Sour Hour of Prayer

Sour Hour of Prayer
1 Samuel 1: 9-11

For Hannah, too, the hour of prayer was initially sour, though eventually sweet. Presumably she prayed when she was at home in the village, as other Israelites did, but the occasion when the family went to Shiloh would be a natural time for special prayers. We have already seen how the annual festival was designed to be an occasion of great joy and celebration as people rejoiced in the harvest that God had given them and also in the commemoration of God’s giving them their freedom and their place in the land, but for Hannah it had become consistently an occasion when her infertility was driven home to her. This fact would give extra drive to her pressing her agenda with God. Further, the sanctuary that is the focus of the festival is, after all, God’s this-worldly dwelling, an earthly equivalent of God’s dwelling in the heavens. It is God’s palace; Hebrew doesn’t have a word for “temple” but uses either the word for “house” or the word for “palace,” because the temple is the equivalent to a human being’s home and thus in particular the equivalent to a king’s palace. It is a portal; a place of contact, of interchange, and of movement between earth and heaven; a place from which prayers and praises can naturally reach the heavens and where messages from the heavens can reach the earth. It is thus the place where prayer is especially possible; and for Hannah the pain associated with this annual celebration makes it the place where prayer is necessary, too...