Thursday of Week 1 of Lent – First Reading
Commentary on Esther C:12,14-16,23-25*
Esther, a Jewish woman and queen to King Assuerus (Greek, Xerxes) of Persia, used her influence to avert a massacre of her people by the Persians. As she prepared to enter the presence of the king she made the prayer in today’s passage.
She prays to God to stretch his protecting hand over his people and to help her, particularly in the task she has to do. She acknowledges her weakness and that, without God’s help, there is nothing she can do. But she, so to speak, reminds God of the promises he made long ago to his chosen people, chosen as a “lasting inheritance”. It is a prayer of pure petition.
She knows that she and her people are totally in God’s hands. She does not threaten or try to manipulate God or bargain with him. She leaves the outcome entirely to him.
We are encouraged by today’s Gospel to ask, to search, and to knock as a way of acknowledging our total dependence on God. At the same time, whatever we ask for, like Esther, we leave the outcome totally in his hands. As Jesus prayed in the Garden:
Father…not my will but yours be done. (Luke 22:42)
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*The text references for this passage from the Book of Esther vary from Bible to Bible. The citation above is from chapter C in the New American Bible (Revised Edition). The Book of Esther consists of an original Hebrew text with a later (but still pre-Christian) text in Greek added. Non-Catholic Bibles tend to omit the Greek text as apocryphal. Today’s reading comes from a part of the Greek text.
Thursday of Week 1 of Lent – Gospel
Commentary on Matthew 7:7-12
Today’s readings are about prayer, and specifically, prayer of petition. The Gospel reading sounds marvellous:
Ask, and it will be given to you; search, and you will find…
It seems all I have to do is pray for something and I will get what I ask for. And yet, we all know from experience, that is simply not true. I pray to win the lottery, but don’t even get one of the minor prizes. I pray for the recovery of a person with cancer, but the person dies. What is happening? Is Jesus telling lies? Are there some hidden conditions of which we are not aware?
I believe the answer lies in the second half of the passage. First, Jesus asks whether a father would offer a stone to his son asking for bread, or whether a snake would be offered instead of a fish.
If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
In other words, if we human beings, in spite of our shortcomings, care for the well-being of our children, then surely God, who is all good, will be infinitely more caring. The problem is not that God does not answer our prayers; the difficulty is that we tend to ask for the wrong things. We do not give a child a sharp knife to play with even though, when we refuse to do so, he throws a temper tantrum and gets angry with us. A good parent, of course, will try to give the child something else which satisfies the child’s real need at the moment.
Jesus is saying that God will give “good things” to those who ask. In fact, as Jesus says elsewhere (Matt 6:8), God already knows all our needs so it is not necessary to tell him. Then why pray at all? The purpose of prayer is for us to become more deeply aware of what our real needs are.
The things we ask for in prayer can be very revealing of our relationship with God and with others. It can be very revealing of our values and our wants (which are very different from our needs). The deepest prayer of petition will be to ask God to give us those things which most benefit our long-term well-being, those things which will bring us closer to him and help us to interact in truth and love with those around us. It is a prayer to be the kind of person we ought to be. It is difficult to see that prayer not being answered.
It may be useful for us to look at the prayer of petition of Jesus in the garden and how it was answered. Paul, in the second letter to the Corinthians also shares an experience of petitionary prayer which he made (2 Cor 12:7-10) and the surprising answer that he got.
Today’s Gospel passage ends with the so-called Golden Rule:
In everything do to others as you would have them do to you, for this is the Law and the Prophets.
Note that it is expressed positively rather than negatively and that makes a considerable difference. The negative version can be observed by doing nothing at all—not so the positive version. Although it is a separate saying, it can be linked with what Jesus says about petitionary prayer. If we expect God to be kind and generous to us, surely we are expected to be equally kind and generous to those who come asking our help.
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