17th Sunday of Ordinary Time (C): Luke 11:1-13
“Lord, teach us to pray”.
Jesus’ disciples, seeing Him praying, make this request of Him. They do not ask this because they have never heard of prayer. The Hebrew Scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, are filled with example after example of prayer. The disciples, as sons of Israel, would have been taught various prayers from the time they were first able to speak. They would have seen their parents (and other people) praying at home, praying in the synagogue, and praying in the Temple. Prayer was a vital part of the Israelite’s daily life. Jesus’ disciples have been praying all their lives. Nevertheless, they ask Jesus to teach them to pray.
Why do they make such a request? For one thing, they are already beginning to recognize that Jesus is different from any rabbi or teacher they have known. He is a prophet, and yet more than a prophet. He is the Christ, the long-awaited Messiah, who has told them that He is the Son, sent by the Father into the world. Thus, the disciples know that there is something quite unique about Jesus. Therefore, there is something unique about them, though they can’t quite name it yet. They sense the need for a unique prayer that expresses who they are as disciples of Jesus.
Moreover, the disciples make this request after witnessing Jesus Himself at prayer. Can we possibly imagine what that was like? They saw the Son, in intimate union with the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit. It must have made a profound impression on them. They wanted to learn how to experience a taste of this in their own lives. They wanted to pray like Jesus prayed: not only in words but also in their attitudes, in their attention to prayer, and in the profound trust in the Father that always shone from Jesus.
Jesus then teaches His disciples a prayer, the prayer we now call the “Our Father”. The version we know and pray is the version that St. Matthew gives us in Chapter 6 of his Gospel. The version that St. Luke gives us here, though essentially the same prayer, is shorter, lacking some words and phrases that St. Matthew’s version has. The changes in wording do not change the meaning, though.
To do justice to the Our Father itself would require more than one blog post – and this could well be a future project for me. For now, I want to focus on what Jesus said after He taught the Our Father to His disciples. He wanted to teach them not only words to use in prayer, but essential attitudes to have in prayer. The attitudes Jesus focuses on here are persistence and confidence.
Why persistence? If God is God, can’t God answer our prayers with one definitive act and do, once and for all, whatever He wills for us? God certainly can do this. However, we human beings live in time. Most things do not happen immediately. Changes happen over time. God may bless us, but it takes time for us to recognize the blessing, and time for the blessing to work its graces in us.
Moreover, we who live in time find that there are ongoing obstacles to God’s workings among us. One of these is simple inertia. Inertia, as you may recall from your physics classes, is the tendency of an object to remain in the state it is in. If the object is in motion, it will remain in motion until something else exerts force upon it to change its direction, slow it down, or stop it. If an object is at rest, it will remain at rest unless something else exerts enough force upon it to set it in motion. We human beings experience a spiritual inertia at times. We often prefer the familiar to any change, even if the familiar is difficult or painful to us, even if we wish it were different. It’s what we know. Because of this, it takes some initial effort for us to begin to pray that God will help us to change something in our lives. It takes some initial persistence to begin a habit of prayer.
Sometimes spiritual inertia can become what the ancient Church Fathers called acedia. Acedia is spiritual laziness or sloth. It is not easy to spot acedia in ourselves, let alone in others. People with acedia may look very busy on the surface. That is because most of their efforts are going into running away from what they most need to face and deal with, the thing that needs to change in their lives if they are going to truly repent and become more fully children of God. They are doing everything but what they need to do. If you find yourself stuck in acedia, you need persistence in prayer all the more. Such persistence will be even more difficult at first, but eventually, through persistent prayer, you will be open to the grace of God and gradually freed from acedia.
Thirdly, we need persistence in prayer because the world we live in is not a neutral place. We are in a spiritual battle, whether we like it or not. Evil forces are at war against us, constantly trying to discourage us, tempt us, seduce us and deceive us. Therefore, we need constant prayer to open ourselves to God’s love, wisdom and strength – because we need them every day, and we will need them for the rest of our lives in this world. So, we must persist in prayer – not only for ourselves, but for others. God does not need us to bless others. Nevertheless, God chooses to bless people through the prayers of others. God, out of His great love and mercy, wants to involve us in His work of healing and reconciliation, so that His joy will live in our hearts and that our joy may be brought to completion in Him. This, too, is why we persist in prayer.
Jesus bids us pray not only with persistence but also with confidence. As He told His disciples, if we, with our occasional self-centeredness and sins, can still give good things to our children (and others), how much more will the Father lavishly pour the Holy Spirit upon all who ask Him? Our confidence is rooted in our trust that God is love, and that God will give us all we need. We ask Him for our own needs and for the needs of others. Our confidence is such that we are not confused or discouraged if God does not seem to be doing exactly what we asked Him to do. We trust that God knows what we most need, even better than we do. How often have we found that, after praying for some need from God, that God gives it to us in a way we did not expect, but in a way that was better for us that what we had asked for? God knows our hearts better than we do. He knows what we truly need. He knows what those we are praying for truly need. May we always trust in the fathomless, awe-inspiring love of God!
This confidence in God helps our persistence in prayer. At the same time, our persistence in prayer increases our confidence in it, as we begin to see how God truly responds to prayer and blesses many through our prayer. Though our persistence and confidence in prayer, may we come to know the great mercy of God in our own lives, and become conduits through which God may pour His mercy into the hearts of people all over the world!