Night Counted as Day

Now power is given against us in two ways: as punishment when we do wrong, or for glory when we are put to the test. That is what we see in Job’s case, where God himself sets it out: “Look, everything he has I give into your hands; only be careful not to touch the man himself.” And in his Gospel the Lord says, at the time of his suffering, “You could have no power against me at all unless it had been given you from above.” [a]

But when we ask that we may not come into temptation, the very fact that we ask it reminds us how weak and frail we are. It keeps anyone from swaggering, from proudly and arrogantly claiming anything for himself, from taking to himself the glory of confessing or of suffering as though it were his own — when the Lord himself, teaching humility, said, “Watch and pray, so that you do not come into temptation. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak.” So a humble and submissive confession comes first, and everything is credited to God; and then whatever is asked in that way, as a request made with fear and honor toward God, may be granted by his own kindness.

After all this, at the end of the prayer, comes a short clause that gathers up all our petitions and prayers briefly and completely. We finish by saying, “But deliver us from evil” — which takes in everything hostile that the enemy attempts against us in this world. Against all of it there is a faithful and certain protection, if God delivers us, if he gives his help to us when we pray and beg for it. And once we have said, Deliver us from evil, there is nothing left that we still ought to ask for. When we have asked for God’s protection against evil and have been given it, then we stand secure and safe against everything the devil and the world do against us. What is there to be afraid of in this life, for the man whose guardian in this life is God? [e]

Dear brothers, is it any wonder that the prayer God taught is like this — that in his teaching he packed all our praying into one saving sentence? Isaiah the prophet had foretold this long before. Filled with the Holy Spirit, he spoke of the greatness and the kindness of God: “He is completing and cutting short his word in righteousness, because the Lord will make a shortened word in all the earth.” For when the Word of God, our Lord Jesus Christ, came to everyone, gathering the learned and the unlearned alike, and published to every sex and every age the instructions that save, he made one large summary of his commands. He did it so that the memory of those learning would not be weighed down in this heavenly schooling, but could take in quickly what a simple faith needed. So when he taught what eternal life is, he wrapped the sacred secret of life in a great and divine brevity, saying, “And this is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” [f]

And when he set out to gather the first and greatest commandments out of the law and the prophets, he said, “Hear, Israel: the Lord your God is one God, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength. This is the first commandment. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.” “On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” And again: “Whatever good things you want people to do for you, do the same for them. For this is the law and the prophets.”

The Lord taught us to pray not only in words but in what he did. He prayed often himself and made his own requests, and so showed us by the witness of his example what we ought to do. As it is written: “But he himself withdrew into a lonely place, and prayed there.” And again: “He went out to a mountain to pray, and spent the whole night in prayer to God.” If he prayed, who had no sin, how much more ought sinners to pray? And if he prayed without stopping, keeping watch through the whole night in unbroken requests, how much more ought we to keep watch at night, praying over and over! [j]

But the Lord prayed and pleaded, not for himself — why should the one who was without guilt pray on his own behalf? — but for our sins. He said so himself when he told Peter, “Look, Satan has asked to sift you like wheat. But I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail.” And afterward he pleads with the Father for them all: “I do not pray for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one — as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us.” The Lord’s kindness, no less than his mercy, is great where our salvation is concerned: he was not content to buy us back with his blood, but prayed for us on top of it. Now look at what he wanted when he made that request — that just as the Father and the Son are one, so we too should stay in complete unity. From this you can see how great a sin a man commits when he cuts unity and peace apart, since this was the very thing the Lord himself asked for. He plainly wanted his people to be saved in this way and to live in peace, because he knew that discord cannot come into the kingdom of God. [k]

Dear brothers, when we stand praying we ought to be alert and put our whole heart into it, with our minds on our prayers. Let every thought of the flesh and of the world go; let the soul at that moment think of nothing except the one thing it is praying for. This is also why the priest, before the prayer, sends a word ahead to prepare the minds of the brothers, saying, “Lift up your hearts,” so that when the people answer, “We lift them up to the Lord,” he is reminded that he ought to be thinking of nothing but the Lord. Let the heart be shut against the enemy and open to God alone, and let it not allow God’s enemy near it at the time of prayer. He often steals up on us and gets inside, and by clever deceit he calls our prayers away from God, so that we have one thing in our heart and another in our voice — when it ought to be the soul and the mind praying to the Lord, with a single intention, and not the sound of the voice. [l]

And what carelessness it is to be pulled away and carried off by silly, godless thoughts while you are praying to the Lord — as if there were anything you ought to be thinking about more than the fact that you are speaking with God! How can you ask God to hear you when you do not hear yourself? Do you want God to remember you when you make your request, if you do not remember yourself? This is simply taking no precaution at all against the enemy. This is offending the majesty of God by the carelessness of your praying, while you pray to God. This is being awake with your eyes and asleep in your heart — when a Christian, even asleep with his eyes, ought to be awake in his heart, as it is written where the church speaks in the Song of Songs: “I sleep, but my heart stays awake.” That is why the apostle warns us so anxiously and carefully: “Keep on in prayer, and stay awake in it.” He is teaching and showing that the people who can get from God what they ask are the ones God sees keeping watch in their prayer.

Those who pray should not come to God with fruitless, bare prayers either. A request gets nothing when it is a barren pleading that begs God. Every tree that does not bear fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire; so words that bear no fruit certainly cannot deserve anything from God, since they come to nothing. This is what Holy Scripture teaches us: “Prayer is good with fasting and giving to the poor.” The one who will give us a reward for our labors and our giving on the day of judgment listens mercifully even in this life to the man who comes to him praying with good works alongside. Cornelius the centurion is an example. When he prayed, he had a claim to be heard, because he was in the habit of giving a great deal to the people and of praying to God constantly. When he prayed at about three in the afternoon, an angel appeared to him, bearing witness to his labors and saying, “Cornelius, your prayers and your gifts to the poor have gone up as a remembrance before God.” [o]

Prayers go up to God quickly when the merit of our labors urges them on God. This is how Raphael the angel came to be a witness to Tobit’s constant prayer and constant good works. He said, “It is honorable to reveal and confess the works of God. When you prayed, and Sarah too, I brought the remembrance of your prayers before the holiness of God. And when you buried the dead with a single heart, and did not put off getting up and leaving your dinner but went out and covered the dead, I was sent to test you. And now God has sent me again to heal you, and Sarah your daughter-in-law. For I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who stand and go in and out before the glory of God.” [q]

Through Isaiah the Lord reminds us of the same things and teaches them: “Loosen every knot of injustice; release the pressure of contracts that have no force; let those who are crushed go into peace, and tear up every unjust bond. Break your bread for the hungry, and bring the poor who have no shelter into your house. When you see the naked, clothe him; and do not look down on those of your own family and stock. Then your light will break out in its season, and your clothing will spring up quickly; righteousness will go ahead of you, and the glory of God will surround you. Then you will call, and God will hear you; and while you are still speaking he will say, Here I am.” He promises that he will be at hand; he says he will hear and protect the people who loosen the knots of unrighteousness out of their heart, who give to the members of God’s household as he commands, and who — by listening to what God commands them to do — earn a hearing from God themselves. The blessed apostle Paul, when his brothers helped him in a time of hardship, said that good works done are sacrifices to God: “I have plenty, now that I have received from Epaphroditus what you sent — a sweet-smelling fragrance, a sacrifice God accepts and is pleased with.” For when a man pities the poor, he is lending to God; and the man who gives to the least gives to God — he offers to God, in a spiritual way, a fragrance with a sweet smell.

And in carrying out the duty of prayer we find that Daniel and the three young men, strong in faith and victorious in captivity, kept the third hour, the sixth and the ninth — as a sacred sign, so to speak, of the Trinity that was to be shown in the last times. The first hour, running on to the third, completes the number three; the fourth, going on to the sixth, makes up another three; and when the ninth is reached from the seventh, the perfect three is counted out over every three hours. God’s worshippers long ago settled on these stretches of time in a spiritual way, and used them as fixed and lawful times for prayer. Later it became plain that these had been sacred signs all along, since the righteous men of old prayed at just these hours. For it was at the third hour that the Holy Spirit came down on the disciples and made good the grace the Lord had promised. At the sixth hour Peter went up to the housetop and was taught, by the sign as well as by the word of God warning him, to receive everyone into the grace of salvation — he had been in doubt until then about receiving the Gentiles for baptism. And from the sixth hour to the ninth the Lord hung on the cross and washed our sins away with his blood; and there, to buy us back and give us life, he completed his victory by his suffering. [t]

But for us, dear brothers, on top of the hours of prayer kept from of old, both the occasions and the sacred signs have now grown in number. We must pray in the morning as well, so that the Lord’s resurrection is celebrated by morning prayer. The Holy Spirit pointed this out long ago in the Psalms: “My King and my God — because I will cry out to you; Lord, in the morning you will hear my voice; in the morning I will stand before you, and I will look up to you.” And again, the Lord speaks through the mouth of the prophet: “Early in the morning they will watch for me, saying, Let us go and return to the Lord our God.” [w]

At sunset too, as the day declines, we have to pray again. For since Christ is the true sun and the true day, when the world’s sun and the world’s day go away and we pray and ask that light may come back to us again, we are praying for the coming of Christ, which will give us the grace of everlasting light. And the Holy Spirit shows in the Psalms that Christ is called the day: “The stone the builders rejected has become the head of the corner. This is the Lord’s doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made; let us walk in it and rejoice.” The prophet Malachi bears witness in the same way that he is called the Sun: “But for you who fear the name of the Lord the Sun of righteousness will rise, and there is healing in his wings.”

But if in the Holy Scriptures the true sun and the true day is Christ, then there is no hour left out for Christians, no hour when God ought not to be worshipped often and always. We who are in Christ — that is, in the true Sun and the true Day — should keep at our requests all day long, and pray. And when, by the law of the world, the turning night comes round again in its alternating changes, the darkness of night can do no harm to people who pray, because the children of light have daylight even in the night. When is a man without light, if he has light in his heart? When does a man lack the sun and the day, if his Sun and his Day is Christ?

So we who are in Christ — that is, always in the light — must not stop praying even during the night. That is how Anna the widow, praying and keeping watch without a break, went on deserving well of God, as it is written in the Gospel: “She did not leave the temple,” it says, “serving with fastings and prayers night and day.” Let the pagans see to this, who have not yet been given light, or the Jews, who abandoned the light and have stayed in darkness. Dear brothers, we are always in the light of the Lord, and we remember and hold on to what by the grace we received we have begun to be. Let us count night as day. Let us believe that we are always walking in the light, and let us not be held back by the darkness we have escaped. Let there be no failure of prayers in the hours of night, no idle and careless waste of chances to pray. Newly made and newborn of the Spirit by the mercy of God, let us imitate what we are going to be. Since in the kingdom we will have day alone, with no night breaking in, let us keep watch in the night as if it were daylight. Since we are going to pray and give thanks to God forever, let us not stop praying and giving thanks in this life either. [z]