This right of admission to the divine Presence is the precious gift of God to us. Since the heavens received the ascending Lord the Kingdom of heaven has been open to all believers. Prayer is a very simple and common thing in our experience; and yet when we try to think out its implications we are overwhelmed with the wonder of it. It implies a God Who waits upon our pleasure: it reveals to us a Father Who is ever ready to listen to the voice of His children. No broken hearted sinner, overwhelmed with the conviction of his vileness, cries out in the agony of his repentance but God is ready to hear. "He is more ready to hear than we to pray." No man pours out his thanksgivings for the abundant blessings he discovers in his life but the heart of God is glad in his gladness. No child kneels at night to repeat his simple prayer but God bends over him and blesses him. The wonder of it is summed up in our Lord's words: "The Father Himself loveth you," which are as an open door into the inner sanctuary, an invitation to enter to those who are hesitating on the threshold of the Holy of Holies.
And there is no danger of tiring God: we come ceaselessly, endlessly. The cries of earth go up to Him, pitiful, ignorant, foolish cries; but they find God ready to hear and answer, fortunately not according to our ignorance but according to His great mercy. We think of the clouds of prayer in all ages, from all nations, in all tongues, and the very vastness of them gives us an index of the divine love.
And it is not simply for ourselves that we pray, nor do we pray by ourselves; it is of God's love that in the work of prayer we are associated with one another. There is nothing further from the divine plan of life than our present individualism. Our temptation is to be egotistic and self-centred; to want to approach God alone with our private needs and wishes. We incline to travel the spiritual way by ourselves; we want no company; we want no one between our souls and God. But that precisely is not the divine method. We come to God through Christ; we come in association with the members of the Body. Our standing as Christians before Him is dependent upon our corporate relation to one another in His Son.
Important issues are involved. We attain through this associated life of the Christian the power of mutual intercession. We find that it is our privilege to share our prayers with others, and to be interested in one another's lives. We have common interests and we work them out in common. Therefore when we try to put before us an ideal picture of the power of prayer, it will not be the solitary individual offering his personal supplications to the Father, but it will be the community of the faithful assembled for the offering of the divine Sacrifice. It is the praying Body that best satisfies our ideal of prayer, where we are conscious of helping one another in the work of intercession. We remember, too, when we think of prayer as prayer of the Body of Christ, that it is not just the visible congregation that is participating in it, but that all the Body share in the intercessions, wherever they may individually be. Our thoughts go up from the little assembly in the humble church and lose themselves in the splendour of the heavenly intercession where we are associated with prophets and apostles and martyrs, and with Mary the Mother of God.
There was a third gift that the Magi brought to Him Whom they hailed King, a gift that is more perplexing as a gift to royalty than the other two. That gold and incense should be offered a King is clearly His royal right; but what has he to do with the bitterness of myrrh? But to this King myrrh is a peculiarly appropriate gift, for it is the symbol of complete self-abandonment. He who came to do not His own will but the will of Him that sent Him; Who laid aside the robes of His glory, issuing from the uncreated light that He might clothe Himself with the humility of the flesh, is properly honoured with the gift of myrrh.
And as it was the symbol of His humility, so is it the symbol of our humanity in relation to Him. It suggests to us that uttermost of Christian virtues, the virtue of entire abandonment to the will of God. This is a most difficult virtue to acquire. We cling to self. We are devoted to our own wills. We rely on our own judgment and wisdom. We are impatient of all that gets in the way of our self-determination. We have in these last days made a veritable religion out of devotion to self, a cult of the ego.
But he who will enter into the sanctuary of the divine life, he who will seek union with God, he who will be one with the Father in the Son, must abandon self. He must lose his life in order to save it. He must let go the world to cling to the Lord of life. This will of the man which is so insistent, so persistent, so assertive, so tenacious, must be laid aside and the Will of Another adopted in its place. Often this is bitter. Very true of us it is that when we were young we girded ourselves and walked whither we would; but it must be in the end, if we make life a spiritual success, that when we are old another shall gird us and carry us whither we would not.
The secret of life is found when the bitterness of myrrh is turned to sweetness in the discovery that the outcome of the sacrificial life is not that it be narrowed but enlarged; and that for the life which we have entrusted to Him God will do more than we ask or think. When our will becomes one with the will of God we are surprised to find that we have ceased to think of what we once called our sacrifices, because life in Christ reveals itself to us as of infinite joy and richness, so that we forget the things that are behind and gladly press on.
Queen of heaven, blessed may thou be
For Godes Son born He was of thee,
For to make us free.
Gloria Tibi, Domine.
Jesu, Godes Son, born He was
In a crib with hay and grass,
And died for us upon the cross.
Gloria Tibi, Dominie.
To our Lady make we our moan,
That she may pray to her dear Son,
That we may to His bliss come.
Gloria Tibi, Dominie.
Sixteenth Century.