The Prayer That Carried Everyone's Sorry

Daniel had once dreamed of kingdoms climbing out of the sea like beasts, and now he had watched the first of them, Babylon, fall. In the first year that Darius the Mede ruled, Daniel sat by his window with a scroll open on his knees.

It was the scroll of the prophet Jeremiah. Long ago God had told Jeremiah that Jerusalem would lie in ruins for seventy years. Daniel began to count.

He had been a young man when the soldiers of Babylon marched him away from home. (Now his beard was white. That is a great many birthdays to spend in somebody else's country.) Since then the Babylonians had knocked down Jerusalem's walls and burned God's house, the temple. It had happened because for years and years God's people had turned their backs on him. They would not listen to the prophets he sent.

Daniel counted again. Seventy years were nearly up.

Most people would have jumped up and started packing. Daniel stopped eating instead. He dressed in sackcloth (rough, scratchy cloth made of goat hair, a little like wearing a doormat) and sprinkled ashes on his head, the way people did in those days to show they were truly sorry. Then he turned to God and prayed.

"O Lord, great and awesome God! You keep your promises to the people who love you. But we have sinned. We have done wrong. We turned away from your commands, and we did not listen to the prophets you sent."

Daniel could have said they. He had prayed to God three times a day for most of his life. If anyone in Babylon could have pointed at everyone else, it was Daniel.

He said we.

"Lord, you are right, and we are covered with shame: our kings, our leaders, our grandparents, all the people of Jerusalem, near and far. But you are merciful and forgiving, even though we rebelled against you."

He reminded God how he had brought his people out of Egypt with a mighty hand. (God had not forgotten. Sometimes the person praying needs the reminder most.) Then Daniel asked God to smile again on his ruined city and his burned house.

"We do not ask because we are good. We ask because your mercy is so great. Lord, listen! Lord, forgive! Lord, hear us, and act! Do not wait, my God, because your city and your people carry your name."

Daniel was still on his knees, still talking, when the angel Gabriel came flying to him. "The moment you began to pray, God gave an answer," Gabriel said. Putting an end to sin would take seventy sevens of years. Then God's Anointed One would come and be cut off, which means killed.

But Daniel could only ask. He was one of the we himself, kneeling in the same ashes, with nothing to give God except his sorry. The seventy years ended, and the people went home and built the temple again, and before long they were wandering from God again. The prophets kept watching for someone who could do more than ask.

At last another man got in line at the Jordan River with a crowd of sorry people who were confessing their sins and being baptized. He had no wrong of his own to confess, not one, and he waded in with them anyway. Outside Jerusalem, the city that carried God's name, he was nailed to a cross and died, carrying everyone's sorry in himself. On the third day he rose. Daniel had cried, "Lord, forgive!" and Jesus was God's answer.