11 March 2014
Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
The words we hear read from the prophet Isaiah today are truly amazing. God gives His promise that His word will always be fruitful. Water cannot but help make things wet, and when it does, the ground is set for even more amazing things—the bringing forth of life and vegetation, to start with. In the same way, God’s word will prepare everything it comes into contact with. God does not speak in vain. With the same impact as water on a field, God speaks to the world.
Especially when I am in the classroom, I wish that my words could be as fruitful as God’s. So I find great consolation in the reading from today’s gospel, where Jesus admonishes the disciples not to babble on to no end. What’s more, He shows them how to pray so as to avoid this, and gives them the Our Father. When we speak the words of this prayer, we speak words that are always fruitful, just as our Father in heaven speaks. Through a rote prayer that many Christians learn when they are small children, we are made God-like. As we reflect on our sins and temptations to sin, may we be mindful of what truly makes us like God and what merely seems to do so.