MORE THAN WE DESIRE
A Homily for the 12th Sunday After Trinity
The Rev. Michael Vinson+ Rector
Before you ever asked anything of God this morning, God had already heard you. Let that arrest you, as it arrests me. Not “before you finished asking” — but before you Began.
At the beginning of today’s Eucharist we prayed these words standing at the entrance of our worship: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts be open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid.” And perhaps as sometimes happens with me, your mind ran, before you could call it back, to the desires you would rather God not see. The grudge you are still nursing. The old wound you thought long buried. The misshapen loves of the heart.
These are not shameful to confess — they are the honest ache of the soul not yet made whole. But hear the prayer again and hear it closely. It does not say, “all evil desires known.” It says all desires. Every single one — the desires you would parade as proof of your own devotion to God no less than the ones you hide. And still the prayer asks that every desire within our hearts be cleansed — “by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit.” Here, in the very first prayer for Holy Communion, it is not only our wicked desires that need forgiving — even our good desires are too small, satisfied too soon, and needs a hand not our own to enlarge them into what God desires to give.
Saint Paul knew this and said it better than I can. He says that our God “is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” Not merely beyond our asking — beyond our thinking, but beyond the edge of what we can even imagine wanting.
This is the heart of our appeal in today’s Collect (206):
Almighty and everlasting God, who art always more ready to hear than we are to pray, and art wont to give more than we desire or deserve: Pour down upon us the abundance of thy mercy; forgiving us those things whereof our conscience is afraid, and giving us those good things which we are not worthy to ask, but through the merits and mediation of Jesus Christ, thy Son, our Lord. Amen.
“More ready to give than we desire or deserve.” Mark that phrase well, for it offers two hands of truth.
The first hand of truth is this: God is “more ready to hear than we are to pray.” Before the prayer. Before the asking. Before the words have so much as gathered themselves in our throat.
Hear again the Psalmist, who knew this terror and this comfort as one thing: “O Lord, thou hast searched me out and known me. Thou knowest my downsitting, and mine uprising; thou understandest my thoughts long before.” He has searched our down-sitting and our up-rising; he covered us in the womb before we drew breath; he us before he knit us in our mother’s womb. Before you had ears to hear or a tongue to speak, beloved, you were already known.
Carry that reality with you now into the Gospel, where we meet a man for whom prayer, in any form that we might recognize, is simply impossible. He is deaf. His tongue is bound. He cannot form the plea, nor hear it spoken over him. So, others do what he cannot: “they bring unto him one that was deaf and had an impediment in his speech: and they beseech [Jesus] to put his hand upon him.”
Take note: the man himself asks nothing. Everything that will be done for him begins in someone else’s prayer, offered on his behalf, before he has lifted so much as a finger.
This is no exception to the way of grace. It is the pattern of it. However fervent our prayers may be, they are never the first word spoken. God speaks first, and calls us before we call on him; every prayer we offer is only ever our answer to a voice that has already spoken.
But the Collect presses further, and here is the other hand of truth: God is not only more ready to hear than we are to pray — he is more ready to give than we desire or deserve.
Now deserve, we grasp well enough. The writer of Ecclesiasticus tells us the choice was always our own: “he [God] hath set fire and water before thee: stretch forth thy hand unto whether thou wilt.” God is the author of no man’s wickedness; we burn our own hand. The fear and guilt which stalk the conscience is purchased by our real transgressions. And Paul, in today’s Epistle, names the only ransom for our sins: “not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.” Real guilt, met by a mercy that owes nothing to the size of the debt. But “more than we desire” — that is a bit harder, for it accuses us not of wanting too much, but of wanting too little.
St. Augustine, chased one dying love after another before he understood why such lesser loves could hold him: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in thee.” His desires weren’t all wicked ones. He desired friendship, beauty, to be esteemed for his giftedness and well loved. His error was not in the desiring, but in the pursuit: he mistook the gift for the giver, desiring the means more than the end of what he sought.
That is nearly all of us, nearly every day. We desire good things of God. Yet do we truly desire the best thing? We ask Christ for relief, when he is offering rest. We implore him for comfort, when he is offering the true consolation of himself.
You know the verse: “delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart.” Do not mistake it for a bargain. Delight comes first, and delight does not reward right desire; delight begets it. God does not simply grant the list of wishes we’ve already written. He gives us, by grace, the very desire for himself we could never have forged on our own.
My friends, we cannot fix our desiring. We cannot decide, by sheer will, to want the highest good above the lesser ones — if we could, we would have done it long ago. And yet we are not released from the charge to will after and desire for God. Christ has not withdrawn his command to love the Lord our God with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, on the grounds that we find it difficult to do.
What, then, do we do with a command we cannot keep by our own strength? Our friend Augustine gives one of the honest answers I know when he prayed: “[God] Give what you command, and command what you will.” Not, I will supply what you ask — but God supply in me what you’re asking of me requires. The command stands, as does our effort to fulfill it — The Apostle Paul bids the Philippians to work out their own salvation with fear and trembling — yet it is God, in the same breath, who works the willing in us. We climb, and even as we climb, we are carried up the mountain. The one does not cancel the other.
We cannot fix our wanting. And yet we are commanded to want him above all things. So let us climb, however brokenly, and pray as Augustine prayed: Lord, give what you command, and command what you will.
Which returns us, at last, to the deaf-mute man who could not ask.
Christ does not heal him with a word flung out over the heads of the crowd. No, St. Mark
says that Jesus “took him aside from the multitude” — privately, tenderly, beyond the reach of every eye that might have made of his affliction a spectacle. Watch what the Lord does with his own body. He puts his fingers into the man’s ears. He touches the man’s tongue with his own spittle. He lifts his eyes to heaven. And he sighs — the word in the Greek is nearer to a groan, the sound not of a physician diagnosing from a safe distance, but of one who has taken another’s affliction bodily into himself.
Do not let that groan pass unnoticed, for it will not be the last one Mark records. This same Christ, who groans here over one man’s shut ears and bound tongue, will groan again — more terribly, more completely — upon a hill outside Jerusalem, where the affliction he takes into himself is not one man’s but the whole worlds. “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows— and with his stripes we are healed,” said Isaiah. His sigh beside the Sea of Galilee is the first note of Christ’s salvific cry from the cross, where the groaning would be finished once for all, and where our deafness to God and our own dumbness before him would be answered not only by a word, but by blood.
Only then does Jesus speak: “Ephphatha” — “Be opened.” The early Church Fathers heard in this an echo of the world’s first morning, when God shaped a man from the dust and breathed life into him. The same hands. The same closeness. Christ does not heal this man’s infirmity from a cosmic distance — but by his incarnational presence he completes, in the man’s own flesh, a work of creation left incomplete.
And I want us to weigh what was asked of Jesus against what He gave. The deaf-mute man’s friends had asked only for a touch — for Christ to “put his hand upon him.” But what they receive is one word — Ephphatha” — and two healings are given: “his ears were opened, and the string of his tongue was loosed, and he spake plain.” The crowd’s own verdict tells the whole of it: “he hath done all things well; he maketh both the deaf to hear, and the dumb to speak.” Jesus gave more than was asked. Immeasurably more than could have been imagined. Exceedingly abundantly above all that they could imagine.
Do you see, beloved, both hands of our Collect placed within in this one man’s body? His deafness — unable to hear either the law’s accusation or mercy’s answer. His silence — unable to ask for what he could never have been worthy to ask for regardless. Both healed in a single moment, by a single hand, though he never once framed a plea equal to his need.
Notice, too, the order of it. His ears are opened before his tongue is loosed. That is no accident of the narrative. Paul tells the Christians in Rome that faith comes by hearing, and only afterward does confession spring forth from the mouth. This man’s healing follows the very pattern of a soul coming to faith: hearing first, and clear speech after, because a heart that has truly heard cannot long stay silent.
The early Church knew this so well that she built it into the very threshold of baptism. For centuries, the priest preparing a soul for the font would touch the ears and the lips and speak this selfsame word over them — Ephphatha, be opened — for the Church understood that what happened once beside the Sea of Galilee happens still, in hidden fashion, to every soul brought by faith to the baptismal waters. Ears opened to hear the Gospel. A tongue loosed to confess it. Isaiah spoke it first, and Christ claimed it for his own: He was anointed “to preach good tidings unto the meek; sent to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound.” Bound things, opened. Shut things, set free.
And that same Christ, whose own flesh once touched this man’s ears and tongue beside the sea, gives that same flesh now, spiritually, mystically, into our hands at this table. We come as we are, shoulder to shoulder, one beggar beside the next, gathered at the banquet of a King who does not first ask what we deserve before he feeds us. Your Father knows what you need before you approach. He knows your desires, your needs, and the desperate longings of the heart— and He mercifully gives us His Son. “Such trust have we through Christ to God-ward.”
He is more than sufficient for you. Amen+
