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Sacred Scriptures/Liturgy- Commentary on Sunday's Readings |
Christ's Parable About the Need to
Pray Always
29th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Fr. Raniero Cantalamessa, OFMCap, Pontifical Household Preacher
www.zenit.org
Exodus 17:8-13a; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8.
Sunday’s Gospel begins thus: “Jesus told them a parable about the
need to pray always and not to lose heart.” The parable is the one
about the troublesome widow. In answer to the question “How often
must we pray?” Jesus answers, “Always!”
Prayer, like love, does not put up with calculation. Does a mother
ask how often she should love her child, or a friend how often he
should love a friend? There can be different levels of
deliberateness in regard to love, but there are no more or less
regular intervals in loving. It is the same way with prayer.
This ideal of constant prayer is realized in different forms in the
East and West. Eastern Christianity practiced it with the “Jesus
Prayer”: “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me!”
The West formulated the principle of constant prayer in a more
flexible way so that it could also be proposed to those who do not
lead a monastic life. St. Augustine teaches that the essence of
prayer is desire. If the desire for God is constant, so also is
prayer, but if there is no interior desire, then you can howl as
much as you want -- to God you are mute.
Now, this secret desire for God, a work of memory, of need for the
infinite, of nostalgia for God, can remain alive, even when one has
other things to do: “Praying for a long time is not the same thing
as kneeling or folding your hands for a long time. In consists
rather in awakening a constant and devout impulse of the heart
toward him whom we invoke.”
Jesus himself gave us the example of unceasing prayer. Of him, it is
said that he prayed during the day, in the evening, early in the
morning, and sometimes he passed the whole night in prayer. Prayer
was the connecting thread of his whole life.
But Christ’s example tells us something else important. We are
deceiving ourselves if we think that we can pray always, make prayer
a kind of respiration of the soul in the midst of daily activity, if
we do not set aside fixed times for prayer, when we are free from
every other preoccupation.
The same Jesus who we see praying always, is also the one who, like
every other Jew of his period, stopped and turned toward the temple
in Jerusalem three times a day, at dawn, in the afternoon during the
temple sacrifices, and at sundown, and recited ritual prayers, among
which was the “Shema Yisrael!” -- “Hear, O Israel!” On the Sabbath
he also participated, with his disciples, in the worship at the
synagogue; different scenes in the Gospels take place precisely in
this context.
The Church -- we can say, from its first moment of life -- has also
set aside a special day dedicated to worship and prayer: Sunday. We
all know what, unfortunately, has happened to Sunday in our society:
Sports, from being something for diversion and relaxation, have
often become something that poisons Sunday ... We must do whatever
we can so that this day can return to being, as God intended it in
commanding festive repose, a day of serene joy that strengthens our
communion with God and with each other, in the family and in
society.
We modern Christians should take our inspiration from the words
that, in 305, St. Saturnius and his fellow martyrs addressed to the
Roman judge who had them arrested for participating in the Sunday
rite: “The Christian cannot live without the Sunday Eucharist. Do
you not know that the Christian exists for the Eucharist and the
Eucharist for the Christian?”
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary