Reflection for Today ▶️ ⏩ ⏹️
Moslem at Prayer by Charles Bargue, 1883
Omy God, incline thine ear, and hear; open thine eyes, and behold our desolations, and the city which is called by thy name: for we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies.
— Daniel 9:18
Daniel is praying for understanding, specifically to understand Jeremiah's 70-year prophesy1 that he may better support his people in captivity. Daniel's prayer, and this is especially clear in the quoted verse, is very much in the spirit of what Jesus of Nazareth counsels some 200 years later, we do not present our supplications before thee for our righteousnesses, but for thy great mercies. Daniel's prayer came not from his righteousness, but towards God's righteousness; it was the necessary expression of great trust and dependence on God.
Much prayer of the time, and perhaps still today, is prayer to extoll the supplicant, a sort of prayer-for-points approach. It is actually quite difficult—and very contradictory to the ethos of most societies today where the individual reigns supreme—to give ourselves wholly and completely to God in the way Jesus asks us to, and Daniel demonstrates here.
The outcome of the prayer (in this case the angel Gabriel offering insight) is actually of less importance than the act of prayer itself. It is while in such prayer that we are changed, not in the consequences thereof which are an almost inevitable outcome of the change within.
1 Jeremiah 25:11-12 & 29:10