Canter Bridge

We may live in a world with its horrors, yet we do not live in a horrible world.

There is goodness and gift aplenty amid these hills, in this city, within the troubled textures of this little life.

In his ‘sermon on the mount’, Jesus pictures life with his Father as a most loving, most natural conversation.

Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened. Or which one of you, if his son asks him for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a serpent? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him! (Matthew 7:7–11 ESV)

The regularities of life when it is good, the patterns that lead us to expect that a request will be met, a knocked door soon opened, a hunger satisfied carry over—so Jesus instructs his audience—into life with our unseen Father.

There is goodness here, a responsive if invisible heart, an expectation of gifts and the satisfaction they bring. Jesus’ words both denote and connote a generous reciprocity as the normal life of one who lives dependent upon this tenderly described Father. In fact, the gentle imperative of Jesus’ teaching seems purposed to counter a sense in his listeners that life might not be so good as this. Ask, he urges. Knock. Seek.

You’ll see.

It might be a bridge too far for people acquainted with hunger and sorrow to imagine that the heavens—in the abstract—are kind. But our Father is, Jesus instructs them, choosing the image of the home to make his point. The Responsive One whom he describes is not far off, not hovering in some distant heaven. On the contrary, he is at home with you, as a father is just a few words away from his needy daughter, his momentarily lonely son calling out from a room just six steps down the hall.

Life becomes, in Jesus’ teaching, a gentle, generous conversation. One needs, so one asks. The answer can be expected to come. We live with our Father in the good domesticity of hearth and home.

Is it bread you need? A fish? The answer will not come as stone or snake.

But how can we know this?

Ask. Seek.

Knock.