In praying, do not babble like the pagans,
who think that they will be heard because of their many words.
In our Gospel today Jesus took another step to remove religion from the realm of cause and effect. Yesterday he addresses some of the short-term rewards that can distract us from finding fulfillment in God himself. After hearing that teaching we learned that we should no longer look to a direct and controllable result for prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, but would have to look to God himself to reward us when and how he chose. This morning we heard him reveal that prayer that was simply transactional would not be accepted. God wasn't interested in his favor being purchased by a mere performance of prayer. This lesson is less than intuitive however. We tend to have a very hard time praying in the context of a relationship. Our interest in 'doing it right' can often overflow the essence of what we are doing.
Do not be like them.
Your Father knows what you need before you ask him.
There is nothing mechanical about prayer. The very fact that God knows what we need and desires even better for us than we do for ourselves demonstrates why prayer must be about more than a correct formula. It must be about encounter with God and the transformation that such encounter brings.
Our Father who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy name,
thy Kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Jesus demonstrated that simple prayer that we can truly inhabit with our hearts and minds is the basis on which our life of prayer must be built. Only with these building blocks in place can we expand outward to spend more time in prayer. Such prayer may appear to be fruitless in terms of effects, to be nothing more than wasting time with God, but as long as we are becoming better acquainted with him who is the first and final cause of all things this will not discourage us. We will be able to even embrace the devotions of the Church without the risk of doing them merely for spiritual vanity. The rosary has many words, but we must not come to believe that the value of the rosary is in that repetition. It is rather in the intercession of our Blessed Mother and the enlightenment and graces that come from pondering the mysteries of the decades. It is emphatically true that one decade prayed attentively is better than hurrying through all of the decades of all of the mysteries.
Our prayer does not begin with us or our efforts, and neither does the completion of it rest upon them. Jesus wants us to find the freedom for relationship that comes from being loved by the Father in heaven before we ever thought to pray in response. When we learn this lesson and are set free from the cause and effect system of performative religion we become increasingly free to love others sincerely as well. We become more who we ourselves are truly meant to be.
Even if I am untrained in speaking, I am not so in knowledge;
in every way we have made this plain to you in all things.
Did I make a mistake when I humbled myself so that you might be exalted,
because I preached the Gospel of God to you without charge?
Thank God that Paul did not mask his Gospel behind a façade of fancy words, behind an expensive price tag that would be apparently worthy of his knowledge. He was well acquainted with the simplest and most direct form of communication with Jesus himself. It was his sincere response to this message that brought him healing and formed him into the person God always intended him to be.
By the truth of Christ in me,
this boast of mine shall not be silenced
in the regions of Achaia.
And why? Because I do not love you?
God knows I do!
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