17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

There was a little boy who asked his mother for a bike, a red bike, for his upcoming First Communion.

His mother, knowing that he had not been a very good boy, asked him to write a letter to Jesus about his request for a bike. So the little boy, Bobby, went up to his room, sat at his desk and began to write his letter.

Dear Jesus,
I have been a very good boy this past year and for my First Communion I would like a bike, a red bike
from Bobby.

Bobby knew this wasn’t true and so, feeling a little guilty, he crumbled up the letter and began a new one:

Dear Jesus,
I have not been the best boy this past year but I promise to be better if I can have a bike – a red bike.
Signed.. from Bobby.

Now Bobby felt pretty bad because he knew he didn’t deserve the bike because he had not been a good and diligent boy that year but he still wanted it very much. So, he went downstairs and asked his mother.

Hi Mum, could I go to our church?

His mother was so happy because she thought that Bobby might want to go and pray in the church for forgiveness, so she allowed him to go. Bobby ran down the street, ran into the church, looked around him and saw a statue of Mary. No one was in the church . He grabbed the statue of Mary, ran out of the church and ran home. Bobby went to his room, sat at his desk, put the statue on his desk and began another letter.

Dear Jesus – I have your mother. If you ever want to see her again send me the bike, make it a red one!
Signed…from you know who

We can certainly applaud Bobby for his perseverance – he got that part right, as for the other parts, well we’ll return to what Bobby got wrong a little later…

Out of all the gospel writers, Luke is the evangelist that most pays attention to the subject of prayer, and in particular it is Luke who gives most attention to portraying Jesus as a man of prayer. in the introduction to this episode we are told that Jesus was at prayer himself, and that one of his disciples come up to him and ask him to teach them how to pray. When you really admire someone, you want to imitate them and in order to do so you want to know as much about them as possible. We might imagine now that for some time now the disciples have been used to see Jesus going off alone to pray for long periods by himself. They must be wondering what exactly he is doing during all of these long periods. This is why they ask him to teach them to pray – they want to be able to imitate him in his spirit of prayerfulness. They are not so much asking Jesus to teach them another prayer – but rather to teach them how to pray. The Our Father, instead of just being a formula for the perfect prayer is rather a distillation of the attitudes that we are to cultivate when we come to prayer. I think too often as Catholics we have missed this fundamental insight and instead of teaching people how to pray, we have simply taught prayers. For far too long, popular piety has revolved around knowing the right novenas to say and belting off sufficient rosaries in order to secure the grace that we desire from God.

Crucial to our praying as Jesus prayed is the realization that prayer is not so much about changing God’s mind as it is about changing us. This was Bobby’s fundamental error. He thought that through his prayer he might change God’s mind – and when he realized he didn’t have a leg to stand on, namely worthiness – he resorted to manipulation. Notice that Jesus only said, “ask and you will receive” after he had given us the pattern of prayer. This is because we first need to learn how to ask – Jesus is not giving us carte blanche here – and saying ask whatever you want and you’ll get it – as many of us know from experience – it simply doesn’t work that way. Jesus first wants to teach us how to ask, the attitudes and dispositions that should shape our asking – and he does this in the Our Father. Prayer is about giving God the space to change our priorities so that when we have to petition God, our petition is coming from the right place. This is why it is very significant that the Our Father does not lead off with our needs but leads off by asking that God’s name be held holy and that God’s kingdom come. If we are able to truly make these our first priority and realize that the purpose of our lives on earth is so that these two requests are fulfilled then what we ask for will be shaped by putting God first in our lives. This is what Jesus means when he says “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these other things shall be added onto you.”

Having placed God first, the rest of the Our Father deals with petitions that pertain to our own needs. I am sure that many of us, at some point in our catechetical formation were taught about the four types of prayer – namely – the prayer of praise, the prayer of sorrow and asking for forgiveness, prayer of thanksgiving and prayer of petition. The prayer of petition is frequently put last, almost as a concession to people who have needs and must therefore have to interrupt prayer of adoration and contemplation with baser earthly preoccupations. It is then very striking that what Jesus gives us as the pattern of all prayer consists only of petitions: six petitions, here in Luke, and in Matthew seven. The message seems to be that the most fundamental attitude to cultivate in prayer is one of dependence.

Luke has it the translation equates to “keep on giving us day by day our daily bread” – not as Matthew which is in the past tense “give us our daily bread.” The idea here is similar to the notion of the manna that sustained the Israelites in the desert. We are asking God to sustain us day by day, bread and manna are symbols of the life that we receive from God day by day. As we remember well, the Israelites thought that they could make themselves independent of divine providence by storing up the manna – but then they found that was corrupted if they kept it longer than a day.

What does this mean for us today? Many of us sitting here today, I hazard to guess do not have to worry where our next meal will be coming from. While we may have some financial worries of one kind or another, I would presume that most of us do not find ourselves in a position where we are called to trust in God for the provision of our day to day basic needs. Of course on a macro-level the financial and social security we enjoy are as a result of God who has blessed us with the talents and gifts that enable us to provide for ourselves through our work and careful saving and provision for the future through retirement funds.

So what can these words mean for us today? I think that it is about far deeper than just our physical sustenance. It is about more basically where we derive our joie de vivre, our hope, our motivation, why we wake up in the morning. Many of us, I think, especially in our modern world, where there is such an array of choice in terms of entertainment and personal comfort have engineered our lives to be able to give us our daily dose of joy, enough joy to make it worthwhile getting up in the morning. Whether this is from watching our favorite series on Netflix, eating a good meal, spending quality time with a spouse or our children or playing a sport, a drink with friends, the high we get from closing a deal or doing well at our jobs – and for many of us – it is a combination of all of these things we have structured our lives in such a way that we are able to assure the delivery of this joy. But what we find, like the Israelites in the desert is that the more we try to control our lives, the more we find that the little joy that we used to suck out of life disappears. If we are not radically honest with ourselves and realize how we have stacked these little addictions of ours like a house of cards and are so afraid that one little change in our circumstances is going to make this house of cards come tumbling down, then we will also find that our prayers of petition will revolve around God helping us to maintain and even build up our house of cards. This was Bobby’s fatal error.

The radical trust that we are called to live in as followers of Jesus is to get up in the morning and not have any idea of where our sustenance is going to come, other than to know that we will receive it from the Lord our God. This is perhaps why Jesus urges us to be like little children – because a child still has a capacity for wonder, one, and two because a child has not yet got to the stage where she can create her own cocoon of little pleasures and joys. I think that asking God to give us day by day that which sustains us – our daily bread is asking for the grace to trust that day by day God will give us the reason to wake up in the morning the next day and want to live our lives with joy, generosity and a sense of fulfilment. We have to trust that each day God will fill us with God’s life.

Questions for reflection

1. Do I use prayer as an opportunity to try to get what I want out of God?
2. How is my way of praying influenced by Scripture, by the parables and values of Jesus?
3. In what ways is God calling me to forsake an attitude of spirited independence and become more child-like in my relationship with my Father in heaven?