon God and resists the devil, stedfast in the faith, is the one the shepherd finds.
Here the Collect comes clear. The hearty desire to pray is not something we manufactured. It is the sign that the shepherd is already seeking. When a man finds himself wanting to pray — not as a duty to be discharged but as a genuine hunger, a reaching toward something he cannot name but cannot live without — he should recognize that hunger not as his own achievement but as evidence. The woman has lit her candle. The house is being swept. The coin is about to be found.
The Morning Lesson
Jeremiah this morning sings what God promises to the exiles: I will turn their mourning into joy, and will comfort them, and make them rejoice from their sorrow. He is writing to people who have every reason to believe themselves abandoned — the city fallen, the temple burned, the people carried away — and he addresses them with the most astonishing tenderness. Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. The word translated drawn is the same word used of pulling something out of a pit, of hauling a net from the sea. God does not merely invite. He draws.
And our Lord’s own calling of Matthew, in the second lesson, is over in a sentence: Follow me. And he arose and followed him. We are not told that Matthew deliberated, or felt worthy, or had put his affairs in order. We are told he arose. The desire was there — perhaps he himself did not know it until that moment — and the word of Christ named it and Matthew arose and it was done. This is how the coin is found. Not by the coin’s own navigation but by the woman’s candle and the woman’s broom and the woman’s rejoicing when her hand closes over what was lost.
So we come to the Office this morning, and we bring our hearty desire, such as it is — perhaps very hearty, perhaps barely a flicker, perhaps we are not entirely sure we have it at all. It does not matter. The Collect does not ask us to have produced the desire on our own. It thanks God for having given it, and asks him to defend and comfort those who hold it. To come to Morning Prayer with even the faintest willingness is already to be further along than we think. The candle is lit. The house is being swept. And there is joy already, in heaven, at the finding.
Until she find it.
AMEN.