Word to the Wise
Tuesday, September 12, 2006 - 23rd Tuesday in Ordinary Time
[1 Corinthians 6:1-11 and Luke 6:12-19]Jesus departed to the mountain to pray, and he spent the night in prayer to God.
The Gospel of Luke is known among other things for the importance that it seems to give to prayer. Jesus is shown to be a man of prayer. In today's scripture, he spends the night in prayer before choosing the Twelve! It was an important decision and no doubt required a lot of prayer! What might escape our consideration in focusing on Jesus as a model for prayer is why Jesus needed to pray at all! Isn't that a bit like talking to oneself? Did he do this so that we could have an example to imitate? Did he do this because he really needed to do it? Who is he praying TO? Scholars write long books on questions like those I just mentioned. These same scholars tell us that the Gospel of Luke was written for a church facing persecution. They needed all the encouragement and strength they could get. I can only say that the gospel clearly presents Jesus as needing to pray. He prays during his ministry of healing and preaching. He prays before selecting the apostles. He prays in the Garden of Gethsemani. He even prays while hanging on the cross! The gospel takes for granted that like any human person of faith, Jesus needed to pray for strength to stand fast in the task before him. This included confronting the power of evil and his own suffering! In the process, we are all given an example of the power of prayer. The Gospel of Luke gathers a number of Jesus' teachings about prayer together in chapter 11. There we are given "the Lord's Prayer," and the admonition to be persistent in prayer. Whatever may be said about the mystery of the Incarnation and Jesus' relationship to his Father, the necessity for prayer was clear in his life and I, for one, find encouragement in his example. I don't face the persecution that the community of Luke was facing, but I have enough challenges of my own to know that without prayer I'd be dead long before I die. AMEN
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