Ask, and it will be given to you

‘Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened. Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!

‘In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.

‘Enter through the narrow gate; for the gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. For the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it.

- Matthew 7:7-14

Reading these gospels, I increasingly see qualities expressed in Jesus' teachings that we have come to associate with good social governance. What I mean by that is something akin to the notions that we embrace about the rights of man. These are things that many of us take for granted in certain countries, but we forget how hard a struggle it has been and continues to be for people to achieve a basic form of equality or just treatment and respect for persons as human beings. There are many places in the world where such words have no meaning.

Today's daily readings group the passage above from Matthew with a reading from Wisdom. In the book of Wisdom chapter 7, Solomon declares that he prayed to God and he was given wisdom - the spirit of wisdom came to him, instructed him. These are beautiful passages about relationship to God, and instruction in the spirit of God.

In Christ, it seems to me that through grace we are blessed with the ability for each of us to cultivate this relationship that Solomon writes about. As Christ spreads his own message of redemption, that which he calls the fulfillment of the law, what I see is a greater spread of this ability for relationship into the world and among human beings, an opening and offering to all for the relationship that Solomon has with wisdom. Jesus says, Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you. I believe that he is offering to all people this opportunity for relationship with wisdom. He is saying that as human beings we each possess the necessary capabilities for such relationship ourselves.

However, in this same passage he tells us that although we have the capability, we must also exert the effort. We must do what it takes if we want this great prize, this beauty. The way is narrow. As human beings, equipped with the capacity for this life in abundance, we also bear the position of responsibility - as does anyone with a capability for great gifts. In order to achieve that life, we must also realize that as being entrusted with so great endowments, we also bear responsibility for our conduct, a way to live our lives and pursue that path. It is not enough that we qualify for this relationship with Spirit, we must also walk in the ways of Spirit and bear our gift responsibly to realize its fruits.

I see all of this as grace, as an establishment of human beings as beings "greater than the angels." In today's psalms we read:

what are human beings that you are mindful of them,

mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,

and crowned them with glory and honour.

I see Jesus' extension of grace into the world as that which extends to human beings a greater honor than before, a depth of knowledge about what our capabilities and possibilities are. He is here to give life in abundance, and to make us his co-redemptors in the sense that we are capable of receiving this life; he asks us to be his co-workers in grace, and to share the responsibility that comes with such an endowment, and to bear its fruits. It is an extension of depth and dimension to what it means to be a human being, and a radical form of equality in that all who are capable are invited to sit at this table, and to take up his Way. In my opinion, this is a radical departure into the social values we call "good" and that have borne fruit in the sense of the recognition of human beings as deserving of basic rights of treatment and respect, in the same sense that the crucifixion story has given us values of social good in the awareness of the harm of the innocent that comes with our imperfect systems of human justice. Solomon is called Solomon the Great, but Jesus extends to each of us Solomon's capacity for relationship to wisdom.

Jesus extends to each of us this invitation to ask, to seek, and to knock. He promises response to those who will accept this lofty invitation with responsibility and understanding. We are all invited into this relationship. It is just a question of stepping up to the plate and doing our part to fulfill this gift, this capability we've been given. In that extension of grace I read of radical establishment of equality and respect for human personhood, an extension of grace to all and a gift to the world of consciousness of what it is to be human. How far do we fall from this lofty capability with our choices?

"And whoso degrades His dignity in the creature, degrades the Creator in his victim"
- Franz Werfel, The Forty Days of Musa Dagh