Straight to the Source

When we have a question, it is always best to go straight to the source for the answer. Want to know what is for dinner? Ask Mom. Want to know what time is Mass? Ask the pastor. Want to know what’s really going on in the parish? Don’t ask the pastor because he doesn’t know. Ask the old ladies – they know all the gossip!

In today’s Gospel, the disciples go straight to the source about learning how to pray. They recognize that Jesus has the knowledge that they are looking for: how to communicate with the Father in heaven. Jesus responds with the beautiful words we hear in today’s passage – the famous words of the Lord’s Prayer, now uttered millions of times a day, as well as all of the other helpful insights into what prayer is all about. There’s a lot in this Gospel to comment on, too much really for one homily. And so I’d like to speak about prayer more generally and see how this passage can help us correct some misconceptions we have about God and our prayer. 

The Sermon on the Mount (c. 1442) by Fra Angelico

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I have the conception that my prayers are intended to convince God what he should do for me. Do you do the same thing? It’s understandable we think that way, since that’s how we operate. When someone asks us for something, we weigh the factors for and against, perhaps we make a mental list of Pros and Cons; maybe we even listen to see if they can give us a really good reason why we should do what they want. We can be tempted into thinking that God operates in the same way, and today’s Gospel seemingly doesn’t help much in correcting this idea. It sounds as if God is up on his heavenly throne, listening to what we have to say and waiting for us to give him sufficient reason to give us what we want. Isn’t Jesus saying that if we are persistent enough, God might finally relent and answer our prayer?

Jesus is not saying that exactly, for two reasons. First, that way of thinking assumes God does not already want to give us what is good – that instead we somehow have to convince him to be benevolent. Second, that way of thinking assumes that we can change God’s mind. But God is already all-good, and he’s also unchanging. There’s no way for him to be more loving, more wise, more benevolent than he already is – otherwise he wouldn’t really be God! The truth is God has already decided from all eternity to give us precisely what is best, really best, as he knows it.

Now, perhaps you’re thinking, “Well, if God already has decided on what he’s going to give me, of what use is my prayer?” When I was at the university in Fayetteville, I heard that objection sometimes from students and others who struggled with belief in God. They thought prayer didn’t make sense if God already knows and plans to give us what is good. But that too is a misunderstanding. Because God is eternal – that is, outside of time, in the ever-present “now” – he has foreseen and preordained how he will give us each good thing. He knows not just what he is going to give us but how he will give it to us. Sometimes he allows our prayers to be the very means by which he grants us the good thing he has in store.

Think, for example, of a parent who asks a child what she really, really wants for Christmas; the parent may already know what it is and may already plan to give it to her, but the asking is precisely what the parent wants to elicit from the child. The gift becomes more beautiful because it is given in answer to a request. That’s the real meaning of Jesus’s beautiful words: “Ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.” God wants us to pray to him, not because we need to convince him that he should give us something good, but because he wants us to trust in him enough to confidently ask for what we need. The “Our Father,” of course, is the perfect prayer for this. It helps us understand that prayer is not a pleading session with God but simple communication – a loving dialogue of trust in our heavenly Father.

Of course, as we know, sometimes our prayers seem to go unanswered. What are we to think then? Why didn’t God give us what is good? There’s a few reasons God seems to not answer prayers, or not at least in the way we want. It could be because what we asked for is not really good for us, or at least not the best thing. It could be that God wants us to wait a bit longer to receive something even better, like building up an appetite for a really delicious meal. Or it could be that God knows that some suffering or trial in the present moment is going to be the avenue for an even greater good down the line. That one is the hardest to accept, but if we have faith in what Jesus tells us today, we can believe that our heavenly Father truly will always give us what is best.

St. Padre Pio, the Italian priest and mystic, in one of his last homilies before his death used a wonderful image for how to think about our relationship to God, especially when it seems as if he doesn’t give us what is good. A mother is sewing a piece of embroidery, and her son sits at her feet, looking up at her and her work. From his vantage point, upside down, the embroidery looks like a mess, with tangled threads of different colors going in all directions. The son says, “Mother, what are you doing? Your work doesn’t make sense at all.” Then the mother turns the embroidery around to show him the beautiful pattern that is being stitched together, thread by thread, which from his vantage point he could not see. 

Mary Cassatt, Young Mother Sewing (1900)

Friends, often in life we are like the child in that story. We cannot always see the pattern of how God is at work. Often, it may look very disorganized and even ugly. But we can believe that it is in fact something beautiful and good – indeed, what is truly best. In our prayer, may we never be afraid to go straight to the Source of all that is good, may we never be fearful or untrusting in asking God for precisely what we need, and may we be persistent in asking if we are not answered right away. And then, whether our prayers are answered in a way that we understand or not, may we seek to always renew our trust in our heavenly Father, whose kingdom will come, whose will is always done.

Welcome the Stranger

Do you have a welcome mat on your front porch? Even if you don’t, it’s probably not because you wish to be unwelcoming to a person who visits your home. We like the idea of having that word “Welcome” adorn our front doors and front steps, of being warm and inviting to those who come to visit.

But hospitality in theory and hospitality in practice can often be very different. Preparing a bed, readying a meal – those things don’t just happen by themselves. And if you’ve ever had houseguests, you know that sometimes the phrase “make yourself at home” can be taken a little too literally. Hospitality is a nice idea, but it sometimes means inconvenience – it means work.

Félix-Henri Giacomotti, Abraham Washing the Feet of His Three Visitors (c. 1854)

In today’s readings, we hear two accounts of hospitality. In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, Abraham goes to great lengths to be hospitable to three men journeying through the desert. Notice how he insists upon waiting on them – he considers it a personal favor to be able to wash their feet and serve them a fine meal. The standard of hospitality in ancient times was higher than it is today, but still we are meant to be impressed by Abraham’s graciousness. In the reading from Luke’s Gospel, Martha famously plays hostess as Jesus comes to visit. Jesus would have been traveling with his disciples, and so it wasn’t just he who was coming to dinner, but at least twelve of his friends as well. We oven oversimplify the meaning of this Gospel, but it’s easy to see that Martha has a point: serving others can be hard work.

These readings share the obvious connection of hospitality, but they are linked together for another reason as well: there is a surprise about the identity of the guest. Abraham does not know that the three travelers who visit him are anything more than ordinary men, but as we can see by the end of the story, they are at least angelic figures, and maybe more than that. Christian tradition since at least the time of St. Augustine has considered whether perhaps these three men are the three Divine Persons, the Holy Trinity appearing in human form to affirm the covenant God has made with Abraham.

In the Gospel, Martha has her friend Jesus as a houseguest, but it is not clear at this point that she has arrived at the same realization about him that her sister Mary has: that this Jesus is not just a wise preacher, but God himself who has come into the world to save it. It is only later, after the death of her brother Lazarus, that Martha will say to Jesus: “I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God.” The story of today’s Gospel marks perhaps the beginnings of Martha’s deepened awareness of just who Jesus is, and that faith in him is the “only one thing” that’s truly needed.

Hospitality certainly has its costs; but the point of the readings today is that it has its rewards as well, especially when the one whom we are accommodating is the Lord. The hospitality of Abraham is rewarded by being gifted with the promise of a child, the one through whom God will fulfill his promise of making Abraham “the father of many nations.” And while Martha might have preferred that Jesus make her sister get up to help her, Jesus repays her kindness with something far better – a revelation of himself, his true identity, and an invitation into a deepened faith.

To open our homes to accommodate someone else takes effort, and it means we will be inconvenienced. When we open ourselves to God, that’s true all the more; but it can also mean that we ourselves are opened, extended beyond ourselves – by being inconvenienced, we are made able to receive something, a grace, that perhaps we had been closed off to before. God is never outdone in generosity, and so when we make space for what he wills, he always reciprocates. He helps us to grow in exactly the way we need so that we “fill up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ, on behalf of his body, which is the Church.” 

The Light of the World [detail] (c. 1853) by William Holman Hunt

But here’s the thing: this rarely happens in the abstract. Our readings today show that God usually comes knocking in practical, real-world situations, though often in unexpected guise. He might take the form of the foreigner, the migrant, the outcast, the outlaw – even the enemy – to test whether our hearts are really open to being changed in the manner we need. True, it can be inconvenient to be hospitable to such as these – we might think up all kinds of reasons why we’d prefer not to welcome those who offend our notions of fairness or decorum. But if we close our hearts to the one who by Providence appears at our doorstep, we might just be shutting the door on the Divine Guest, who if welcomed has far greater gifts to offer.

Friends, consider today how God might be inviting you to practice a deeper and richer hospitality, not just in theory but in practice. It may not be on the welcome mat of your home that a guest is waiting – it might be your heart you are being invited to open, not your door, and your wellbeing that you are being invited to share, not your home. Welcome the stranger into your life, especially if it is hard, because the one who knocks softly at the door of your heart might just be the Divine Guest, who invites you to “choose the better part” and then receive all that he desires to give you.