Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Do
we know how to pray? Maybe that
seems like an odd question as we are gathered here in the greatest prayer of
the Church. But I think it’s one
we need to ask: do we know how to pray?
Now,
probably all of us know prayers.
Hopefully we can recite the trifecta of Catholic prayers—the Our Father,
Hail Mary, and Glory Be—from memory. But the question was not if we know prayers, but if we know
how to pray. Simply knowing how to
recite prayers is not the same as knowing how to pray.
Jesus
in our Gospel teaches us how to pray.
Yes, He teaches us a prayer as well (we get St. Luke’s version of the
Our Father today), but He also teaches us how to pray. First and foremost, we are taught to
pray to God our Father. While God
the Father is neither male nor female, and Jesus Himself, having male gender,
even uses the image of a hen to describe His own care for Jerusalem, Father is
not just an image of God, it is the way we are taught to address God, the Name
we are to use in calling upon Him.
Whenever we pray, we should address our prayers to the Father, in the
same way that Jesus always did.
We
also see that first we are to praise and thank God. So often, and this is certainly true in my own life, we skip
immediately to asking God for something.
But, if we are to follow Jesus’ model of prayer, then first we give God
glory; not because it adds anything to Him by being praised, but because it is
proper for the creature to praise and thank God for what has already been
given. Then, and only then, are we
to ask God for what we need—daily needs, forgiveness, and the grace to
persevere in living a Christian life.
This
should be the format of our prayer: calling upon God as our Father, praising
and thanking Him for his goodness, and then asking God for what we need. We do the same thing in the Eucharistic
Prayer, the high point of our prayer of the Mass: we call upon God, we praise
and thank Him, and then we ask for what we need.
Jesus
also tells us to pray with confidence, because our loving Father will never
deprive us of any good gift. When
we ask for what we need, we will receive it. Of course, this has to be read in the light of the line from
the Our Father: “thy will be done.”
Just because we think we need something, does not mean we truly do. While some of us may think it at times,
none of us is omniscient. But God
is, and so gives us exactly what we need to further our pilgrimage that
hopefully ends in eternal salvation.
All
too often, we approach prayer to God like making a list for Santa: Dear God,
I’ve been very good this year (which may or may not be true), so please give me
this, that, and the other thing.
But God is not Santa. We
cannot force His hand, nor do the answers to our prayers come because of any
good thing we’ve done. The answer
comes not from our goodness, but from God’s. And when we try to justify ourselves, to prove to God that
we deserve something because we’ve been so good, we end up like the Pharisee in
one of Jesus’ parables, who, when he prayed, extolled himself, while the Tax
Collector, who stood at the back of the temple and beat his breast in sorrow
for sins, and only asked God for mercy for his many sins. Remember that Jesus said that the Tax
Collector went home justified, while the Pharisee did not.
Our
Gospel, as well as our first reading, also reminds us to have confidence in
prayer. “‘Ask and you will
receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.’” When we ask that God’s will be done, and
when we are united to God by conforming our lives to that of Jesus, then what
we ask the Father in the name of Jesus will be granted to us. We see it in the first reading when
Abraham pleads for Sodom and Gomorrah.
God truly would have spared those cities if there would have been 50, or
45, or 40, or 30, or 20, or even just 10 innocent people. Abraham had confidence in his
relationship with God, not viewing God as an equal, but knowing that he could
make his desires known to God, and that God would listen. God even saves Lot and his family from
destruction, though he does destroy Sodom and Gomorrah for their sinfulness.
I
have seen the results of confidence in prayer in my own prayer life. In the past year, I have had two
experiences of prayers being heard.
Addressing God as Father, praising Him for his goodness and His love, I
poured out my soul to God for a young man who had recently buried his father
and then had been robbed. I prayed
that what had been stolen would be returned, since this young man had already
lost so precious a gift as a loving father. The stolen goods were returned the next day. Calling upon God as Father, thanking
Him for His generosity, I prayed for an MSU student who had been robbed of his
moped. I called upon God to be
faithful, in the Name of Jesus, and through the intercession of St. Anthony,
and have the moped returned, and it was on the next day. Were either of the stolen items
precious? Not really. Either could have been replaced. But God, as a loving Father, looked
with mercy upon me, and upon these two persons who had been robbed, and granted
them back what they wanted. For
whatever reason, that was part of His will. Maybe, the only reason was to allow me to tell this story to
you, to inspire you in faith to have confidence when you pray.
Will God
always give us what we want? As
the Brad Paisley songs goes, “sometimes the answer is no.” But prayer, true prayer, always brings
us closer to God, and that is a gift that is more precious than all the gold in
the world. Whether we are praying
using a prayer that we have memorized, or we our speaking with our own words,
may our prayer always be like the prayer of Jesus, and so draw us closer to our
heavenly Father.