Prayer without reserve
1 Samuel 1:1 – 2:11
Samuel, like several other great men of scripture, is born to a woman who was previously barren.
Hannah was the beloved wife of Elkanah, though he had taken a second wife in order to have children.
While the birth of Samuel and the events surrounding it is the most significant part of today’s reading, I’d like to draw your particular attention to something else: the prayer of Hannah.
Hannah is deeply grieved. Not only does she not have children, but Elkanah’s second wife seems to take every possible opportunity to humiliate her about it. Despite his love for her, Elkanah doesn’t see the depth of her pain.
There was a place of worship in Shiloh where Eli and his sons ministered as priests. In her despair, Hannah goes there and prays—but this isn’t the quick polite kind of prayer we usually do. Instead, it’s a deep, from-the-soul encounter with God that leaves her weeping and mouthing the words of her prayer so intensely that Eli, seeing her, believes her to be drunk.
A couple of New Testament passages about honest, intense prayer come to mind:
Romans 8:26-27 “In the same way, the Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us through wordless groans. And he who searches our hearts knows the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for God’s people in accordance with the will of God.”
Also, in Acts 2:1-21, the Holy Spirit moves in a way that Galileans speak and people of many other languages hear the Good News preached in their own tongue. Some are amazed and converted. “Some, however, made fun of them and said, ‘They have had too much wine.’” (Acts 2:13)
Hannah takes prayer to a level many contemporary Christians don’t even try to reach: prayer that goes beyond intelligible words and speaks directly from the heart of the person praying.
It is in that state that her will is able to align so closely with God’s will that the thing she prays for—a son—is granted to her.
It is not a selfish prayer, though. Hannah recognizes that her son is a gift from God who is required of her as a gift to God, and she surrenders Samuel as a child to Eli the priest, setting into a motion a chain of events that will change the world.