Fr. Tom Richie
One of my very early memories is my mother praying with me the prayer to my guardian angel before I went to sleep. Prayer is a vital part of our lives if we claim to be Christians or even people who believe in God. Usually when we are little we learn prayers and we form an idea about God. But sometimes God is used to threaten us with punishment if we are bad children. Some develop their idea of God as a fearsome authority figure. The way we pray flows from the way we see God. For some their prayers are a ritual they need to fulfil in order to keep safe or get what they want.
In
the gospel today the Disciples ask Jesus to teach them to pray just as John the
Baptist has taught his disciples to pray. In this Gospel Jesus teaches them the
prayer that we call “the Lord’s Prayer” or the “Our Father” and then we have
several other teachings of Jesus about pray that have been collected together. I
am sure we can learn something here to help us pray. I think the most important
thing we learn is the way that Jesus begins. He doesn’t say “O, all powerful Lord”,
or “Great God”. He says when you pray say “father”. Actually that is not right.
We have even made it sound more formal than it should be. What Jesus actually
says is in Hebrew “Abba”, which is more like “Papa”, or “Dad”. And this is not
the only place where he uses this way of addressing God. Jesus is not telling
us that prayer is about getting the right words for prayers. What Jesus is
telling is that to begin we have to have the right relationship with God. To
pray is about entering into a relationship, or making ourselves aware of our
relationship with God as our loving father.
When
we want to communicate with people we must first be aware of our relationship
with them as our co-worker, as a shop assistant, as our child, our wife, a
beggar, our boss. Our communication will follow on from our relationship. We
will not be using a set formula of words. When we are thinking of God Jesus say
think of him as “Abba”, Dad, or Papa. How the Hebrew people described God’s
attitude to his people was to say he was rich in “racham” a Hebrew word meaning
“compassionate love”. The word is related to the Hebrew word for
womb and it means the tender compassion that a mother or father has for the
child that they have borne. When we begin to pray Jesus is reminding us that we
are responding to the God who loves us in this tender way and we can think of
him as having the qualities of loving father and mother.
Jesus
tells us that we then remind ourselves that we want everything to be in his
hands, our life, the whole world, “your kingdom come”. We can ask for our needs
“give us bread”, we remember that we do wrong “forgive us as we forgive”, and
we need to be protected from temptation and evil, ”deliver us from evil”.
The
story of Jesus about asking the man in bed to get bread is not telling us that
it is very difficult to get God to hear us, but to say that if an unwilling man
will answer our request how much more easily will we be heard by our loving
father. If we do not give up on trust in him he will not give up on us. He will
answer our prayers but not always in the way that we expect. I think that many
times what we ask for could turn out to be like the stone or the snake or the
scorpion for us if we were to really get it: Like praying for success and
riches, or to punish someone else. God will always listen to our prayers and he
will answer them but in a way which often changes us to see things in another
way. He helps us to bear the pain, the sadness, the loss, the humiliation. He
changes our hearts to take away the hardness, to see the good in others, to
forgive and to have the courage to ask for forgiveness. If we really give our
heart to God in prayer it will bring joy and peace.
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