Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 23, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Seventeenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
July 23, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday in which the disciples of Jesus ask him how to enter into the most fundamental consequential conversation of all: the dialogue with God we call prayer.
• “Lord, teach us to pray,” one of Jesus’ disciples asks at the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel. On its face, it seems like a straightforward-enough request, but when one understands well the context in which it would have been asked, it would be similar to Michael Jordan’s asking someone to teach him how to dribble a basketball. The Jewish disciples of Jesus already should have been experts on prayer. The whole of what we call today the Old Testament was one long instruction on how to pray: Abraham, Moses, Samson, David, Elijah, Esther all teach us by example. The 150 psalms were a prayer book the Jews sang over and over with inspired words, the prophetic books contain many examples of prayer, and the wisdom literature shares the fruit of much prayer and contemplation on the mysteries of God. The history of the Jews and the whole Hebrew Bible was a school of prayer. Yet Jesus’ disciples, fully educated in that school, knew that there was something different about Jesus’ prayer that they hadn’t learned from the rabbis in the synagogues or the levitical priests in the Temple. His example of prayer — going off to the desert, heading up on a mountain, stealing a corner in a garden, often spending all night — enticed them to ask him to teach them his secret. Implicitly they knew that the type of prayer to which God was calling them was more than merely making some time for God, or reflecting on the Torah or putting the sacred words of the Psalms on their lips. So they turned to Jesus to ask him to teach them this special art, and Jesus didn’t let them down. This weekend we learn from the same Master.
• One cannot exaggerate the importance of prayer in a life that’s truly and fully Christian. St. John Paul II, in his 2001 Pastoral Plan for the Church in the new millennium, said, “Prayer cannot be taken for granted. We have to learn to pray: as it were learning this art ever anew from the lips of the Divine Master himself, like the first disciples: ‘Lord, teach us to pray!’” He went on to emphasize what happens if we don’t learn that art. “It would be wrong to think,” he said, “that ordinary Christians can be content with a shallow prayer that is unable to fill their whole life. Especially in the face of the many trials to which today’s world subjects faith, they would be not only mediocre Christians but ‘Christians at risk’ … of seeing their faith progressively undermined,” something we see when Catholics drift away from the faith because they were often not finding God and entering into intimate existential dialogue with Him through the practice of their faith. So St. John Paul said, “It is therefore essential that education in prayer should become in some way a key-point” of everything the Church does, because “learning this Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer and living it fully, above all in the liturgy … but also in personal experience, is the secret of a truly vital Christianity” (NMI 32-34). For our faith to be truly alive, we must learn from Christ how to pray to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit. Basically our spiritual life will be worth what our prayer is worth.
• So how does Jesus teach us to pray? How do we enter effectively into the consequential conversation in which we exchange not just words or ideas with God but our very selves? Jesus teaches us the art of prayer in four ways.
• The first is by his own contagious example. In this Sunday’s Gospel, we read that “Jesus was praying in a certain place.” Jesus was constantly praying and it was this personal example of prayer that precipitated the disciples’ question for him to teach them. Jesus by his own witness showed how important prayer is. If Jesus, who is God, prayed so much, then he is instructing us by example the priority that prayer must have in the life of each of us who is not God. In prayer, as in all things, Jesus teaches by example and then says, no matter how busy we are, “Come, follow me!”
• The second way Jesus educates us in the Trinitarian shape of Christian prayer is through his own prayers recorded in Sacred Scripture, which manifested a quantum leap over the way of prayer faithful Jews would have been taught in Old Testament times. Jesus revealed that prayer was to be filial, the prayer of beloved son or a daughter, to a Father who loves his child with great affection. In the Old Testament mentality, God was regarded as so awesome, transcendent and distant that the great intimacy and loving reciprocity that God desires to have with us was not always apparent. Jesus came to reveal the Father’s face and to help us to turn to him as a beloved child. We see this in the prayers of Jesus that are recorded in the Gospel: everyone features an intimate, confident, loving address to his Father. “I thank you Father, Lord of heaven of earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will!” (Mt 11:25-26), he says on one occasion. “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I know that you always hear me” (Jn 11:41), he says on another. “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you” (Jn 17:1), he says in a third. “Father, not my will, but yours, be done,” he says in the Garden of Gethsemane. “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” (Lk 23:34) and “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Lk 23:46) he prays from the cross. The purpose of prayer is ultimately to seek the Father’s will, to come to know it, embrace it, love it, and do it. Jesus shows us how through prayer out of love for God, we come to love what God loves so much that his will becomes our will.
• The third way Jesus responded to the petition “Lord, teach us how to pray” was by instructing the disciples and us the different virtues and characteristics of someone who prays well. He gives us two in this Sunday’s Gospel. First he reinforces for us that to pray well, we have to pray as beloved children. “Is there anyone among you,” he asks, “who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” Just like a girl trusts that her earthly parents will not give her something poisonous when she asks for something good, so we’re called to trust in our Heavenly Father that he will give us something even better. Jesus says God the Father will give the Holy Spirit — he will give Himself —to those who ask him, with all the Spirit’s gifts, including his help to cry out in prayer, “Abba, Father!” The second disposition Jesus teaches us this Sunday is how to pray with perseverance. He uses the analogy of a next-door neighbor’s banging on the door at night to borrow three loaves of bread to extend hospitality to a late-arriving guest. If a friend would eventually get out of bed to give what was requested not because of goodness but simply to get the neighbor off his back, how much more readily, Jesus was saying, would the Father in Heaven who is good give what is requested by those children whom he loves.
• The final way Jesus teaches us how to pray is by teaching us what has been called the Lord’s Prayer. In giving us the words of the Our Father, Jesus was doing far more than merely teaching us a “magic formula” for us to follow rigidly. We know this because the words of the Our Father we have St. Luke’s Gospel are slightly different and briefer than the words found in St. Matthew’s. Jesus was rather teaching us about the types of things we should desire and the sequence of things we should pray for. We begin by focusing on God the Father and his name, his kingdom and his will, rather than our name, our fiefdom and our will. Then he teaches us to turn to our needs: to trust in his providing material and spiritual food each day, to forgive us our sins, to strengthen us when tempted and to deliver us from Evil One. Those seven things — first God’s holy name, kingdom and will, and then what we need to survive, forgiveness, strength in temptation and deliverance from sin, evil and the devil — are what Jesus teaches we should be regularly conversing with God the Father in the lifeblood of Christian life we call prayer.
• The culmination of Christian prayer is the Mass, which St. John Paul II said we need to learn to pray “above all.” Jesus’ greatest prayer was the one he said from the Upper Room and the Cross as he was preparing to save us, the prayer into which we enter live in time whenever we celebrate the liturgy. It’s at Mass that we enter into Jesus’ own filial petition to the Father, praying with perseverance from the rising of the sun to its setting, seeking the glorification of his name, the coming of his kingdom, and the doing of his will. The Mass is where the Father gives us something far greater than our daily material bread, namely, his Son, the true Living Bread come down from heaven. It’s where he strengthens us for the test, fortifies us to forgive, and bolsters us against the wiles of the evil one. And so as we prepare to “dare” to pray together as Jesus taught us this Sunday, let’s ask God the Father to send the Holy Spirit to remind us of what Jesus taught and take us further, so that we may pray the Mass together with him, have our whole life turn into a continual extension of this prayer, and become missionaries helping the whole world to learn the art of prayer and enter deeply into the most consequential conversation a human being can ever have. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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