17th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The prayer

Lk 11,1-13

        The Christian prayer springs from Jesus. The disciples asked him to teach them to pray. They grew up in the Jewish formation and followed the liturgical assemblies and the personal payers at home. Seeing Jesus praying, they liked to share his spirit, because he emanated a seduction.

        The disciples were not interested in a new prayer. They liked to reach a personal relation with God. They have been astonished, when they knew that the first step was to call God “father” and that he cares for what we need every day. Jesus taught them to ask God for the daily bread, for forgiveness and that they may be spared from the temptation of faith. All the more they were surprised hearing that God behaves as we do with our neighbours. God doesn’t play miracles. He gives us the bread we need, and we are happy to praise him. We long for his authority is installed on the earth. Indeed our faults are forgiven along the forgiveness we grant, by becoming God’s co-operators in our daily relation with people. Pope John Paul II said that man is the true road towards God. Our relation with God goes in the same way we behave with the neighbours and especially the way we forgive them.

        Jesus used to look for the time to pray. He got up early in the morning and went to solitaries places out in the nature. It was this spirit that the disciples wanted to know. It was indeed an experience of God’s intimacy and of love necessary against the difficulties of the life. God the Father loved Jesus and Jesus loved him in return by living among people and accepting the life as it was. Jesus learned from the Father the beautiful parables and words he told people so as also his enemies confessed that nobody spoke as he did (Jn 7,46).

        Is it possible to pray as Jesus? Yes, it is. He has given us a way in the prayer “Our Father”. Abraham lived on the same intimacy with God, when he tried as a son with the father to intercede for the two cities Sodom and Gomorrah (Gn 18). Jesus did all the more during his earthly life for our sake. There was no just man among us but him who gave his life to restore us to life. He forgave us from the cross (Lk 23,34) and laid his life in his Father’s hands.

        In the Baptism we have been consecrated with blessed oil to share in Jesus Christ’s personality, he who is Priest, King and Prophet. As priests we all can intercede for mankind and experience the intimacy with God the Father, from whom every goodness and personal equilibrium takes origin.

Fr. Tiziano Pegoraro,
a missionary Priest at St. Ladislav Church in Bratislava
Bratislava, 25 July 2010