How does God’s grace work in our prayer?
I attended my first opera last week, “Hansel and Gretel” by Engelbert Humperdinck.
You may know the Grimm fairy tale by the same name: scarcity of food leaves a brother and sister abandoned in the woods, where they come across a witch who wants to eat them, but they manage to defeat the witch and all is well.
But as I was flipping through the playbill before the performance, an article about the content of the opera struck me. According to the critic, the children’s defeat of the witch is a triumph of humanism: “[H]eaven has played no part in the rescue of Hansel and Gretel or the awakening of the spellbound children. They are saved by their own wits.”
So I watched the performance with great interest in how this theme might actually play out. This critic was convinced that Humperdinck’s opera had no space for God’s providence in the salvation of the characters. Was he right?
The opera was written in German—a fact that ironically helped me follow the content of the lyrics more closely, because English subtitles were projected above the stage. Humperdinck has expertly taken this fairy tale and expanded it, centering the lyrical content on a rich smorgasbord of food imagery. Food virtually overflows from every stanza of the opera: either in the ever-present absence of food or the over-abundant bewitched food in the witch’s house.
Hansel sings about hunger as they do their chores in Act I: “For weeks, nothing but dry bread!” But Gretel reminds him, “Don’t forget what father said, when mother, too, wished she were dead: ‘When past bearing is our grief, Then ’tis Heaven will send relief!’”
The only food in the house at the time was a jug of milk, and after Hansel and Gretel accidentally break and spill it, their mother sends them into the forest to pick strawberries so they’d have something to eat.
But then the mother sings, asking God to provide money and food. “O Heaven, send help to me! Naught have I to give them, no bread, not a crumb, for my starving children! No crust in the cupboard, no milk in the pot. Weary am I, weary of living! Father, send help to me!” As if in answer, her husband enters the house with cry of “here am I, bringing luck and jollity!” (literally, “luck and glory,” or in the translation the Lyric Opera employed, “Here is salvation!”) The Father answers her prayer in the father’s arrival with a bag of good food, and they rejoice together.
Their joy at being sated with food soon turns to horror, however, as the father asks the whereabouts of the children. The mother says they’re in the woods, to which the father responds that there is a witch in the woods—not just any witch, however, a gobbling witch. An eating witch. A witch who lures children in with gingerbread, before baking them into gingerbread in her oven! “She’s in league with the powers of hell,” the father says, and so “Heaven help us!” prays the mother as they run out the door to find their children.
Act II begins with Hansel and Gretel picking strawberries but eating them all, and realizing they’re lost in the woods. “O God!” says Gretel, as they realize they’ll be spending the night alone—an exclamation but, no doubt, an implicit prayer. Before they go to sleep, Gretel says, “Let us first say our evening prayer.”
When at night I go to sleep
fourteen angels watch do keep;
two my head are guarding,
two my feet are guiding,
two are on my right hand,
two are on my left hand,
two who warmly cover,
two who o’er me hover,
two to whom ’tis given
to guide my steps to Heaven.
Prayer has been shot through Act I and II, but does Act III really end with the humanistic triumph the critic said it did? With Hansel and Gretel saved by their wits?
Act III begins with Hansel and Gretel waking, and realizing they’d both dreamed the same dream, of fourteen angels guarding them. Clearly, it was more than a dream, since they’d both had it. And as the content of the dream matched their “evening prayer,” clearly it was an answer to prayer. And yet the critic in the playbill writes, “[W]hen day dawns, the angel sentries are gone. They were as a dream. the children are left to face the menace of the Witch.”
Then comes the gobbling witch’s gingerbread house, and the witch’s attempt to fatten Hansel up, bake him into gingerbread, and consume him. Instead, Hansel and Gretel manage to push her into the oven and bake her! And then when they touch the gingerbread children around the house, they are brought back to life and cry “Redeemed! Liberated for all time!”
Recall the critic’s words: “Heaven has played no part in the rescue of Hansel and Gretel or the awakening of the spellbound children. They are saved by their own wits.”
Was it their wits that saved them? Was this a triumph of human ingenuity? If so, this is news to Hansel and Gretel!
Here’s how the opera ends:
Hansel: “The angels whispered in dreams to us in silent night, what this happy, happy day has brought tonight.”
Gretel: “Ye angels, who have watched o‘er our steps and led them right, we thank for all our joy and wondrous delight!”
And as father and mother find them, the father sings: “Such is Heaven’s chastisement; evil works will have an end!”
And they close, all singing triumphantly together: “When past bearing is our grief, Then ’tis Heaven will send relief.”
Our unhappy critic has baked himself into a mince-pie, tying knotted arguments like pretzels, a paella of self-assured humanistic philosophy. “In fact,” says he, “heaven’s role is distinctly ambiguous.” Ambiguous? Our critic is has starved himself of sense, having swallowed worldly logic.
Of course, he has misunderstood—perhaps purposely—the way God works sovereignly and providentially. Since Hansel and Gretel were the ones who pushed the witch into the oven, clearly it wasn’t a divine intervention, he thinks. There is no Christian nourishment to be had in Humperdinck’s operatic feast.
But God’s grace in answering prayer is not at odds with our obedient and faithful activity. The Westminster Larger Catechism tells us that prayer is one of the “ordinary means” by which Christ’s mediation is made effectual to us (Q154). And it says, of the third petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we pray “that God would…by his grace make us able and willing to know, do, and submit to his will in all things.” (Q192)
When we pray “give us this day our daily bread,” we aren’t praying for gingerbread to drop out of heaven, or praying to stumble upon a buffet in the woods. Instead, we are praying that God would use our work to provide for our daily needs (cf. Q193). He answers by giving us work, and the abilities necessary to carry out that work. It is God who gives the ability to get wealth (Dt 8:18). Not by giving us unlimited bank cards, but by using our effort to provide for us.
Hansel and Gretel pushed the witch into the oven, but Heaven played its part. God sent relief, in the narrative, by guiding them in what they did. They followed the recipe He laid out. They were saved, we might say, “by their wits,” but their “wits” were used sovereignly, guided by their Heavenly Father, in answer to their prayer.
