Ask, Seek, Knock

A hand on a door that has not opened, and the person on the step deciding whether to knock again or walk back down the path.

Jesus stacks three verbs and they cost different amounts. Ask is what anyone can do standing still. Seek takes time and attention and going somewhere. Knock is what you do at a door that has already failed to open once. He puts the same promise on all three, which means the promise is not attached to the first attempt.

And he is not the only one in the New Testament handling this. Luke sets the same words beside a story about a man banging on a neighbour's door at midnight for bread and getting it, Jesus says, not because of friendship but because of his shamelessness. Later Luke gives us a widow who wears down an unjust judge, and the reason attached is that men ought always to pray, and not to faint. Then Matthew immediately guards the whole thing from the other side: what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? The persistence is not there to wear God down into resembling a good father. And James supplies the correction that keeps it honest: ye have not, because ye ask not; ye ask, and receive not, because ye ask amiss. So the chain runs asking, seeking, knocking, shamelessness, not fainting, a father who is not the judge, and a warning about what you are actually asking for.

So which is it with the prayer you retired? You may have been told no, and a no is an answer a person can live with and build on. Or you may simply have got tired of the sound of your own voice, which is not an answer at all and has never once been recorded as one. Those two feel identical at the moment you stop, and only one of them was a decision anybody actually made.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 321 is At His Right Hand (Psalm 110:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna