Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Matthew 6: Giving Up Glory

In this passage, Jesus exhorts people not to seek glory and praise in this life--not to give to the needy for public praise, not to pray loudly so that people see you and think, "Wow, what a holy person."

He also suggests that God hears us the first time we ask for something--we do not need to ask it over and over. Perhaps God does hear us the first time, but when we receive no answer, it's easy to assume he hasn't heard us. So I have more sympathy for the babbling prayer, the "please please please" repetition. Sometimes, the repetition is more for us than for God. We feel a need to be doing *something* and that's the only thing we can do sometimes.

The Lord's Prayer is simple as a formula: worship God and ask for his will to be done, ask for your daily needs to be met, request forgiveness of sins and help to forgive people you're angry at, and keep us from doing wrong. Except for the first part of it, it's hard to imagine that anybody could have a probem with this as a formula for prayer that can help make us better people. I can also see removing the religious trappings of it and suggesting it as a simple daily meditation.

The final passages suggest we shouldn't worry about our physical needs being met--food, clothing, shelter--because if we're following God, he'll take care of all of that. So...why do the righteous sometimes go hungry? There are many faithful people who end up in refugee camps after all. I suppose I could pull some theological explanation that made sense to me in the past to try to explain this contradiction, but I think I'll leave the question as is. Why do good people--hard-working people--people who love God--why do they go hungry?

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