Persevering Faith in Action, 29th Sunday (C), October 16, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 16, 2022
Ex 17:8-13, Ps 121, 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• In today’s first reading, we have a pivotal scene from the journey of the Israelites across the desert. It happened at Rephidim, where Moses at God’s instruction had struck a rock and allowed it to gush forth water for the people to drink. A brand new well in the middle of the desert would obviously attract others who might see in the well not just the means to quench their thirst but a source of power and profit. And so unsurprisingly the fearsome Amalekites showed up. God told the Israelites not to be afraid and instructed Moses to climb a nearby mountain with the staff of God in his hand and allow Joshua and the Israelites to battle against Amalek and his soldiers. We see what happened during the fight. Whenever Moses raised his hands raised in prayer, the Israelites dominated. Whenever his hands grew tired and fell, the Israelites were pummeled. Hence Moses’ two assistants, his brother Aaron and Hur, had him sit on a rock as they from behind kept his hands raised in prayer until sunset. With the hands raised as an external sign of Moses’ constant prayer, Joshua and the Israelites ended up mowing down the Amalekites. Through this unforgettable lesson, God was teaching his people about the importance of praying always in order to persevere and be victorious in the battles of life, the battles all of us face, individually and as the people of God.
• Jesus underlines this message in the Gospel with the Parable of the Persistent Widow, which St. Luke says Jesus gave us so that we would learn about the “necessity for them to pray always without losing heart.” Notice it wasn’t about the “suggestion” of trying to find time to pray, or the “helpful tip,” but the sine qua non If this persevering widow was able eventually to get a corrupt judge to do the right thing when she was being victimized, Jesus says, how much more will God the Father, the Just Judge, “secure the rights of his chosen ones,” his beloved sons and daughters, “who call out to him day and night.” Jesus implies that God’s chosen ones do call out to him not just when convenient, not just when there’s an emergency, but night and day. His chosen ones pray always without growing weary. We seek to unite ourselves to him not just in formal times of prayer, but in our study, our work, our hobbies, even our sleep.
• At the end of the parable, however, Jesus asks a haunting question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” At first it’s seems like a non-sequitur. Jesus is talking about prayer through a story of a persistent widow and a corrupt judge but then he turns to asking about whether he will find people faithful. What’s the connection? It’s because prayer is faith-in-action. Jesus was asking whether when he comes — and by this he certainly means the end of our life, but since he can come at any point, he also means right now, tomorrow, any time — will he find us ultimately persevering in prayer? One of the reasons why it seems God does not always answer our prayers immediately is because he wants to train us in how to pray without wearying. If we got everything we asked for immediately, we might only pray episodically, when we need something. God loves us too much for that. Pope Francis focused on this point a few years ago, explaining that Jesus’ words about the necessity of praying always without giving up lead us “to deepen a very important aspect of the faith. God invites us to pray with insistence, not because He doesn’t know what we need, or because He doesn’t listen to us. On the contrary, … He is at our side. … But the fight against evil is hard and long, it requires patience and resistance… There is a struggle to carry on every day; but God is our ally, faith in Him is our strength, and prayer is the expression of this faith. … If the faith goes out, if prayer goes out, and we walk in the darkness, we will be lost on the journey of life.” To persevere faithfully in life, therefore, we must learn how to persevere faithfully in prayer.
• The reality is that many people do not pray with the grit of the importune woman in today’s Gospel. Many of us Catholics don’t persevere in prayer. We’re content on praying “a little,” saying a Hail Mary or two at the beginning or the end of the day. Others would like to pray more but believe they don’t have time, because they’re prioritizing so many other things in life to a life-changing time with God. Others, because of a bad experience or other reasons, stop praying altogether as an ordinary activity of life, only turning to God in times of crisis. Even priests and religious sisters and brothers can sometimes begin cutting the corner on their prayers, just getting them in as a duty, and eventually not getting them in at all except at times when they “professionally” have to pray. In short, many of God’s chosen ones don’t persist tenaciously in growing in communion with God in prayer. To all of us Jesus is speaking about the persevering faith he wishes to find in our prayer, hoping to open us up to receive his graces precisely so that we can pray in that way.
• One of the biggest reasons why people give up on the faith — either by choice or simply by drifting away — is precisely because they’ve never learned how to pray, how to hear God speaking, how to receive his light and strength in their daily life. Many have never learned how to encounter God whispering to them in quiet mental prayer, how to meet him during Mass as he teaches us with his wisdom and feeds us with his body and blood, how to contemplate him in Sacred Scripture, how to experience his mercy in Confession, how to recognize and love him in others, how to keep conscious of him at work, in school, and on the streets. They give up these practices because they were never trained how to find God in them in the first place. When I was a Catholic high school chaplain, when students would tell me that they had stopped going to Mass because they found it “boring,” I asked them whether they really knew God was there. In general, they didn’t. They didn’t think the reading had anything to do with God. They didn’t think the singing had anything to do with God. They didn’t even think that they were in God’s presence in receiving Holy Communion. They had come by that point to Mass for years, but never really understood that they were meeting the God who created them, entered the world to save them, died on the Cross for them, rose to give them life, and now journeys alongside of them to make them holy. They similarly didn’t know that prayer was more than “saying prayers,” but a loving dialogue of life with God who is alive and madly in love with them. They were doing the right things but not finding God, and they drifted from the practice of the faith because they intuitively grasped that without God all these activities lose their meaning.
• So one of the most important things we need to learn in life is how to pray, how to find God and enter into continuous conversation with him through the various activities of our life. We shouldn’t expect this to be easy. If we were out of physical shape and started going to the gym, it wouldn’t be enough for us only to do some bicep exercises with five-pound barbells. We would need to exercise our legs, our stomach muscles, our cardiovascular system, our shoulders. There’s a similar regimen to exercises our souls. It’s not going to be enough for us simply to do the form of prayer we like the most or find easiest. We need to push and pull and stretch ourselves. We need to take the guidance of the trainers God has given us. Just like top athletes wouldn’t be able to succeed on the field without putting in the hard work in the gym, so we will not persevere in life without putting in the hard work of various forms of prayer. That’s why last weekend we had a retreat on “Putting into the Deep: Learning and Living the Art of Christian Prayer,” in which we were able to focus on how to pray better our vocal prayers, to meditate, to contemplate, to praise God, to thank him, to ask for his forgiveness, to ask unceasingly for what others need or what we need, to pray the Mass, to pray our work, to pray our whole life. We focused on prayer because it is the most important thing we can learn. At the end of our privileged time at Columbia, the most important thing we should be walking away with is not a degree or even expertise in a particular academic discipline, but the capacity to pray well, in a way it can fill up our whole life. If you weren’t able to come last week, please know that slides and recordings from the retreat are all up at the website CatholicPreaching.com so that, if you’d like to grow in these ways, you still can.
• I want to focus today on a particular type of prayer. In the second reading, St. Paul stresses to St. Timothy a particular form of prayer that is “useful … for training in righteousness,” for helping us “remain faithful to what [we] have learned and believed,” for making us “equipped for every good work,” and “persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient.” It’s praying Sacred Scripture. To pray Sacred Scripture is something different than to study it. Praying it begins by asking what God is actually communicating in the text, then asking what God is trying to say to me in my own life and circumstances. Praying it provokes us to speak back to God to ask him for the help we need to live by what he’s indicating to us. It involves envisioning ourselves living by that word and making a resolution to put it into practice. Then it culminates in our acting on that word. This is the whole process that’s called the “divine” or “sacred reading” (lectio divina) of Sacred Scripture. God has given us Sacred Scripture to help train us to grow to be his image and likeness and fully human.
• Almost every aspect of Church prayer and life flows from learning how to pray Sacred Scripture with a holy persistence. The Liturgy of the Hours that priests and religious pray at least five times a day — and that lay people are encouraged to pray — is an ecclesial lectio divina each day in which we use God’s words to speak to him. It’s normally prayed together with others in a community of Aarons and Hurs, as we all help each other to pray. The Rosary is similar. St. Thomas Aquinas called the Rosary a “compendium of the Gospel,” because together with Mary we ponder the meaning of the various episodes of her Son’s life. The new evangelization — sharing our faith with our family members, friends, fellow students and the whole world — begins by being drenched in prayer, just as Christ prayed all night before he called his first twelve disciples. Vocations work begins with ardent prayer, as we turn to Harvest Master constantly and beg him to provide laborers for his Church. The sanctification of our work begins with prayer, as we explicitly offer our work to the Lord and like St. Joseph did with Jesus, work always for, with, and in the Lord Jesus.
• The Mass is the great persevering prayer of the Church. It began during the Last Supper, continued on Good Friday and has continued all the way down to the present day. It’s one continuous sacrifice, as Eucharistic Prayer III has it, “from the rising of the sun to its setting.” It’s where we come to unite ourselves to Jesus and where he hopes to find us not only present but praying with living faith, ready to persevere in prayerful union with him through the valleys and mountains of life all the way until, God-willing, we join the saints in the eternally persevering prayer of the heavenly Jerusalem! The Lord gives us Mass each day as a school of prayer so that he can help us always be ready for his arrival at the end of our life by the way we prepare with prayerful eagerness to receive him here, seeking to unite all aspects of our life to him. It’s here where we daily answer his question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

I charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus,
who will judge the living and the dead,
and by his appearing and his kingly power:
proclaim the word;
be persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient;
convince, reprimand, encourage through all patience and teaching.

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