Bargaining with God?

When my mum was in her 20's she nearly died of a brain haemorrhage. She tells me that her parents prayed that if her life was saved they would give her to God. This sort of bargaining with God at times of crisis is common to all of us and the story of Hannah and Samuel is a similar story – Hannah bargains with God: ‘if you open my womb, I’ll return the gift back to you’ – and she fulfills that vow; she brings her weaned child to the temple to give him as a Nazirite to the Lord. (a Narzirite is set apart, they can drink nothing made from grapes, they can't cut their hair and they must avoid corpses). 

I suppose both these stories encourage us to reflect deeply on the nature of God’s relationship with us – can God really be influenced by the prayers and bargaining of God’s people? Can humans given anything to God and if so what? What are the implications of our answers to these questions?

Answering these questions necessarily brings us up sharp against the gap between God’s identity and our own. As humans we plead, bargain, ask, petition, hope, despair, loan, borrow, give and receive. But, how far is God like that? In the Jewish tradition relationship with God was governed by some leading concepts like covenant and sacrifice. God established a covenant with God’s people that asked for certain behaviours. However, when the people fell short God was merciful to them. The people sacrificed for God as a way of confessing and making atonement for their sins – reciprocity was at the heart of the Jewish description of God’s dealings and therefore relationship with his people. It was a two-sided affair –yes God was in charge, but a response was required and many a prophet argued and bargained with God and is shown to change God’s mind.

What changes, if anything, with Jesus? Calvinism interprets Christianity in a particular way and there are strands of Calvinist thought and practice that appear in Anglicanism. Calvinism takes a particular position with regards reciprocity in the dynamic between God and people. The Calvinist position emphasises free grace (the gratuitousness nature of God’s love). Humans cannot earn God’s mercy, forgiveness, etc. and they cannot influence God. There is, in this theology, no way of pleasing God by our own efforts and importantly God could not be put under any obligation by the actions of humanity: ‘For Calvin no return is possible, and any attempt to make it will lead to the endless obligation or righteousness by works that Luther decried’. Such a theology is still present in Anglican practice most clearly in the Book of Common Prayer:- the ‘we do not presume to come to this thy table merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in thy manifold and great mercies, we are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under thy table’ prayer puts into words a theology of grace, gratuity and complete unworthiness. God gives; we receive and give thanks.  We do not receive because we have done well; we receive because God is merciful.

In my Lent Group we have been considering the nature and practice of prayer and to my surprise I take quite a Calvinist position in relation to it. Whilst I may bargain with God and ask God for many things, to keep people safe, for protection, for healing – deep down I have a sense that all we can offer God is our thanksgiving and faithfulness and that no bargaining with God is possible – we cannot put God under any obligation to save us, other than in the way that he has already saved us – through Jesus Christ.

God is what God is and he does give to us, fully, utterly and completely in his Son, through whom we are redeemed, blessed and made whole. A true and proper understanding of this, I think, can lead to a life of greater peace because we truly receive life as gift and return our praise and thankfulness to God. Most of human living and human happiness is dependent upon our receiving the things we want to receive; on gaining the things we want to gain and on keeping the things we love. If we have this and get this, we give thanks and our faith remains. For Hannah it was so: here is my adversity, take it away from me and I will return the thanks.

But in asking God for those things we are not living a new life as a redeemed person – we are simply contracting God into the well-established human system. To live anew with freedom and in God’s grace we thank God everyday for the good and the bad, for the failings and for the successes – that is the Christian attitude: ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed be the name of the Lord’.

From Calvin’s theology came also three rules or principles which directly impacted not only on Christian community, but on politics:

1)   we act charitably to all human beings, ‘without looking to see if they are worthy or unworthy’

2)   we act charitably with a joyous face and kind words, not making any person to whom you have done a benefit obliged to you in any way

3)   we are not discharged from our duty when we have helped one person – we are in debt to those near to us for all we can provide

These three principles or rules relate to Calvin’s theology that refuses to see the relationship between God and humankind as a reciprocal one: God gives freely and overwhelming to us; Christians should do likewise to one another - giving freely with no judgment and no sense of limit. Such a practical outworking of God’s generosity helps us to live in the world of loss, disappointment and death. Through us God remakes our experience and thereby transforms our common life. In such a way and perhaps paradoxically a different sort of reciprocal relationship between God and creation does appear: we are called to copy God, in so doing we live as the redeemed and joyful ones who include everyone in their inheritance.