What self-control and reserve are here! How would one of us have been inclined to conduct himself, if he found himself with just {155} one more day for active service? "One more day," he would have said; "then fill it with the best works and the best words; let me stamp my message on my time; let me fulfil the work which was given me to do." But Jesus has no such lust of finishing. He simply commits his spirit to his Father, and awaits the trial and the cross. And perhaps on that unrecorded day his real agony was met, and his real cross borne. Perhaps as he went up on that hillside, which still overlooks the little village of Bethany, and looked at his past and at his future, the real spiritual conquest was attained; for he comes back again to Jerusalem on Thursday morning, not with the demeanor of a martyr but with the air of a conqueror; and when Pilate asks him if he is a king he answers him: "Thou hast said it."
So it is with many a life. It has its great days,—its Palm Sundays of triumphs, its Good Fridays of cross-bearing, and these seem the epochs of its experience; but when one searches for the sources of its strength, they lie—do they not?—in some unrecorded day, as the sources of an abundant river lie hidden in some nook among the hills.
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LXIII
THE ANSWER TO PRAYER
Luke xxii. 39-48.
(PASSION WEEK—THURSDAY)
On Thursday morning of his last week Jesus sends two of his friends before him into Jerusalem to prepare the Passover meal, while he does not himself enter the city until the afternoon. There he meets his friends, and after the supper he takes the bread and wine and with entire naturalness asks them, as they eat and drink, to remember him. Then he talks with them and prays with them, and they go out again on the road toward Bethany; and coming to a little garden at the foot of the hill called the Mount of Olives he bids his companions wait while he goes, as his custom was, to pray.
We hear much discussion about prayer and its possibilities,—what we can pray for and what God can do in return, and what is the true answer to prayer. But what a silence comes over all such questionings when one notices that this prayer of Jesus uttered thus {157} in this most solemn hour was not, in the sense of these discussions, answered by his God. It was the moment of the supreme agony of Christ. The falseness of friends, the blindness of his people, the malice of their leaders,—all these things seem more than he can bear. "Let this cup pass from me," he prays, and, behold, his prayer is not accepted, and what he asks is denied, and the cup is to be drunk. And yet in a far deeper sense his, prayer is answered. "Thy will be done," he prays,—not in spite of me, or over me, but through me. Make me, my Father, the instrument of thy will; and so praying he rises with absolute composure and kingly authority, and goes out with his prayer answered to do that will.
What should we pray for? Why, we should pray for what we most deeply want. There is no sincerity in praying for things which are fictitious or abstract or mere theological blessings. Open to God the realities of your heart and seek the blessings which you sincerely desire. But in all prayers desire most to know the will of God toward you, and to do it. Prayer is not offered to deflect God's will to yours, but to adjust your will to His. When a ship's captain is setting out on a {158} voyage he first of all adjusts his compasses, corrects their divergence, and counteracts the influences which draw the needle from the pole. Well, that is prayer. It is the adjustment of the compass of the soul, it is its restoration from deflection, it is the pointing of it to the will of God. And the soul which thus sails forth into the sea of life finds itself—not indeed freed from all storms of the spirit, but at least sure of its direction through them all.