July 24th - 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
(Gn 18:20-32 ; Col 2:12-14 ; Lk 11:1-13)
Does God answer prayer? Today's Gospel addresses that question. Luke recounts how Jesus teaches his disciples to pray the Lord's Prayer. The intercessions in the that prayer are quite simple: the food to live one more day, and the help to live forever in heaven. That help includes forgiveness of sin, guidance to avoid temptation, and freedom from evil. To drive home the point about the effectiveness of prayer, Jesus tells them a parable about someone asking his friend in the middle of the night for a loaf of bread. Jesus assures his disciples that persistence pays off, and the friend will come through with the bread despite the inconvenience. Jesus tells them to ask so they might receive, seek so they might find, and to do so persistently. Then Jesus tells them one more parable about what happens when a child asks his father for a fish or an egg. As it is hard to believe a human father would be so perverse as to give his child something evil when he asks for something wholesome, so it would be all the more true that God who is all good would not give someone something evil to those who ask for something good. Jesus says that God will give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him.
Sometimes God knows that answering our prayer exactly the way we expect is not always good for us. And so He may answer in an unexpected way, which might appear to our limited human mind that God is not listening to us. But that should not prevent us from asking. Remember that when Jesus was praying the night before his sacrifice on the cross he asked God that this cup should pass – that he would not die the next day. And we know that God denied his request. Yet this did not sever the relationship between Jesus and his heavenly father. We can follow Jesus' example and always add “thy will be done” to any petition we make to God.