20 February 2018
Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
Jesus has entered the wastes to gather His people, to lead them back to our home with God. He tells us that, in the end, He will divide the “sheep” from the “goats.” Today He begins teaching us something vital if we are to enter that Promised Land: He teaches fallen humanity how we speak to our Father. We were so used to the wilds, so used to God being only Lord and Master, that the notion of addressing Him as “Father” was utterly forgotten.
“In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words.” This verse is often thrown at Catholics as a Biblical proof against such things as the rosary or litanies, but Jesus is not condemning such methods of prayer. In the pagan world, when seeking the favor of a god you had to know the god’s name or, in other cases, know the name he or she liked the best. And so the pagans would rattle off a long litany of names and titles like a religious ring-toss, hoping one of the names would evoke a response from the deity. In other words, a pagan’s prayers might be completely ineffective if they happen not to utter the name their targeted deity feels like responding to that day. Knowing a deity’s name was thought to be the key to getting them to do things in your favor: Jesus is therefore telling us that the pagans pray to gods they do not know. Thus their prayers are in utter vain.
Yet we pray not only to a God we know, but to a God who knows us; not only a God, but a Father who “knows what you need before you ask him.” We address our God as Father, which is a beautiful and intimate title but also we are acknowledging the manner of relationship we have with our God: we are His children. He is in Heaven; He is not a statue, a concept, or a god of any place or thing, but rather a living God who dwells in Heaven yet is not so distant that He is not present to us. His name is holy, so holy that we never utter it yet, again, He is our Father: what child addresses their parent by his or her first name? We know our God and He knows us, such that we are beyond even being on a first-name basis, but rather we enjoy the intimacy of familial terms.
As children we imitate the Son whose chief desire was to do the will of the one who sent Him; we echo this desire in saying “thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven.” We ask our Father not merely for the “bread” we need to live throughout the day, but the bread come down from Heaven that gives life to the whole world (John 6:51). We ask Him to forgive us, and we ask His aid in helping us to forgive others who have wronged us; otherwise, as Jesus teaches us at the end of our Gospel today, we cannot ourselves be forgiven. We ask Him not to allow us to be tempted and tried by the Enemy but to be delivered from evil by His strong arm, to defend us and keep us safe until we come home to Him at journey’s end.
This is the prayer of a child of God, of someone who knows Him and is known by Him. This is the prayer of the people in the wilds, the bleating of His dear sheep.