We have this confidence in God,
that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.
Jesus said that he would do for us whatever we asked in his name (see John 14:13). The slight caveat in that promise is that we must ask in his name. That is to say, we can't be purely acting on our own behalf and out of our own self interest. Rather, acting in the name of Jesus means that we are at least try to pray "according to his will". We have been given discernment to recognize Jesus Christ as the one who is true and the grace of abiding in him so that "we are in the one who is true, in his Son Jesus Christ". Because of this gift of the Spirit, this anointing giving us the power of discernment, we ought to try to pray more and more from our posture living in Jesus, acting and operating in his name.
by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (see Ephesians 2:5-6).
We must learn to prioritize God's will and his desire for ourselves and others over that which is merely natural, and even more so than that which is selfish, prideful, or ambitious. One praiseworthy request is to ask God to give life to a brother whom we know to be sinning. For those, however, who entirely dead in their sins we must learn a different way to pray, one which does not confirm them in their sins for the sake of lesser things. We can't be content to just pray that they experience the blessings of worldly life. We ought not help them indulge the illusion that their spiritual life is fine by the normal interchange of prayer between Christian brothers and sisters. What will draw back those dead in sin to God is often deeply mysterious, and sometimes quite difficult to understand. And so, rather than architecting things ourselves, we should entrust them with our own prayers to the mercy of God. For God himself is the one who can bring back sinners just as Father Brown caught the thief:
I caught him’ [the thief] with an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.- G. K. Chesterton
Our prayers are not always answered immediately or in the way we expect. According to John this ought not lessen our confidence.
And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask,
we know that what we have asked him for is ours.
We can be confident that we have been heard even when we don't see immediate results. Who can be a better image of this than Our Lady in today's Gospel?
And Jesus said to her,
"Woman, how does your concern affect me?
My hour has not yet come."
His mother said to the servers,
"Do whatever he tells you."
Mary's faith is greater than our own, and what she asks in the name of her Son will surely be done for her. So we who are her other children should bring our petitions to her. When the wine of our joy is running low she is ready to intercede with her Son for our sakes. She will help us to conform ourselves to her Son's will and shape our requests to be worthy of his name. With the help of her intercession the bland water our own efforts have produced can become the joy of the Holy Spirit. She helps us realize and enter into the reality of a life that belongs to God.
We know that we belong to God,
and the whole world is under the power of the Evil One.
We are meant to know that we belong to God and that, with his protection, the Evil One will not be able to touch us as it in nowise could touch Our Lady. It is for this reason that we must be on guard against idols, against anything that would take the place of Jesus Christ in our lives, because he himself "is the true God and eternal life".
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