Luke the evangelist records seven occasions of Jesus’s prayer and five prayers of Jesus. Two of these prayers were uttered on the cross: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34) and his last words: “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46). No evangelist insists so much on the subject of prayer as Luke. The whole life of Jesus was marked by prayer.
Today’s passage is a catechesis on prayer. It starts by presenting the circumstance in which Jesus taught the “Our Father.” The Lord’s prayer is more like the Apostles’ Creed because, it is a complete compendium of faith and of Christian life.
In the early Church, the catechumens directly learned this prayer from the mouth of the bishop. It was like a gift, the bishop gave to those who had applied and were accepted to be Christians. During the Easter Vigil, they recited it for the first time together with their communities.
Jesus teaches us to address God as “our Father” because “before we were being formed in secret, and woven in the depths of the earth” (Psalm 109:15), God the Father thought about us and loved us! He wants us to stand before the Father with confidence and ask for the things we need to live as his sons and daughters.
When we ask: ‘Hallowed be your name,’ we declare to the Father our willingness to get involved in glorifying his name, and to collaborate with him in fulfilling his promises of “you shall be my people and I will be your God” (Ezekiel 36:23-28).
“Thy kingdom come,” we pray. Jesus has taught us that the Kingdom has already come. The time of waiting is over. However, we continue to pray for its coming because, it must develop and grow in every person as a seed of goodness, of love, of reconciliation, and of peace. Prayer makes us to discern between the values of this world and the values of the Kingdom of God.
We cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer with sincerity, if we think only of our own bread, forgetting the poor, and neglecting social justice. The Lord’s prayer calls on us to free our hearts from the greed of possession and anguish of tomorrow. It amounts to saying: “Help me, Father, to be content with the necessary, to be free from the bondage of goods and give me the strength to share with the poor.”
God’s forgiveness has only one requirement – that we cultivate love and forgiveness for our brothers and sisters and be reconciled with them first.
And the temptation from which we ask to be saved does not refer to the small weaknesses, struggles of life and persecutions. They do make us stumble and can choke the seed of the Word of God in us. But, Jesus wants us to pray that we must be kept away from the temptation of abandoning our faith in God, the loving and merciful Father.
The parable of the man who went to ask a friend to help him with three loaves reiterates the importance of insistence and consistency in prayer.
For your reflection
Prolonged prayers are not intended to persuade God to change his plans! Prayer does not change God; instead it opens our minds, changes our hearts.
Father Fernando
Armellini SCJ
