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.
1 comment:
Good morning and thank you for a lovely homily and thought. It was beautiful. May you receive many blessings from i today .
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