third commandment? And what about our bodies that always seemed to come off so badly in every contest with our soul? Did Jesus put on our flesh so that we might despise it?
But the worst day of all was when it hit me that Jesus’ own most fervent prayer was refused: “Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.” I must have read that verse or heard it a hundred times before without seeing or hearing. Maybe I didn’t want to see it. But then one day I saw it. It just knocked me in the head. This, I thought, is what is meant by “thy will be done” in the Lord’s Prayer, which I had prayed time and again without thinking about it. It means that your will and God’s will may not be the same. It means there’s a good possibility that you won’t get what you pray for. It means that in spite of your prayers you are going to suffer. It means you may be crucified.
After Jesus’ terrible prayer at Gethsemane, an angel came to Him and gave Him strength, but did not remove the cup.
Before that time I may have had my doubts about public prayers, but I had listened to them complacently enough, even when they were for the football team. I had prayed my own private prayers complacently enough, asking for things I wanted, even though I knew well already that a lot of things I wanted I was not going to get, no matter how much I prayed for them. (Though I hadn’t got around to thinking about it, I already knew that I had been glad to have some things I had got that I had never thought to want, let alone pray for.)
But now I was unsure what it would be proper to pray for, or how to pray for it. After you have said “thy will be done,” what more can be said? And where do you find the strength to pray “thy will be done” after you see what it means?
And what did these questions do to my understanding of all the prayers I had ever heard and prayed? And what did they do to the possibility that I could stand before a congregation—my congregation, who would believe that I knew what I was doing—and pray for favorable weather, a good harvest, the recovery of the sick and the strayed, victory in war? Does prayer change God’s mind? If God’s mind can be changed by the wants and wishes of us mere humans, as if deferring to our better judgment, what is the point of praying to Him at all? And what are we to think when two good people pray for opposite things—as when two devout mothers of soldiers on opposite sides pray for the safety of their sons, or for victory?
Does God want us to cross the abyss between Him and us? If we can‘t—and it looked to me like we can’t—will He help us? Or does He want us to fall into the abyss? Are there some things He wants us to learn that we can’t learn except by falling into the abyss? Is that why the Jonah of old, who could not say “thy will be done,” had to lie three days and three nights in the dark in the belly of the great fish?
“Father, remove this cup from me,” I prayed. And there I stopped. For how would I know what God’s will was, even provided I could have the strength to submit to it? I knew a lot of hearsay about God speaking to people in plain English, but He never had (He never has) spoken so to me.
By then I wasn’t just asking questions; I was being changed by them. I was being changed by my prayers, which dwindled down nearer and nearer to silence, which weren’t confrontations with God but with the difficulty—in my own mind, or in the human lot—of knowing what or how to pray. Lying awake at night, I could feel myself being changed—into what, I had no idea. It was worse than wondering if I had received the call. I wasn’t just a student or a going-to-be preacher anymore. I was a lost traveler wandering in the woods, needing to be on my way somewhere but not knowing where.
I went to my professors with my questions, starting with the easiest questions and the talkiest professors. I don’t think about them much anymore. I don’t hold anything against them. They were decent enough men, according to their lights. The problem was that they’d had no doubts. They had not asked the questions that I was asking and so of course they could not answer them. They told me I needed to have more faith; I needed to believe; I needed to pray; I needed to give up my questioning, which was a sign of weakness of faith.
Those men could go on all day about the sins of the flesh or the amount of water needed for baptism or whether you could go to Heaven without being baptized or who could or couldn’t go to Heaven, but they couldn’t say why, if we’re to take some of the Bible literally, we don’t take all of it literally, or why we kill our enemies, or why we pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets that we may be seen of men.
That I should give up my questioning was good enough advice, which I would have been glad enough to take, except that my questioning would not give me up. It kept at me. Sometimes it seemed to me that people I walked by in the street must be able to hear the dingdonging in my head.
And so finally, late one afternoon, I went to the professor I was afraid to go to, old Dr. Ardmire. I was afraid to go to him because I knew he was going to tell me the truth. Dr. Ardmire was a feared man. He was a master of the Greek New Testament, a hard student and a hard teacher. We believed that he had never given but one A in his life. The number of students in his class in New Testament Greek, which he taught every fall, varied from maybe twenty to maybe three or four, as the horror died away and was renewed. He was known, behind his back, as Old Grit.
I knocked at his open door and waited until he read to a stopping place and looked up from his book.
“Come in, Mr. J. Crow.” He didn’t like it that I went by my initial.
I went in.
He said, “Have a seat, please.”
I sat down.
Customarily, when I came to see him I would be bringing work that he had required me to talk with him about. That day I was empty-handed.
Seeing that I was, he said, “What have you got in mind?”
“Well,” I said, “I’ve got a lot of questions.”
He said, “Perhaps you would like to say what they are?”
“Well, for instance,” I said, “if Jesus said for us to love our enemies—and He did say that, didn’t He?—how can it ever be right to kill our enemies? And if He said not to pray in public, how come we’re all the time praying in public? And if Jesus’ own prayer in the garden wasn’t granted, what is there for us to pray, except ‘thy will be done,’ which there’s no use in praying because it will be done anyhow?”
I sort of ran down. He didn’t say anything. He was looking straight at me. And then I realized that he wasn’t looking at me the way he usually did. I seemed to see way back in his eyes a little gleam of light. It was a light of kindness and (as I now think) of amusement.
He said, “Have you any more?”
“Well, for instance,” I said, for it had just occurred to me, “suppose you prayed for something and you got it, how do you know how you got it? How do you know you didn’t get it because you were going to get it whether you prayed for it or not? So how do you know it does any good to pray? You would need proof, wouldn’t you?”
He nodded.
“But there’s no way to get any proof.”
He shook his head. We looked at each other.
He said, “Do you have any answers?”
“No,” I said. I was concentrating so hard, looking at him, you could have nailed my foot to the floor and I wouldn’t have felt it.
“So,” I said, “I reckon what it all comes down to is, how can I preach if I don’t have any answers?”
“Yes, Mr. Crow,” he said. “How can you?” He was not one of your frying-size chickens.
“I don’t believe I can,” I said, and I felt my skin turn cold, for I had not even thought that until then.
He said, “No, I don’t believe you can.” And we sat there and looked at each other again while he waited for me to see the next thing, so he wouldn’t have to tell me: I oughtn’t to waste any time