Prattling a way to God
Stephen Curkpatrick

If in a common activity such as prayer it is imperative not to be like the Gentiles, then it is crucial to know of what their prattling prayers consist for this deterrence to be necessary. (Matt. 6) This concerns religion, the praying subject and unwitting idolatry. If it is possible to heap up empty phrases that will not be heard—to whom prayers are offered is of vital importance, for this makes a difference to what is ultimately prayed and for what purpose.

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The gospel suggests a propensity for religious prayers to exceed an essential response to God in piling up words, as if by their quantity, divinity might be corralled and favour assimilated. We are not to be like them for your Father in heaven knows what you need.

Humans need basic things such as food, shelter and health. They also need forgiveness and communion, intimacy and responsibility through life that exceeds each generation formed from the earth and invariably anxious in living toward a horizon of death.

The gospel promises life that exceeds our capacity to conjure without compromise or to establish without eventual termination. The prayer that models all prayer begins with intimacy and distinction—Our Father in heaven—presupposing our need for a quality of life received as a gift in response to the gospel.

Can religion promise the reality of God as otherwise yet personal and intimate? Humans strive to know and to please it seems, they “know not what.” This is implicit in the prolific and conflicting systems, speculations and repetitions that presume to puncture the heavens or harness the soul with many words, in order to reach or experience some form of divine essence, whatever this might be.

The confused phenomenon of religion with its conflicting assertions about reality and human nature, suggests that it is not clarified by words, even if it is compelled to pile up many words.

The gospel deters its hearers from heaping up words in a mistaken assumption that these have efficacy, perhaps echoing the difference between Publican and Pharisee (Lk. 18). The brief prayer of gratitude for grace and acceptance of truth recognises that human life in its consistent self-compromise, cannot prattle its way to God. This recognition is inseparable from grace that establishes a distinction between God and humans, yet with the wonder that this distinction is also traversed by God in the initiative of grace.

For Christians, grace makes evident our conflicted state of self-compromise, yet also reversing this predicament in Christ. Without recognition of this human reality and redemptive possibility, there is no recognition of grace articulated in the gospel.

The quest for a true self and ultimate reality within cultural and religious reflections on existence and phenomena generates enormous legislative and speculative verbiage as humans presume to expound a competent movement toward some notion of divinity. Yet the gospel calls for a response to God’s initiative of grace in transparent trust through hearing the word of God.

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The empty phases of Gentiles may be quasi-religious without even acknowledging religion. Inclinations toward an ultimate reality forged from human concerns and given material expression, constitute idolatry, even if this is unwitting.

The testimony of Israel is unique within a call to distinction—not to be like the nations. As the focus of loving-kindness, Israel is set apart to give testimony to the character of God and the volitional responsibility of integral humanity. The prohibition of idolatry in Israel counters the propensity to seek within phenomena, a mirror for human existence that effectively diminishes human dignity.

To seek meaning and identity in inanimate objects or phenomena of time, place, culture or tradition is to give priority to these over relational and volitional qualities of life. Refracted through phenomena, reality is ordered according to valuations forged within cultural rhythms, social expediency or sacred demarcations.

The focus of biblical testimony on God as personal and vocative in calling for our response, endorses the uniqueness of persons. God speaks, we are invited to listen. If God can be harassed, our fellow humans will be regarded in the same way, but even more so.

The act of heaping up empty phrases does not belong to the personal realm, except as an aberration within human encounter and conversation. A vociferous piling up of words—legal, political or religious—suggests dysfunctional relationships and communication. This is consistent with an approach to reality in which either idealism or instrumental pragmatism is dominant.

Verbal harassment in the context of human community indicates that an ideal is more important than people. Piling up rhetoric displaces relational encounters. An ideal becomes the focus of implicit idolatry. In utility use of people, insistent rhetoric is given in imperatives that treat people as manageable objects toward the advancement of a project, rendering them a means to another end.

In the testimony of Israel, God as personal, intimate and righteous invites people to respond in trust, love and distinctive responsibility. This testimony resists displacement of people and the personal through instrumental use of humans, either by ideological tyranny or by expedient pragmatism.

Piling up words, as they do among the nations, need not be explicitly religious, yet it remains implicitly religious in the expression of idolatry that elevates specific phenomena or ideals concerning phenomena above relational and volitional qualities.

Whenever Israel lapses in its distinctive trust in God to become like the nations, Israel is disciplined. Israel is called to listen—to be receptive hearers of the word in complete trust toward God, instead of grasping at folly by vociferous conjectures about phenomena.

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The gospel’s deterrence to prattling on is consistent with biblical testimony in which, by wisdom writings and epistles, Scripture signals the danger of incessant talk, even before God, for excess verbiage only consolidates illusions in our grasp of reality. The word of God is received in hearing; our reception of truth is by response of faith expressed in tangible decisions of trust.

People have a propensity to talk their way to meaning, as if by ratchet movements, tooth by tooth in the use of words, they can inch closer to apprehending ultimate reality. This is supposedly also achieved spiritually within a shifting spiritual consensus that is modified by context and imperatives toward assumed relevance.

By contrast, the word of God speaks into our existence and otherwise than the vociferous inclinations of humans to heap up speculative conjectures as a stairway to transcendence or as a talking cure for spiritual malaise.

Talking a way to ultimate meaning or self-realisation only compounds hubris that assumes it can grasp and therefore arbitrate on the perennial questions of life. In the gospel we are invited to receive a scandalous word of forgiveness that can heal what is compromised through grace and truth, beyond any assumption that words, any words, will suffice to conjure and confirm a desired state of existence. We like to hear our voices. The gospel deters us from talking a way to ultimate meaning, invoking ears to hear another word other than our own.

The word of God speaks otherwise than by rhetorical ruses of the nations that mask hubris and conjectural futility in ever-latent defiance of the word of God (Acts 4). The word awaits human response to definitive grace and truth in Jesus Christ.

Whether explicitly or implicitly religious, knowingly or unwittingly idolatrous—prattling on with many words cannot secure grace that is already given in excess beyond human conjecture, plea, pledge or pomposity in heaping up many prayers.