Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fr Dominic’s Homily

Today’s readings and psalm are all about prayer and how we see God. We all need to pray and we all need to see God in the right way.

There is the story of one child asking another whether or not they ever prayed to God before meals to which he responded “Oh no – I trust my Mother, she is a good cook!”

When we look at the Gospel today it seems to be split into three little sections. In the first section we hear that Jesus himself prayed. He was always a man of prayer during the years he was on this planet.

When we see someone praying devoutly it can affect us. It can inspire us. It inspired his disciples and so they asked him how they should pray. So Jesus does and we see this shortened version of the Our Father prayer from St Luke.

Why are there different versions? Well in the days of Jesus the Jewish prayers were prayed at different times and so different versions of the same prayer were used accordingly. A bit like in the Mass we have different Eucharistic Prayers – some are longer than others.

It starts with Our Father. In other words God wants us to have a close relationship with him. We are the only religion that does this. So this sets the tone of the relationship that God wants to have with us.

May your name be held holy. May we respect his name. If every human being respected Gods name in this way it would change the world. When Gods name is hallowed everything else falls into place.

Praying for Gods kingdom means restoring justice and peace to the world. Jesus is Gods kingdom in human form.

Daily bread is not a good translation from the Greek. The real meaning is supernatural bread. The Eucharist. It refers to the manner from heaven that sustained the Israelites on a daily basis whilst they were on exile. Jesus is the New Moses who frees us from slavery to sin and so we need his supernatural sustenance for this every day on our journey through this life.

Forgive us our sins as we forgive those who are in debt to us. Sin was seen as the violation of a law and so paying of a debt was used as the analogy. And lead us not into temptation. This is always confusing and a little contentious. God never tempts us or encourage us to sin. He can allow situations to occur if he deems that a greater fruitfulness will arise from them.

So he allows certain trials not so that we may fail but so that we may grow. So we pray that we may not feel tempted and fall during the trials that he may allow to come our way.

If we want God to forgive us then we cannot be in a situation where there is anyone in our lives that we have not forgiven for a particular situation. We cannot harbour grudges. The sooner we forgive those family members or friends who have hurt us the better.

Next we have the story of the man demanding food at an unearthly hour of the night. The Greek translation is a shameless persistence in pounding on the door will make the man answer him.

That’s how God wants us to relate to him and offer our worries to him. Relentlessly. Shaking those gates of heaven. Do we do that or do we pray just once and then because we feel God hasn’t listened we give up?

Finally we have that strange story of a Father giving to his son a snake and a scorpion instead of food. If we as humans who are sinful know how to give our children what is good how much more will our Father in heaven?

Jesus uses this Jewish technique of arguing from the lesser to the greater in order to make his point. But notice he says for those who pray for the Holy Spirit – how many of us do that – or do we simply pray for material and earthly goods.

So when we pray there will always be an answer. It’s just that sometimes the answer is no and sometimes not yet. We have to remember that we are not changing Gods mind. He knows from all eternity what he will do. He gives us what we need rather than simply what we want.

He isn’t just a divine service provider that we feed with prayer coins and await our desired result. Do you always give your children everything they ask for?

The reality is that the more we pray the more we change our own hearts to have the capacity to receive what God has decided from all eternity to give us.

We should trust that whatever he does give us will be an opportunity to draw ever closer to him which is what really matters. It’s just is takes us our whole lives to realise this.

So we need to see God in the right way. As a loving Father who knows exactly what he is doing and who gives us what is best for us and who wants us to be shamelessly persistent in our prayers to him.