Word to the Wise
Thursday, June 19, 2008 - Thursday in the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time
[Sirach 48:1-14 and Matthew 6:7-15]In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. This is how you are to pray, "Our Father who art in heaven...... If you forgive others their transgressions, your heavenly Father will forgive you.
For the past week or so, the Church has been meditating on the Sermon on the Mount from the Gospel of Matthew. This discourse presents Jesus as TEACHER extraordinaire! Today's passage contains some (but not all) of Jesus' teaching on prayer. I have given three snippets above because there are three points of importance! Two of these points could be lost because the second point, the words of "the Lord's Prayer," are so familiar that we might grab hold of them and forget what comes just before and just after! With regard to the first point, it is typical of Americans to think in terms of quantity when speaking of prayer, either in terms of numbers of prayers or time spent. Neither of these variables has anything to do with the quality per se of prayer. We might remember the story from the Gospel of Luke about the Pharisee and Publican who go up to the temple to pray.(Luke 18:10-14) The Publican's prayer is now known as "the Jesus Prayer:" "O God, {Lord, Jesus Christ} be merciful to me, a sinner." I often hear people say either in confession or in spiritual direction, "I don't pray ENOUGH." I have to challenge them to define ENOUGH by asking them, "If you were praying enough, what would that be like?" With regard to the very words of prayer that Jesus teaches us to pray, I often challenge congregations and individuals to pay attention to all the words of that prayer. We say it thousands of times in our lives and its sheer familiarity leads us to buzz right through it without a thought. For example, do we really want God to forgive us to the extent that we forgive others? One reply is, "Aw, Father RB, do we have to always analyze things?" Well, we'd better analyze at least this one phrase because the third point is based on it. The third point in the teaching tells us why we need to pay attention. It requires ACTION that matches the prayer. This is a big point in all the Gospel of Matthew. Jesus rejects piety without matching actions of love. Matthew 25:31-46 is an example. However, we may find feeding the poor and giving drink to the thirsty easier than what is demanded by the Lord's Prayer. That prayer demands that we forgive others. That is a much harder thing to do! How good are we at doing it? Remember, God's forgiveness is related to ours! Once more, Jesus the Teacher gives us a substantial amount of material to think about. There's a quiz every day. It's called Christian life. AMEN
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