Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me…
When was the last time you had a real conversation with God?
In Psalm 138, it is clear that when the psalmist cried out for help God responded: I will give thanks to you, o Lord, with all my heart, for you have heard the words of my mouth, the psalmist sings, confident that the Lord will always answer. The patriarch Abraham is similarly confident in God’s patience and love, and so he is bold in his conversation with the Lord in the Book of Genesis. Abraham believes that the Lord may destroy the city of Sodom, and so his prayer takes the form of a real conversation; Abraham wants to understand just how far God’s mercy will reach. Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city, Abraham asks, Would you wipe out place? What about forty-five, forty, thirty? What if there are no more than twenty? What if there are at least ten? It is almost endearing: Abraham is open enough to be able to converse with the Lord, and the Lord loves Abraham enough to endure his persistent questions. We can almost see them both smiling as the conversation continues…
When they see Jesus himself praying, the disciples in Luke’s Gospel ask Jesus, Teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples. The disciples seek what Jesus has – to be sustained by a relationship grounded in prayer – and Jesus has a connection to the Father unlike any they’ve seen or witnessed. Notice that the prayer Jesus teaches them begins with that word, Father; they are first to address God by a word that connects, a word that draws them into relationship. Their prayer is also to be constant: God our friend will give us whatever we need because of our persistence. Jesus is speaking throughout of where their heart is when they pray, hopeful that they will cultivate an intimacy with the Lord that is greater than anything they might have imagined.
Jesus would again pray before his disciples while on the cross. Aware that our own salvation means entering into Jesus’ death – being buried with him in baptism, as Paul tells the Colossians – that we might rise with him, we should seek the transformation that prayer offers us in order to remain one with him always, forgiven of all transgressions. We long for the kind of relationship that Jesus enjoys with the Father, like the one that Abraham enjoyed with his God, and God himself longs for such a relationship with us, a relationship with no distance between us, so that God’s love and mercy can pour out abundantly on us. When we enter into prayer, we are drawing nearer to all God wants us to be, and mercy is ours. Let us pray one day to see God smiling at us as he must have smiled upon Abraham, full of love for the one who seeks him in persistent prayer.
This post is based on Fr. Pat’s Scripture class.
Image source: www.wordclouds.com
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