PAUL'S PRAYER OF PRAISE

Paul’s Prayer of Praise

            God’s praises rang out from Paul’s mouth amidst his pagan surroundings. Consider the seismic scene at Philippi. It was night. A prison. And in it were Paul and Silas. “About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them” (Acts 16, 25). God’s praises were being sung in the dead of night in a malodorous cell in an idolatrous city, and for the first time. Singing God’s praises in the heart of the night in a prison cell? The fellow prisoners didn’t seem to mind; but weren’t the guards disturbed badly enough to thump the singing duo on the head? A greater wonder was that “suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened” (ibid. vs. 26). The primordial case of a duet bringing down the house!

            The prison earthquake was but an echo of the original convulsion when the Son of God himself entered the earth in death and took possession of the heart of reality from within. Then the earth shook and the boulders were split and the tombs were unfastened to vomit their dead who walked abroad. Apart from being an echo, the Philippi convulsion signified the opening of a thousand prisons to release a million souls from bondage.

What a happy night! On the one hand, we see the old world of darkness and chaotic cacophony with its temples, altars and sacrificial repasts; and, on the other, in its very midst Paul drawing forth deep melodious (as against malodorous) tones from the harp of angels.

            Every quiet presbytery, where in the dark of night God’s priest kneels in prayer – perhaps amid unbelieving surroundings – is like Paul’s Philippi prison. And like Paul the priest sings God’s praises. But more. The priest is the very flute through which Jesus breathes the Spirit of divine music. In the lithesome words of Tagore’s Gitanjali:

“Thou hast made me endless, such is thy pleasure. This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new. At the immortal touch of thy hands my little heart loses its limits in joy and gives birth to utterance in-effable. Thy infinite gifts come to me only on these very small hands of mine. Ages pass, and still thou pourest, and still there is room to fill.” The man of God must become in his very being the praise of God, his body vibrant with the prayer of praise, so that those who see him in his unfeigned gladness will instinctively reverberate with God’s praises. Paul’s love for God was not satisfied with personal praise; he must hasten forth by land and sea until everyone joined him in the joyous worship of the God of Jesus Christ. He became the herald of God’s glory, calling upon his people to live up to what God’s glory expected of them.

            The Psalms are meant to be chanted/sung. The priest’s daily Office should appear in a new light, for it fulfils a noble purpose: to make atonement for a godless world, shake the ramparts which ungodliness has built, burst the heavy chains of sin, and so free innumerable souls who have long been held captive, just as happened at Philippi. “Praise becomes the upright” (Ps 32,1), and how much more the priest, the man of God for man! This herald has something to announce to the world, more than about economics, politics, minerals and animals. Like Paul’s, his tidings are about the love of God and our faith in him; sacred and eternal history, the march of God through the ages, the ultimate cause and meaning of all events, tracing everything back to their eternal cause – a momentous and consoling task!  The priest is the divinely commissioned channel of divine praise and proclamation.