Lord, Teach us to Pray

Reflection on Luke 11:1-13

Someone was praying, and he said, "Lord, give me patience. But please hurry!" That is a glaring example of just how NOT to pray. From today's Gospel passage, we gather that patience or perseverance is one of the essential attributes of prayer. If we lack it when we pray, then we just don't know how to pray. Two other attributes of prayer are faith and "right intention.”

When we pray, we must have faith that God will answer us. First, we must believe that God is able to do what we are asking. Then, we must also believe that he is willing to do it for us; that is, he cares enough, he has our interest enough to do it for us. The basis of this faith can be seen in the words of Jesus in today's Gospel passage: "Ask, and it will be given to you .... For the one who asks always receives." Jesus did not say, "Ask, and it may be given to you." What he said was, "Ask, and it will be given to you.” He did not say, "The one who asks sometimes receives." No! He said, "The one who asks always receives:' Jesus was not given to making frivolous promises, promises that he could not or would not deliver on. That is why we have to be convinced that if he said so, then it had to be so. That is why we can and we must pray with faith.

But what we are praying for must be for our own or our neighbour's good. That is where "right intention" comes in. If what I am praying for is not for my own or my neighbour's good, God will not do it for me. He will substitute something that is good for me or the neighbour that I am praying for. Yes, no responsible father would hand his son a stone when he asked for bread, or hand him a snake instead of a fish or a scorpion instead of an. egg. But what responsible father would hand his son a stone if he asked for one, when what he really needed was bread? What responsible father would hand his son a snake or a scorpion even if he asked for either of them? In the same way, God cannot be expected to give us anything that would turn out to be a stone or a snake or a scorpion in our hands, even if we asked him.

Having taken care of faith and "right intention", the next attribute that we must bring to our prayers is patience or perseverance. God is absolutely sovereign. He does not take orders from us. He will do what we ask for in prayer in his own time, not our time. Don't we all say that God's time is the best? How come we don't seem to believe that when it comes to prayer?

The trouble may be with the way things are in our world today. We have gone well past jet age and space age into cyber age. We seem to be able to do a lot of things at the touch of a button. As a result, many of us have lost the attribute of patience. If something we want fails to materialise at the time we expect it, we give up. We stop trying. We say, "It's no use. We are just wasting our time." A well known adage in days gone by used to be, "If once you try and you don't succeed, try, try, try again." It would seem that many of us today have settled for a modern corruption of that adage, which says, "If once you try and you don’t succeed, don't be a fool; give up!"

That is not the right attitude to bring to prayer. That is the lesson of today's gospel passage for us. When we pray, it is we who must wait on the Lord, and not the other way round. We cannot give God any ultimatums or deadlines to do what we want, or else .... That is what we are doing if we lack patience or perseverance when we pray.

Welcoming Jesus

Reflection on Luke 10:38-42

Hospitality is one of the things we Africans used to be well known for. Not anymore! And it is not our fault. Times have changed. Not only have the times become so very hard for most of us financially, but there are so many criminally minded people about these days. The innocent looking guest that you let into your house during the day may well return at night wielding a machete or a gun to dispossess you of your whole life's savings, if not of your life itself.

In days gone by things were quite different. The times were not so hard and crime was not so prevalent. If someone came to your house, say from the village, you received him warmly, you gave him water for his bath, you gave him a warm meal, and he had at least a space on the floor of your room, if not a bed, to lie on for the night. But you would not do all that without giving the visitor at least some moments of your time to tell you what his mission is. That is to Say, you would give him a listening ear.

Which one would you do first? It depends on the need of your visitor. If he arrives very hungry and famished, you would be well advised to give him food first before asking him to state his mission. But if his mission is so serious that it is boring a hole in his heart, then you had better listen to him first before talking about food. The message of Jesus, his teaching was urgent, momentous, far more important than anything material. It demanded the undivided attention of the recipient. That was the kind of attention that Mary gave to it, while Martha busied herself with serving. What Martha did was fine. It wasn’t wrong. Yes, it was a good thing to welcome Jesus with food and drink. But what Mary did was better. She gave Jesus a listening ear, her undivided attention. Jesus said she had chosen the better part, and it would not be taken away from her.

It is all a matter of knowing what to give to God at each moment in our relationship with him. There will be times when we must be Martha: giving our time, talents and treasures (money) in the service of God and our Church. God fully expects that of us when it is the time for it. But there will be other times when we must be Mary: just being present to God, just being there, listening to him and conversing with him, for instance, by going to Mass, visiting the Blessed Sacrament, reading our Bible.

What is required of us, then, is to be both Martha and Mary in our relationship with God, in our relationship with Jesus. Just being one of them, and not the other is not good enough. We must be both of them at different times, depending on what the times and circumstances dictate. That is how we too will choose the better part that will not be taken from us.

Who is my Neighbour?

Reflection on Luke 10:25-37

During one of the Sharia riots in the north, people did unspeakable things to their fellow Nigerians. Men, women and children were slaughtered as if they were sallah rams. Muslims did it to Christians, and Christians did it to Muslims. In the midst of all that, there were cases of acts of heroism and uncommon courage displayed by Christians and Muslims alike. Some Muslim landlords defended their Christian tenants against attack by Muslim marauders at great risk to their persons and their families. Many Christians did the same thing for Muslims who were in danger of attack by Christian mobs. Those were modern day examples of the Parable of the Good Samaritan: Muslims seeing Christians as their neighbours and caring for them, and Christians doing the same.

In the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans were mortal enemies. They hated one another with a passion. It can be said that if a Jew saw a snake and a Samaritan, he would kill the Samaritan first before going after the snake. A Samaritan would do the same to a Jew. Therefore, when Jesus presented the Samaritan as the one who cared for the Jew who had fallen into the hands of brigands, Whereas his fellow jews, two leaders of his own nation and religion -a priest and a Levite- failed to care for him, he was making a revolutionary statement. He was saying that a Samaritan was as much neighbour to a Jew as another Jew. And so, the commandment of God to love one's neighbour as oneself applied as much to a Jew loving a Samaritan as it did to a Jew loving a fellow Jew.

As Christians, we are not supposed to have enemies, we are not even supposed to hate anyone. Jesus has not given us any permission to do so. But we cannot help it if other people hate us or they appoint us as their enemies. They may even go on to cause us grievous harm, physically, mentally, emotionally. They are still neighbours whom the law of God says we must love as ourselves. We must be Good Samaritans to them, and care for them in their need as we would for those who call and treat us as friends.

That is what those Muslims and Christians did in the north when they defended members of another religion against attack by people of their own religion. It means that we too can do the same. The final injunction of Jesus to the lawyer in today's Gospel passage is therefore addressed to us too: "Go, and do the same yourself."

Be Involved

Reflection on Luke 10:1-12, 17-20

When Jesus began his public ministry, he knew that he could not do it alone. He would need a helping hand from some hand-picked persons. He picked twelve men, and named them Apostles. "… they were to be (first) his companions, and (then) to be sent out to proclaim the message" (Mark 3: 14). That is the meaning of the word Apostle, someone who is sent out.

As the mission grew bigger, Jesus must have realised that thirteen persons (himself and the Twelve) could not do it all. He therefore proceeded to appoint "seventy-two others and sent them out ahead of him in pairs, to all the towns and places he himself was to visit'~ as we read in today's Gospel passage. Even then, Jesus still remarked that "the harvest is rich but the labourers are few ... "

Just before he ascended into heaven, Jesus threw the mission wide open to all his disciples. The mission was now to "Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations..." (Matthew 28:19). Twelve men could not make disciples of all nations. Twelve men plus seventy-two could not either. All of the disciples now had to do it. All of them had to become apostles, evanglisers, missionaries, call it what you like. That is exactly what they began to do, according to what we read in the Acts of the Apostles. In the early days of the Church, it was not only the Twelve or any other restricted group of disciples that evangelised, that is, proclaimed the Good News. All of the disciples did: men and women, ordained and non-ordained. That was one of the reasons for the phenomenal spread of the Christian faith to the farthest reaches of the Roman Empire in only a few decades of the Church's existence.

The harvest has never been richer (Le. greater) than it is today. The labourers too, by comparison with the harvest, have never been fewer. I mean the people that are usually thought to be the labourers in the vineyard of the Lord: bishops, priests, deacons, religious, maybe catechists. It is therefore necessary to remind everyone that the ranks of labourers in the Lord's Vineyard have been expanded to embrace all disciples of Christ, every baptised Christian. Jesus did that more than 2000 years ago just before his ascension. Therefore, every disciple of Christ, that is every baptised Christian, must see himself or herself as a labourer in the Lord's vineyard. Everyone must be involved in the task of proclaiming the Good News and doing God's work. It is both a duty and a right. That is, you must do it, and no one can prevent you from doing it, as long as you are doing it right.

If everyone would just do his or her part, and not sit on the fence, the harvest would still be rich (great), but the labourers would no longer be so few. The Church, like the world, is made up of three categories of persons: those who make things happen, those who watch things happening, and those who wonder what happened. Where can you be 'Counted right now? Where would you like to be counted when you close your eyes to time and open them to eternity? So, get involved!