HOMILY WEEK 01 04 – Year II
On Faith, Prayer and Living the Golden Rule
(Esther 14:1-14; Ps 138; Mt 7:7-12)
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Two young brothers, staying at their grandparents’ house overnight, were saying their night prayers – one quietly, the other shouting out his desire for a new bike as loud as he could. The first asked his brother why he was shouting out his prayers, as God was not deaf. The other replied God was not deaf, but their grandparents were hard of hearing!
Today’s liturgy invites us to deepen our faith, be more mature in prayer, and express both through loving service.
Queen Esther, in the first reading, underlines the urgent need today for an informed faith. She was well taught and grounded in her faith. Ever since she was born she had heard in the tribe of her family all that God had done for her ancestors. A former teacher recently shared with me her shock to find out some students in a Catholic school did not know how to pray the “Our Father” or what the rosary was all about. Esther, on the other hand, grounded in her faith, trusted that God would hear her prayer and sustain her through the crisis facing her and her people.
We learn some important elements about prayer from the readings today as well. A first is to be like Queen Esther and once having prayed, strive to be the answer to our own prayer. There is a saying, “Pray as if all depends on God, then act as if everything depends on us.” That was Queen Esther did. Once she had prayed earnestly and from the heart to the God of her ancestors, she then trusted in that prayer, and acted courageously and wisely to speak what God had put in her mouth, and thus saved her people. We are invited to emulate her – to pray with deep faith, and then strive to be the answer to our own prayer.
Queen Esther’s prayer is also an example of the prayer of the Anawim, the poor people who know they need God. It is the prayer of those who realize their own resources are limited, and so they turn in confident faith to God for the help they need. This is the prayer St. Peter learned when walking on the water. When he got proud, took his eyes off Jesus, looked back at the boat to show off a little, felt the wind and started to sink, his prayer changed from the confident “Lord, make me come to you” to three words, “Lord, save me!” I am sure Peter then hung on to Jesus and walked together with him back to the boat. That is what we have to do every day, admit our need in the morning, ask for help, and walk with Jesus throughout the day, relying on him and not on our own power.
Step 11 of the 12 Step program is a great example of that kind of prayer: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying only for the knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry it out.” The first part fits within the scope of the prayer of the Anawim, connecting with God, while the second part links to what we should pray for.
In today’s passage from Matthew, Jesus mentions God giving “good gifts” to others. In his version of the same passage, Luke is more complete, as he states the Father will give us the “Holy Spirit” (Luke 11:13). That is the best of the good things the Father can and wants to give us, and all we really need to pray for. That is akin to “praying only for the knowledge of God’s will for us” of Step 11, and “the power to carry it out.” That is truly mature prayer.
Today’s Gospel also urges us to persist in prayer. The Lord wants us to ask with persistence, even stubbornness. We must not think of God as becoming exasperated by our prayer of petition, but the clear implication is that we will get what we want through persistence: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.”
How do we make sense of this? For Bishop Robert Barron, the best explanation is offered by St. Augustine, who said that “God doesn’t always give us immediately what we ask for, and in fact, he compels us to ask again and again. The Lord wants to stretch us, expanding our desire so as to receive the gift he desires to give us.”
‘If we got everything we wanted, right away and without effort, we wouldn’t appreciate what we’ve received, and we wouldn’t really be capable of taking it in. It would be like pouring new wine into old, shrunken wineskins, resulting in a loss of both the skins and the wine.
So, if the gift doesn’t come right away, don’t despair; rather, feel your very soul expanding in anticipation.”
Jesus concludes today’s gospel with the Golden Rule – “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.” Jesus boils the whole bible down to this one sentence, this one rule of life. That is very similar to St. Paul, who also boils down the whole bible, all the law and the prophets, to one sentence, “Love others as you love yourself” (Galatians 5:14). Our faith and our prayer, to be genuine and Christian, must lead us into loving service, caring activity, responding to the needs of others. As Activist Daniel Berrigan loved to say, “Our faith is not so much in our head and heart, it’s in our feet and our seat.”
St. Mother Teresa of Calcutta is perhaps our best contemporary example of someone who truly lived out today’s readings with the way she balanced faith, prayer and service in her life of ministry. Her faith was so strong she was given the mixed blessing of the experience of the apparent absence of God, just like Jesus on the cross (“My God, why have you forsaken me”). Her days started off with an hour of adoration and the celebration of the Eucharist. Then, grounded in prayerful faith, she spent the rest of each day selflessly giving of herself to both her congregation of sisters, and tending to the needs of the desperately poor and dying of Calcutta.
The Eucharist pulls these three themes together seamlessly. It is an act of profound faith in both God’s word and the Real Presence of Jesus in humble gifts of bread and wine. It is also our greatest prayer, in which we offer to God the gift of God’s own Son, the Lamb of God. And it also mandates us, sends us out, to live that Golden Rule and new commandment of Jesus – to love others as we love ourselves, and to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
