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 Sirach 48:1-15
About this passage, the Vatican II Missal states:
“Having read in the Book of Kings the story of the great Elijah, we now read Sirach’s poetic description and praise of this prophet.”
It is quite normal in our liturgical readings that, after we have been hearing about one of the great personalities of the Old Testament, there is a final encomium taken from the Book of Sirach (also known as Ecclesiasticus). We had a similar reading after hearing about David’s life. These testimonies are taken from a part of the book called “Praises of the Fathers”. The book is listed among the so-called ‘apochryphal’ books which are not part of the recognised canon in either the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures of other denominations.
The author of Sirach here recalls the great exploits of Elijah, including his triumph over the priests of Baal and his bringing down fire from heaven when the Lord burnt up the sacrifice of Elijah, but not that of the priests of Baal. He was also instrumental in the breaking of a long drought; he raised a dead child to life; and he brought about the destruction of kings (Ahab).
About Elijah, the passage states:
[You] heard rebuke at Sinai
and judgments of vengeance at Horeb…
This seems to refer to the time when Elijah went to the mountain at Horeb and learned that God was not in violence, but in the gentle breeze (“sheer silence” in the NRSVue translation). This seemed to be a reproof from Yahweh that violent action was not the way Elijah’s enemies were to be dealt with.
Finally, he anointed kings who would do the Lord’s work, appointed Elisha as his successor and at the end was taken up to Yahweh in a fiery chariot, the transport of kings.
There is then a subtle reference to his future coming, heralding the arrival of the Messiah:
[You] who were prepared at the appointed time
to calm wrath before it breaks out in fury,
to turn the hearts of parents to their children
and to restore the tribes of Jacob.
The coming of the Messiah will see the inauguration of peace (“My peace I give you…” John 14:27). It will be a time of reconciliation and it will see the inauguration of a new family embracing not just the tribes of Jacob, but the peoples of the whole world.
And yes, says the author in a beautiful turn of phrase:
Happy are those who saw you
and were adorned in love!
For we also shall surely live.
Here there are intimations of immortality. And for those who “were adorned in love”, the word “love” surely means the love of God. However, the Hebrew text is unclear and the sentence may apply to Elisha, whose praises immediately follow.
Elisha was filled with the spirit of Elijah. He wrought many marvels and nothing was beyond his power—even:
…in death his deeds were marvelous…
This refers to a strange event in the Second Book of Kings which took place after Elisha’s death. Just as a dead man was going to be buried, a raiding party was seen, so the mourners threw the dead body into the grave where Elisha was buried and fled. But as soon as the man’s body touched Elisha’s bones, the man came to life and stood up (2 Kgs 13:20-21).
Shakespeare has one of his characters say rather cynically that “the evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones”. Unfortunately that is often the case, but as Christians we might make a special point of remembering the good things that people did in their lifetime, as this reading does.
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