By Rev. Peter Haugen
St. Paul Evangelical Lutheran Church
“Which father among you, if his son asks for a fish, will instead of a fish give him a serpent; or if he asks for an egg, will give him a scorpion? If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (St. Luke 11:15). Our Lord Jesus is here teaching His disciples to pray, but some of what He says makes us a little uncomfortable. Not so much the Lord’s Prayer, of course, but the depiction of the friend who refuses our aid until we bother him too much … Well, that troubles us in much the same way as hearing about the judge who would not give a widow justice because it was right, but because she was annoying.
Of course, the point is not that our heavenly Father will refuse to give us Christians every good thing, or that He will only do so grudgingly. He delights to hear and to answer, to give His children the kingdom. But He would teach us persistence, teach us to trust that He is faithful and true, in spite of what we seem to be experiencing.
Our problem is not that our Father gives us evil things when we come to Him. Our problem is that we so often do not understand what is good and what is evil. We’re like a toddler who encounters a brightly coloured coral snake; we crawl after it and grab at it and seek to make it our own, never seeing or understanding the danger, only seeing the vibrancy of the red and orange and yellow on that black, only fascinated by its sinuous movement, never aware of the death hidden under the glamour. We beg our Father for the serpent we want, and we weep and wail when He gives us the fish we need.
Because that fish so often seems evil to us. We ask for health for ourselves and those we love … when it is necessary to be taught reliance upon our Father in every need. We ask for peace here and now … when it is necessary to be tempered and refined in the fires of persecution and loss. We ask for life here on earth … when it is necessary to pass through the gate of death to life everlasting, lest suffering too great to bear or complacency or pleasure or routine draw us into apostasy and damnation.
That fish so often seems evil to us. But our Father knows what we need, even when we do not. He knows when we need trial and tribulation, when we need peace and rest, when character must be developed, when hope must be nurtured. He knows to keep from us the serpents that illusion would paint as fish and the scorpions that appear to be eggs. He delivers us from evil, even while He gives us our daily bread. God be praised. He does all things well. Amen.
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