Thursday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – Gospel

Commentary on Matthew 6:7-15

Into yesterday’s passage on how we are to worship God through prayer, alms and fasting, Matthew places a related piece of teaching on how we ought to pray. This clearly seems to be an insertion, and today we deal with it separately.

Jesus tells his disciples not to pray like many of the Gentiles. They go in for long prayers, hoping that eventually God will hear them. That is quite unnecessary, Jesus says, because our Father already knows our needs before we ask. If that is the case, why then should we bother praying at all? We do not pray to tell God what he already knows—we pray so that we will realise more deeply our own needs and our total dependence on him.

Jesus then goes on and tells his disciples how they should pray. He teaches them, in effect, what we now call the Lord’s Prayer, or the ‘Our Father’. We have become accustomed to reciting this prayer very often—at every Mass, as well as whenever we say the Rosary and at many other times.

The prayer in this form (Luke has a shorter version) contains seven petitions. Seven is a favourite number for Matthew. In listing the genealogy of Jesus he divides it into three lists of seven (chapter 1 of his Gospel); there were probably seven Beatitudes in the original text (chap 5); there are seven parables of the Kingdom (chap 13); forgiveness is to be offered not seven times, but 77 times (chap 18); and there are seven ‘Woes’ when denouncing the Pharisees (chap 23). Finally, the Gospel itself is divided into seven main sections (Infancy, five discourses, Passion).

The text of the Lord’s Prayer should not be seen as just a formula for vocal recitation. It is, rather, a series of statements and petitions in which we affirm our relationship with God, with the people around us and with the world in general. It is a statement of faith and it is, as we shall see, a highly challenging and, therefore, even rather dangerous prayer.

Let us take a brief look at the petitions one by one.

Our Father
The challenge and the danger begin right in the first two words. We address God as Father, the source of life and of everything that we have; we have nothing purely of our own. But God is not just ‘Father’; he is ‘our‘ Father. And that ‘our’ includes every single person who lives or has ever lived on this earth; not a single person can be excluded.

In addressing God as ‘our Father’ we are acknowledging that every human person (every one of us) is a child of God, and therefore, that we all belong to one huge family where we are all, in a very real way, brothers and sisters to each other. There is no room here for rejection, or hatred, or prejudice or contempt of any kind based on race, nationality, colour of skin, gender, sexual orientation, social class, religion or anything else. If I am not prepared to accept every single person as a brother or sister, I will have problems even beginning to say this prayer.

May your name be revered as holy
Other forms are ‘Hallowed be thy name’ or ‘Holy be your name’. Of course, God’s name is holy no matter what we say or think. We make this prayer more for our sake rather than for his. Here we are praying that God’s name be held in the deepest respect by people everywhere. That is sadly not the case. Some people despise his name and others do not even know it. We pray that the whole world will know God’s name, which is to say, to know and recognise God as their God and Lord, their Creator and Conserver and the final end of their lives on this earth. It is, in fact, another form of the next petition.

Your Kingdom come
We have already spoken about the nature of the Kingdom. It might be more accurate to say, ‘Your kingship come’. In other words, we pray that every person in our world may put themselves consciously and willingly under the kingship and lordship and the love of God. We do this, above all, by our working together to make this world the kind of place that God wants it to be—a place of truth and love, of justice and peace, of sharing and caring. In one sense, of course, God is Lord irrespective of our relationship to him. But it is clearly his will that people, on their part, should accept that loving lordship as the centre of their lives. And that is the work of the Church and of every single Christian, indeed of every person anywhere—to help people recognise the kingship and lordship of God and to accept it as the key to their present and future happiness.

Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven
This, in a way, is simply another way of saying what we have already asked for in the previous two petitions—it is the will of God that people everywhere recognise the holiness of his name and submit themselves gladly to his kingship and lordship in our world. We do that most effectively by identifying totally with the mission and work of Jesus to bring life, healing and wholeness to our world. To do the will of God is not simply to throw aside what we want and accept God’s will even when it is totally contrary to our own. We are only fully doing God’s will when we can see clearly that what he wants is always what is the very best for us. And we are only fully doing his will when we fully want what he wants, when our will and his will are in perfect harmony. Then we do what he wants and we do what we want. We are praying here to reach that level of oneness.

Give us today our daily bread
While it does not look like it, this also is a highly dangerous prayer for us to make. First of all, we are only asking for what we need now. Later in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus will tell us not to be anxious about the future. We are asking for what we need today; tomorrow is another day. We take care of one day at a time.

But there is one little word here that is highly dangerous. It is the word ‘us’. Who is that ‘us’? Just me and my immediate family? Or my parish? Or my neighbourhood or my town or my country? Surely it is the same as that ‘our’ in the first petition—it includes every single person. I am praying, therefore, that every single person have bread to eat today. We know, of course, that there are millions of people (some of them in wealthy countries) who do not have enough to eat, or who suffer from malnutrition and poorly balanced diets. In praying that all of ‘us’ have our daily bread, are we expecting God to drop manna from the skies or are we not reminding ourselves that the feeding of brothers and sisters is our responsibility? If people are hungry or badly fed, it is not God’s doing. Human beings are directly responsible for this in most cases (outside of natural disasters).

This petition prayer can also include the Bread of the Eucharist. But in sharing that Bread together we are saying sacramentally that we are a sharing people and we will share our goods and blessings with others, especially those in need. Otherwise our Eucharist becomes a kind of sacrilege.

And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors
Again, is this not another dangerous prayer to make? We are asking that God’s forgiveness to us be conditional on our readiness to forgive those we perceive to have hurt us in some way. That is a daring thing to do. And forgiveness does not simply mean uttering a few words. Forgiveness in the Scripture always includes an attempt at reconciliation between offender and offended. But even if reconciliation is not achieved, we can still forgive.

We can go even further and say that the fully Christian person is never offended—or even more, cannot be offended. The true Christian has a rock solid sense of their own security and their own inner worth which no other person can take away. When such a person is the recipient of some attack, be it verbal or physical, their first response is to reach out to the attacker with concern and sympathy. It is the attacker who has the problem, not the one attacked. Most of us have a long way to go to reach that level of inner peace. If what you say about me is true, I accept it; if it is false, then it is false. Why should I take offence?

And do not bring us to the time of trial, but rescue us from the evil one (or from evil)
In the end, we acknowledge our weaknesses and our total dependence on God’s help. We pray that we will not find ourselves in a situation where we fall seriously. We ask to be protected from the powers of evil with which we are surrounded.

Some texts conclude with:

For yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever and ever. Amen

This prayer is used by many Christian denominations and has now been included in the Catholic Eucharist after the Lord’s Prayer, but separated by a prayer for peace. It is believed that this conclusion, not found in most Bible manuscripts, was introduced for liturgical reasons.

Finally, in addition to simply reciting this prayer in the rapid way we normally do, we could sometimes take it very slowly, one petition at a time and let its meaning sink in. Or we could just take one petition which is particularly meaningful to us at any time and just stay with it until it really becomes part of us.

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Thursday of Week 11 of Ordinary Time – First Reading

Commentary on 2 Corinthians 11:1-11

In our last three readings from 2 Corinthians, we’ve entered a final section of the Letter where Paul vigorously defends his credentials against people who have been criticising him. There is a unity in these chapters which suggest they may originally have been part of a separate letter. They consist of an apologia by Paul, defending his way of acting and his ministry. The language is highly emotional and very strongly expressed in parts. In the central part, there is a very emphatic statement on his credentials to be an apostle.

As he did in the early part of the letter (which we saw last week), Paul continues defending his record with the Corinthians, though in much stronger terms. Today’s reading is relatively mild. He begins by appealing to the Corinthians to put up with his foolishness, which, he feels does not disqualify him from being an evangeliser. Just before this he had said:

…it is not those who commend themselves that are approved but those whom the Lord commends.
(2 Cor 10:18)

Clearly, Paul feels that he has this mandate, unlike those others he is criticising who do not have such a mandate and yet whom the Corinthians seem to tolerate. He feels like a jealous parent or matchmaker:

I feel a divine jealousy for you, for I promised you in marriage to one husband, to present you as a chaste virgin to Christ.

The “divine jealousy” reminds us of the prophets who describe God as being jealous when his people dally with other gods who would try to take his covenant people away from him. The relationship between God and his people is likened to a marriage, where Israel is Yahweh’s bride.

Similarly, Paul, like a father, has betrothed the Corinthian community to Christ as his bride. But they are now dallying with teachers who are not true ‘matchmakers’ and who will not lead them to their true Spouse, Christ.

But just as Eve was deceived by the cunning of the serpent, Paul is afraid the Corinthians are being seduced away from a sincere and pure commitment to Christ and are becoming unfaithful to their marriage with Christ. For if someone comes and preaches “another Jesus” than the one Paul and his companions gave them, or if they receive a “different spirit” from the one they originally received, or a “different gospel” from the one they first accepted, the Corinthians seem to be quite ready to go along with it. Those ‘other preachers’ are seen as doing the seductive work of Satan, and the Corinthians are flirting with teachings that are not part of the tradition which Paul gave to them.

But Paul feels that he is in no way inferior to what he calls “super-apostles”. They seem to be people who have come from outside and are regarded by Paul as intruders. They also seem to have won support from at least some of the community and this may be because, compared to Paul, they were much more persuasive as speakers and orators. It is possible that they had appealed to the authority of the church leaders in Jerusalem and even had letters of recommendation from them. The Church in Jerusalem was very Jewish and it may not have understood the very different conditions prevailing in the pluralist situation in Corinth, where Jews and Gentiles formed one community.

These “super-apostles” seem, in fact, to be the same kind of people who were causing so much trouble among the Christians of Galatia, where there were movements to restore observance of the Jewish Law not only among Jewish Christians, but even among Gentiles as well. The fact that, in tomorrow’s reading, Paul strongly affirms his own credentials as a Jew indicates that these “super-apostles” belonged to this group.

However, Paul is not attacking the Jerusalem leaders, whose authority and credentials he acknowledges. He is rather attacking the ‘super-apostle’ intruders. The intruders are ‘super-apostles’, not in the sense of the the true Apostles in Jerusalem, but in their own estimation. They consider themselves superior to Paul as apostles and ministers of Christ. Paul rejects their claim to be apostles in any superlative sense (Greek, hyperlian), judging them bluntly as “false apostles”, ministers of Satan masquerading as apostles of Christ. On the contrary, as we will see in tomorrow’s reading, Paul himself will claim to be a super-minister of Christ on the basis of his record.

When it comes to proclaiming the gospel, Paul admits that he may not be as good a speaker as they are, but he yields nothing to them in knowledge (perhaps this is the weakness, the distressing ‘sting of the flesh’ he mentions later on). And he has made this clear to the Corinthians “in every way”. In other words, in all their contacts with him, he has been passing on to them the Word of God which has been revealed to him. Even in his life experiences, the death and life of Jesus are being revealed. His opponents can make no such claim.

Paul now moves to another reason for complaints against him—his custom of preaching without any remuneration. He says:

Did I commit a sin by humbling myself so that you might be exalted, because I proclaimed God’s good news to you free of charge?

Did that make him look like a freelancing amateur? One feels there is an element of sarcasm here and perhaps a jibe at his opponents who may have expected ‘fees’ for their work.

He preached without remuneration because his expenses were covered by other churches he had already evangelised. He says he even “robbed” other churches by accepting help from them in order to give his services free to the Corinthians. And, when he was among them and in material need, he asked nothing from the Corinthians. Members of Christian communities in Macedonia came down all the way to Corinth to take care of Paul’s needs. He refrained then, and he will continue to refrain from burdening them now. He says:

As the truth of Christ is in me, this boast of mine will not be silenced in the regions of Achaia.

Achaia is the province in the south of Greece in which Corinth was situated.

And why will he do that? Because he does not love them? “God knows I do!”, he says. Surely his desire not to burden them in any way is proof enough of that. He rejects any lack of affection as his motive (possibly imputed to him by his opponents) and states his real motive, which is to emphasise the disparity between himself and the others.

Paul’s experience has been repeated many times in the history of the Church (and of other churches). People are often only too eager to hear some novel message, some new way of explaining the gospel, especially if it is accompanied by a lot of razzmatazz. The same goes for some devotional movements in the Catholic Church today which attract large numbers of people, but which are not true to the core message of Christ—the establishment of the Kingdom.

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