THE WORD BECAME FLESH

Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, 2023

2Cor 11:1-11

Ps 111

Matt 6:7-15

This is how you are to pray...

 In the gospel reading(Mt 6:7-15) Jesus makes a distinction between the prayer of the pagans and the prayer of his followers. He speaks of pagan prayer as babbling, as using many words, the implication being that by using many words they are trying to force God to listen. Pagan prayer is an attempt to put pressure on God, to manipulate God into doing what those praying want. The prayer Jesus taught his disciples is the complete opposite of that kind of prayer. 

Rather than trying to force God’s hand, the Lord’s prayer, as we have come to call it, begins in a spirit of surrender to God and to what God wants –‘your name be held holy, you will be done, your kingdom come’. Jesus would pray a version of those opening petitions of the Lord’s prayer in the garden of Gethsemane, ‘My Father if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I will, but what you will’. Although Jesus recoiled before the prospect of a violent death, he did not try to force God’s hand in prayer. Rather, he surrendered to what God wanted. His prayer of petition was secondary to his prayer of surrender. 

The Lord’s Prayer begins in that same spirit of surrender to God, and only then does it invite us to petition God on our behalf. The petitions of the Lord’s Prayer are all in the first person plural, not me and mine but us and ‘our’. They express our basic material and spiritual needs, as a faith community, our need for sustenance, both physical and spiritual, our need for forgiveness, and our need for deliverance when our faith is tested by evil. Jesus gave us this prayer so that all of our prayers may be shaped by this model prayer.

Let us pray: Our Father in Heaven, hallowed be your name. Amen.

+Remain blessed