Prayer
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full. 6 But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you
Our Lord’s emphasis on the need for secrecy should not be driven to extremes. To interpret it with rigid literalism would be guilty of the very pharisaism against which he is warning us. If all our praying were to be kept secret, we would have to give up church-going, family prayers and prayer meetings. His reference here is to private prayer.
Prayer was not normally practised at the street corners, but Jeremias suggests that one who strictly observed the afternoon hour of prayer could deliberately time his movements to bring him to the most public place at the appropriate time (NTT, p. 187)! The disciple, by contrast, is to pray in the ‘storeroom’ (tameion; cf. Luke 12:24). This was an inner room, secluded, probably windowless, and possibly with the only lockable door in the house; it is thus proverbial for a secret place
They love to pray there. They did not love prayer for its own sake, but they loved it when it gave them an opportunity of making themselves noticed
What he says of the hypocrites sounds fine at first: ‘They love … to pray.’ But unfortunately it is not prayer which they love, nor the God they are supposed to be praying to. No, they love themselves and the opportunity which public praying gives them to parade themselves.
Of course the discipline of regular prayer is good; all devout Jews prayed three times a day like Daniel. And there was nothing wrong in standing to pray, for this was the usual posture for prayer among Jews. Nor were they necessarily mistaken to pray at the street corners as well as in the synagogues if their motive was to break down segregated religion and bring their recognition of God out of the holy places into the secular life of every day. But Jesus uncovered their true motive as they stood in synagogue or street with hands uplifted to heaven in order that they might be seen by men. Behind their piety lurked their pride. What they really wanted was applause.
To this we reply that the reason why God’s giving depends on our asking is neither because he is ignorant until we inform him nor because he is reluctant until we persuade him. The reason has to do with us, not with him; the question is not whether he is ready to give, but whether we are ready to receive. So in prayer we do not ‘prevail on’ God, but rather prevail on ourselves to submit to God. True, the language of ‘prevailing on God’ is often used in regard to prayer, but it is an accommodation to human weakness. Even when Jacob ‘prevailed on God’, what really happened is that God prevailed over him, bringing him to the point of surrender when he was able to receive the blessing which God had all the time been longing to give him
We can thank God that the granting of our needs is conditional—not only on our asking, seeking and knocking, but also on whether what we desire by asking, seeking and knocking is good. Thank God he answers prayer. Thank God he also sometimes denies our requests. ‘I thank God’, writes Dr Lloyd-Jones ‘that He is not prepared to do anything that I may chance to ask Him … I am profoundly grateful to God that He did not grant me certain things for which I asked, and that He shut certain doors in my face.’1
This is, as Jeremias puts it (PJ, pp. 159–160), ‘beggar’s wisdom’: ‘If the beggar, although harshly repulsed at first, knows that persistent appeals will open the hands of his hard-hearted fellow men, how much more certain should you be that your persistence in prayer will open the hands of your heavenly Father.’
