Sunday the 27th of July 2025 - The Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Genesis 18:20-32/ Ps 138(137)/ Colossians 2:12-14/ Luke 11:1-13

Karl Barth was a renowned Christian theologian who used his considerable intellect to lecture and write on all aspects of the study of religious faith, practice, and experience, especially the study of God and of God's relationship to us and the world. Once when visiting a college of theology, he was asked by a student to summarise his theology. Barth is reputed to have replied by quoting a song he learnt from his mother when he was a child, it went, ‘Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so …’ It is remarkable that such a great mind could boil down his understanding of what the gospel teaches us into a child’s song. This is an example of the everyday theology that Barth had that was also characteristic of Jesus. Jesus had the ultimate knowledge of theology, he is God and part of the Trinity with God his Father, and God the Holy Spirit, and yet he was able to teach the fundamentals of our faith through his parables and actions without ever writing a word. Sometimes we can complicate what is in reality very simple.

The readings today give us examples of how to pray with simplicity but also with perseverance, trust, and boldness. In the first reading we hear of Abraham bartering with God in what could be considered to be a playful, almost irreverent, manner. The God of the Old Testament is often depicted as a God of vengeance and anger and yet here we have a mere human being negotiating with God. It almost seems that Abraham is manipulating God into mercy but in fact he is being used by God to show God’s mercy. This passage shows us that God is open to direct petition from us, and we are encouraged to be persistent in our prayer. In the Gospel we receive one of the great gifts from scripture, the perfect prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, given to us by Jesus himself. Through the parable Jesus calls us to pray to God with the intimacy between a parent and child, with confidence, faith, courage, and perseverance. God can never be irritated by our prayers; he will always be there to listen to us and provide for us what we need. Note, what we need rather than what we want, these can be very different things.

When considering prayer and how we can sometimes feel we are not being heard by God I am drawn back to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before he suffered and died. Here we find Jesus praying earnestly to his Father that he be spared the torture he was about to endure. His desperation was so great that his sweat fell like drops of blood on the ground. Making it a perfect prayer Jesus ended his petition with the proviso that God’s will be done not his. The prayer of Jesus was not answered in the way he had originally asked but it was answered in a way far greater through the resurrection, an answer to all the prayers of Jesus as well as all the prayers of the whole of humanity. God hears all prayer, God answers all prayer, but not necessarily in the way we ask or expect. God answers our prayers in the way that is best for us and for his Kingdom. Our faith should lead us to an understanding that allows us to say, not my will but yours be done.

There two accounts of Jesus giving us the words of the Our Father. The one we have today from Luke’s Gospel and the one from Matthew’s Gospel. The words we use in our familiar prayer come from both versions, they are not in essence different, but the two writers emphasise wording according to the people they were writing for. All scripture is inspired by God and therefore useful for instructing us and bringing us to a greater understanding of God. It is right therefore that we have amalgamated the Luke and Matthew versions to give us the definitive wording we have used down the centuries and that we share with other Christian denominations. It is the prayer that we can most often pray in the public arena because it is still widely known.

Jesus often took himself away to quiet places to pray. The disciples were familiar with formal prayer as we are with the various liturgical prayers we encounter in the Mass and other formal settings. The prayer they saw Jesus engaged in was different and it intrigued them sufficiently to ask him directly to teach them how to pray. The words Jesus gave them and are handed down to us make the perfect prayer because they come from Jesus. Familiarity can breed contempt, so it is important that we take time to pray the words we are given rather than simply reciting them. It can be useful to pray the Our Father slowly stopping after each line, maybe repeating the line, then meditating on what the words are saying.

We start by addressing God in heaven and praising his name but not as a remote celestial being but a loving parent, not as individuals but as a community calling God our Father. We pray for the coming of God’s Kingdom, something that Jesus promised before his death and resurrection. We are already part of that coming Kingdom which has already been founded by Jesus and we eagerly await his return to complete it. We pray for God’s will to be done on earth, His will not ours or the will of a worldly self-possessed people. God will answer our prayer in accordance with his will and not ours, but it will be ultimately for our benefit. We pray for our daily bread. This is not only the Body and Blood of Jesus in the Eucharist but all our daily needs. Then we ask God for forgiveness, but we attach a condition to that forgiveness which many of us may find challenging to achieve. We ask God to forgive us as we forgive others. We need to see others as God sees them not as we see them. We are all in need of mercy and we are all brothers and sisters in Christ, children of God. Finally, we ask that God preserves us from the temptations that surrounds us in this life delivering us in the end out of evil into the perfection of heaven.

In developing our prayer life, we need to keep it simple remembering that prayer is just a conversation, a conversation with God. We need to learn how to pray and what to pray for, approaching God Our Father with the simplicity of a child rather than the complexity of a philosopher, submitting to God’s will not demanding our own, understanding that God already knows what we need, and what we need might not be the same as what we want.

God Bless Brendan