The Prayer That Carried Everyone's Sorry

Daniel 9:1-19

Do you know what it feels like to be sorry for something you didn't do?

Maybe your whole family did something wrong. Long ago, before you were even born. And now everyone is far from home, and sad, and it isn't fair. And somehow the sorry is still sitting there, waiting for someone to carry it.

That is where Daniel was.

This is the same Daniel who dreamed of the Son of Man riding the clouds. He was old now, and he had spent almost his whole life in Babylon, the faraway land where his people had been carried off. Daniel had been a good man. He prayed. He stayed close to God even when it was hard. But his people, his whole big family of Israel, had turned away from God for years and years. They had stopped listening. They had wandered off. And that is why they all lived so far from the home God had given them.

One day Daniel was reading God's old promises, and he counted the years. He understood that the long time of waiting was almost over. God had not forgotten. God never forgets.

So Daniel did the bravest, tenderest thing.

He didn't point at anyone. He didn't say, "It wasn't me. I prayed. I was good." He could have. It would have been true.

Instead, Daniel knelt down. And he said sorry.

Not just sorry for himself. Sorry for everyone.

"We have done wrong," he prayed. "We. All of us. We turned away. We didn't listen. We are ashamed."

He said we. He gathered up all the sorry of all his people, the sorry of grandparents and strangers and kings, the sorry of people who would never even thank him, and he held it in his own two hands and lifted it up to God.

And then Daniel prayed the most important word of all.

He did not say, "We deserve to come home."

He said, "Forgive."

"O Lord, hear. O Lord, forgive. Not because we are good, but because YOU are kind. Because these are your people. Because you love them."

Daniel knew something about God. He knew that God was not far away with his arms crossed, counting up every wrong thing. God was leaning down, longing, the way you lean toward the door when someone you love is finally coming home.

God wanted them back. He had wanted them back all along.

Hidden inside Daniel's prayer, like a seed in the dark, was a picture of someone still to come: one man kneeling to say sorry for everyone, carrying a guilt that was not his own, asking God to forgive a whole people out of nothing but love.

Daniel was praying a small version of something enormous. Because one day Jesus would kneel too. He would carry the sorry not of one family, not of one nation, but of the whole wide world. He would carry yours. He would carry mine. And he would not hold it for just a moment. He would take it all the way down, and he would not let it go until it was gone for good.

Daniel could only ask God to forgive.

Jesus would come and open the way home.

And in Babylon, an old man rose from his knees, not knowing how close the answer already was. And in Babylon, an old man rose from his knees, not knowing all the ways God would answer. Years later, in a palace Daniel would never see, God would be at work in the life of a girl nobody had noticed yet.