2 March 2023 – Matthew 7:7-12
Today’s readings are about prayer and in particular the prayer of asking. The Gospel reading is wonderful: ‘Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find…’.
It seems that all one has to do is pray for something and get what one asks for. Yet, we all know from experience that this hardly ever happens. I pray to win the lottery, but I do not receive
even one of the minor prizes. I pray for the healing of a person with cancer, but the person dies. What happens? Is Jesus telling lies? Are there some hidden conditions we don’t know about?
I believe that the answer lies in the second half of the passage when Jesus says whether a father would give a stone to his son who asks him for a loaf of bread, or a snake instead of a fish, and continues: ‘If you, therefore, who are evil, know how to give good things to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him’.
In other words, if we human beings, despite our faults, take care of the welfare of our children, then surely God, who is all good, will be infinitely more considerate. The problem is not that God does not answer our prayers; the difficulty is that we tend to ask for the wrong things. We do not give a child a sharp knife to play with even if, when we refuse to do so, he throws a tantrum and gets angry with us. A good parent, of course, will try to give the child something else that satisfies his or her real need at that moment.
Demand prayer is not authentic if it has any demands, even minimal ones. Trust is the soul of prayer; if we do not receive what we have asked for, instead of giving way to bitterness and shutting ourselves off in despondency, let us joyfully renew our faith and ask God for the grace to accept His will with love, even if we struggle to understand it. We cannot measure God’s goodness by our expectations!
Let us remember that Jesus himself in the drama of his agony in Gethsemane thus invokes the Father: My Father, if it is possible, pass this cup from me! But not as I will, but as You will! That ‘as you wish’, referring to God, should resound confidently at the end of each of our requests, even the most urgent!
For good workers…
– It is not enough to ask with confidence, we must also learn to ask only for what is essential, as John Paul II taught: Lent is for everyone an itinerary of inner conversion which, by limiting everything that unnecessarily burdens human life, helps to rediscover the fundamental values of existence. It accompanies man in his natural search for the ultimate meaning of things and introduces him to the contemplation of divine realities.
– And Jesus invites us to review the fundamental attitude of prayer: to whom do we turn when we pray? To a powerful man to convince of the goodness of our requests? Or to a father who knows what we need even before we ask him?
P JOBY KAVUNGAL RCJ