The WORD in other words (2016) by Fr Magdaleno Fabiosa SVD – University of San Carlos, Cebu City
17th Sunday in Ordinary Time – C
The focus of this Sunday’s readings is our need to express our concerns to God in prayer and on how we should pray. I would like to focus on the truth revealed by the first words of the Our Father which I believe is the substratum of what prayer truly is.
Jesus in prayer must have been a sight for the disciples to ask him to teach them how to pray. Together with what Matthew in 6:7-8, tells us: “When you pray, do not use a lot of words, as the pagans do for they hold that the more they say, the more chance they of being heard. Do not pray like them. Your Father knows what you need even before you ask him;” this might give us a clue about an important aspect of the message of today’s gospel.
Luke tells us that at the most decisive and important moments in Jesus’ ministry–his baptism, choice of the Twelve Apostles, sermon on the plain, transfiguration and especially during his passion–Jesus prayed. His teaching was a sample of his own practice of prayer. He teaches first to address God as a loving father, revealing the very heart of his rapport with his God. Yahweh is Abba. Jesus concretely experienced the unconditional love of God his Father.
This was like a fire which burned from within him and which he wanted to share with everyone making it. This passion explains why the Father’s love became the central message of his preaching–that his hearers might be fired by this same experience which the New Testament writers call the experience of God’s Kingdom. This for Jesus was an experience of the Pearl of Great Price, the Treasure in the Field, the one thing necessary as he advised Martha: the God who is love.
If prayer is one of the most important expressions of our relationship with God, then when Jesus asked us to also call God as Father, He must have been teaching us that prayer could only be rooted in the conviction that God is Father to us; that this relationship must be approached from the perspective of total trust and belief in being accepted and loved by Him with no conditions at all.
We pray not in order for God to know our needs . He knows them already even before we ask Him. (Mt. 6:7-8) But so that we may know what he wants from us. Prayer “is not a matter of converting Him to us, but we to Him.” Perhaps this is to which Jesus wants us converted. God’s love is like the sunlight, it is there totally free, undeserved, and at our taking. All we have to do is to bask under that sunlight and let it change us from within. St. John puts it so beautifully and succinctly: Yes, we believe in God’s love! This is what should surface in our awareness every time we say the Our Father.
