(Seventeenth Sunday of the Year (C): This homily was given
on July 28, 2019 at St. Pius X Church, Westerly, R.I., by Fr. Raymond
Suriani. Read Genesis 18: 20-32; Psalm
138:1-8; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11: 1-13.)
[For the audio version of this homily, click here: Seventeenth Sunday 2019]
Tom and Joanne, both 60 years of age, were celebrating their 35th wedding anniversary, when suddenly an angel from heaven appeared to them. The angel congratulated them and said, “God is so pleased with the two of you, that he’s given me permission to grant each of you one wish.”Joanne said, “O that’s wonderful. I wish that Tom and I had tickets for a romantic cruise that would take us all the way around the world.”The angel said, “So be it”—and he handed Joanne two first class cruise tickets.“And what about you, Tom?”Tom replied, “I wish that my wife was 30 years younger than I am.”The angel said, “So be it”—and Tom immediately became 90-years-old!
You
might call that “a prayer of petition gone bad!”
There’s
an old saying (and there is a lot of truth in it): Be careful what you ask for!
But
this does raise an interesting question: Why
do we need to ask at all? We say
that we believe in a God who knows everything.
Well, if that’s true—if Almighty God knows everything that we need
before we ask him (as Jesus says he does in Matthew 6:8)—then why do we have to
ask at all? Why doesn’t the Lord just
give us everything we need instantaneously and simplify the process?
Have
you ever wondered about those things?
Probably
most people have (at least most believers
have) at some point in their lives.
This
morning I share with you four reasons why: four reasons why God wants us to ask. Now
please don’t misunderstand: these are not the only reasons there are. I’m sure that some of you could think of
others, if you spent some quality time reflecting on the matter, as I did when
I prepared this homily. These are simply
the ones that I would focus on, if someone came up to me and said, “Fr. Ray,
why does God want me to pray prayers of petition, if he already knows all my
needs?”
The
first reason is this: Prayers of petition
make us aware of our need for God.
They make us aware of the fact that we are not self-sufficient: that we need God’s grace in every situation of
our lives. The constant temptation we
face in this life, of course, is to think just the opposite. (This is one reason, by the way, why most
Catholics don’t come to Mass every Sunday.
They don’t think they need it!)
And I’m convinced that this temptation to think that we don’t need God
would increase a hundredfold, if we received everything from the Lord without asking. The gifts would be from God, yes that’s
true—but we probably wouldn’t recognize that fact. So the bottom line is this: God doesn’t need to be told what we need, but we need to know that we need him—and
asking helps us to have that knowledge, that awareness.
Reason
number 2 why God wants us to ask: Asking
helps us to grow in faith. Asking helps
us to grow in our relationship with God.
In today’s first reading,
Abraham intercedes for the people of Sodom.
He starts off by asking the Lord to spare the city if there are 50
innocent people living in it. God says
he will. And that affirmative response
from the Lord increases Abraham’s faith—so much so that he then asks, “Well,
what if there are only 45 righteous people in the city? Would you be willing to spare it for their
sakes?” God says yes again. This increases Abraham’s faith even more,
leading him eventually to the point of asking God to spare Sodom if there are
only 10 good people left in the place.
Unfortunately, as we all know, there weren’t. Remember, this is the city from which we get
the modern English word “sodomy”—but the point here is that Abraham’s trust and
confidence in the Lord grew much stronger through his verbal exchange with God,
through this experience of asking the Lord again and again and again.
Those
of you who are parents: When your children need something (when they really need
something) and they come to you and they ask and you give it to them—your
relationship with them grows stronger, does it not? Their trust in you—their confidence in
you—increases.
Well,
the same is true of our relationship with God.
Which
brings us to reason number 3 why God wants us to ask: Because our God is a Father, not a tyrant! A tyrant imposes
things on others. God doesn’t impose
things—even good things—on anybody! Like
a loving Father, he simply offers
them to us. He gives them to us if we
want them—and if we ask for
them. That’s why Jesus encourages us in
today’s gospel to ask, to seek and to knock—and to do so persistently and
perseveringly!
Finally,
God wants us to ask him for things in prayer because we are his co-workers!
This is an idea that St. Paul, St. John the apostle and Pope Emeritus
Benedict XVI would all understand very well.
In 1 Corinthians 3, Paul calls himself God’s “co-worker”; and in his
third letter St. John talks about us being “co-workers of the truth.” That last expression also happens to be the
biblical phrase that Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Emeritus Benedict) took as his
episcopal motto.
We
are called God’s co-workers because we are to have an active role in fulfilling
the Lord’s plan of salvation for the human race. God could have made us robots in a mechanical
universe and worked out everything by himself; but he chose to create us as
free human beings in a moral universe—a universe where we would have to freely
and consciously choose the good and embrace it.
So if we believe that prayers of petition bring good
things—blessings—into our lives and the lives of others (and we should), then
those prayers are part and parcel of this partnership we have with God! When we pray, in other words, we are acting
as his “co-workers” in bringing his help and saving grace into the world.
So
there you have it, four reasons why God wants us to ask: to make us aware of
our need for him; to help us grow in faith; because he’s a Father, not a
tyrant; and because we are his co-workers in this world.
Dear Lord, may
these four reasons be reason enough—reason enough for us to take prayer and its
power seriously, each and every day of our lives. Amen.