The Faith on Earth the Son of Man Wants to Find, 29th Sunday (C), October 16, 2022

At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus asks a truly haunting question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” The question seems to be for him more than rhetorical. Jesus asks it, it seems, because he’s not convinced that when he comes, he’s going to find faith. We are living in an age and culture in which many seem to be drifting away from the faith. A couple of years ago, the Pew Research Center recently released the results of a survey that shows that in 65 percent of American adults say that they’re Christians, down 12 percentage points in just the previous decade. Those who describe themselves as atheists, agnostics and “nothing in particular” are now at 26 percent of the population, up from 17 percent in 2009. Catholics are just now 20 percent of the adult population, down from 23 percent, where it had held stable for a generation. We have all seen the consequences of these trends, which have led to the shuttering of some Churches, schools, convents and seminaries. Catholics have seen it among our family members and friends who are no longer practicing. We have seen it in empty pews in many Catholic parishes on Sundays.

This is all a result ultimately of spreading secularism. Secularism, as Pope Benedict once incisively defined it, is living etsi Deus non daretur, living as God does not exist. One may still believe in God, but one lives like everyone else, like those who do not believe. Even though someone never consciously made a choice against God, life gets structured almost entirely without him. People live self-reliantly trusting in themselves rather than in God. That’s why Jesus’ question is so timely: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Jesus’ point in asking the question is certainly not to get us afraid of the future or frightening of his ambushing us unawares at a moment we least expect. It is meant to help us never to take our faith for granted. Faith is a gift of God but it’s also a virtue, a moral muscle, we’re called to exercise and make stronger. Jesus wants to fortify our faith. Today he shows us how to buttress it in the parable of the persistent widow. The real test of whether he will find faith in us, he indicates, is whether, when he comes, he will find us persevering in prayer, seeking to unite our whole day and life, our mind, our heart and our soul to God. Prayer is faith in action. We live as we pray and we pray as we live and if we’re going to be found faithful, we will be found prayerful. That’s why Jesus teaches us today not about the “suggestion” or the “helpful idea” of “praying always without growing weary,” but about the “necessity” of doing so. He seeks to show us how to “cry out to God day and night.” He wants to train us to live that way so that no matter what time he comes, he will find us an existence-made-prayer, united to him in a prayer of our whole life.

The message about the necessity of prayer is similarly underlined in today’s first reading, in the fierce desert battle between the Israelites and the Amalekites. Joshua and the Israelite soldiers were on the battlefield. Moses climbed the top of a nearby hill with the staff of God. 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. Joshua and the Israelites ended up mowing down the Amalekites. God was teaching them through this unforgettable lesson about the necessity of praying always to persevere in the battles of life, the battles we face, the battles the Church and the world face.

Jesus wants to help us learn to pray with persistence because he knows that is the best means to form us to persevere heroically in life. Pope Francis once explained that Jesus’ words about the necessity of praying always without giving up “leads 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.” We can’t win the battle to remain faithful on will-power. We need to be praying constantly to the Lord. And God wants to train us to recognize this truth, because the stakes can’t be bigger. Just as the Israelites discovered with Moses’ prayer, when we persevere in prayer, when we regularly turn to God for help, when we’re conscious of his desire to live in communion with us, then we will be open to receiving and responding to his help to confront and overcome the challenges we face each day. When our hearts, however, grow weary and our hands fall, when we distance ourselves from the Lord, when we try to do things on our own, we’re at risk of giving up the good fight of faith altogether. To persevere faithfully in life, we first must learn how to persevere faithfully in prayer.

This is a lesson taught to us today by the Visitation nun St. Margaret Mary Alacoque who persevered in prayer such that Jesus appeared to her to reveal the depth of the love of his Sacred Heart and how pained he was that even those consecrated to him did not persevere in loving him prayerfully in the Church. It’s a lesson taught by the Cistercian nun St. Hedwig who persevered in faith with her fellow nuns until death It’s a lesson highlighted for us yesterday by the great Carmelite doctor of the Church, St. Teresa of Avila. It’s a lesson underlined by St. Teresa of Calcutta, who in an address in Los Angeles asked, “What will convert America and save the world? My answer is prayer. What we need is for every parish to come before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament in holy hours of prayer.”

Today 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.

The Liturgy of the Hours 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 it a “compendium of the Gospel,” because together with Mary we ponder the meaning of the various episodes of her Son’s life. Everything the Church does is meant to feature this persistent prayer. The new evangelization 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 SS. Margaret Mary and Hedwig, Teresa of Avila and Teresa of Calcutta 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?”