Last Sunday, I attended Mass at St. Ignatius of Loyola on the Boston College Campus. Fr. Gerald Finnegan, SJ, gave the homily and it fit so well with our Year of Prayer theme, and he graciously agreed to share it with us.
--Christine Frech, Parish Office Administrator
My reaction to today's readings was, "You're preaching to the choir!" Talking to people attending Mass about prayer or the need for prayer in their lives is like "preaching to the choir." You are here, so you are praying! So an instruction on prayer and its importance for daily life should not be directed to you who are here but to those who are not here: those who do not go to church, that is, the non-choir members.
But here we are and here are the readings on prayer. So perhaps we have to presume that we, even though we are members of the choir, can profit from reflecting on prayer and what the saints teach us about it, and what the Lord himself had to say about it.
Our first reading from Genesis has Abraham talking to God as though God were his friend. Yes, he treats God with reverence, but he also challenges God. The conversation, you remember, is about the saving or destruction of the sinful city of Sodom. Abraham is pleading with God not to destroy it because in doing so God will kill innocent citizens along with the sinful ones. So he argues about numbers with God: "Suppose there are 50 innocent people there, or forty-five or thirty or twenty or ten." God's answer is always the same: "I will not destroy the city if there are just people there, even if they are only ten. But we know that the city is destroyed. So it appears that Abraham's argument ultimately failed because there were no just people living there. But, again, Abraham is so bold, not only because of his repeated question but also because he actually reminds God of who he should be. He says to God: "Should not the judge of all the world act with justice?" What chutzpah! He is lecturing God on what the proper divine action should be. He is telling God how to behave.
Is there anything like that in our Gospel today? In its first part which gives us Luke's rendition of the Our Father, the closest we come to such boldness is Jesus' teaching us to call God our Father. That may not seem very bold to us. We are so used to it. But when we reflect on it, we may begin to see that we are in fact being quite bold in addressing God in this way. We are claiming not simply to be God's creations-like everything else in the universe-but to be part of God's family. We are claiming to be intimate with God.
And in the two little parables which make up the second part of the Gospel we also find a rather bold way of behaving with God. The first parable talks about friends in a village. A villager goes to his neighbor to ask for help in an embarrassing situation. He has received an unexpected late night visit and has nothing in his refrigerator. The villager could say to the visitor, "Sorry, it's too late. We are all in bed. I can't help you." But of course he wouldn't say that! That would be shameful behavior, and the next day everyone in the village would know what a terrible friend he had been to his visitor. But if his friend the visitor had continued to pound on his door despite this refusal, maybe his persistence would have worn the villager down. He would have gotten up and given him something just to get rid of him, and not because of their friendship.
This is the Lord's little story about village life in his day. And from it he draws the conclusion that we, like Abraham, should treat God with respect but also with familiarity and with persistence because God is, after all, our friend. So keep on knocking, keep on asking. Then Jesus reverts to the image of God as our Father in his second little parable. "Look," he says, "if you who are parents, despite all your shortcomings-know how to give your children good things, can you doubt that God will not do better than you in taking care of his children, that is, you?"
So what are today's readings teaching us? That we should pray with more confidence, with more faith in God's love for us as our friend and Father, and with more persistence. Yes, of course. But how can we share what we have learned with others, the non-choir members who do not darken our door very often?
I am not sure, but I tend to think that if we pray as the Lord has taught us to pray, that is, if we pray continually and persistently and with great confidence and faith in God's love for us as our friend and Father, such praying is going to make us different people, and that change in us might open a door to others to find their own way to pray.
