17th. Sunday Year (C)
(Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians
2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13)
Our Gospel reading today is all about prayer: Jesus
gave us what we call the "Lord’s Prayer", and then He told us a
parable exhorting us to persevere in prayer.
I was very struck by those final words of His:
If you then, being evil, know how to
give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give
the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?"
How many people, in their prayers, ask to be given the
Holy Spirit? Surely, most who, in their
prayer ask to be given something, will ask for a blessing suited to this world:
health, food, success, comfort, strength, or whatever, for themselves or for
those dear to them. Now, it is clear
from the prayer Jesus gave us that He does not disapprove of such requests: for
He gave us words asking for bread, forgiveness, and protection; and He Himself,
in His own personal prayer, frequently asked His Father to strengthen and guide
Him. So how is it then that He speaks,
in the verse I have just quoted, as though the heavenly Father gives only the
Holy Spirit, no matter what we might request?
We have here a
wonderful example of the hidden riches of Holy Scripture! We do pray for all sorts of blessings for
ourselves and, as the example of Abraham encouraged us to do, also for
others. When, in such prayers, we pray
according to the will of God, He hears our prayers and grants our requests: but
He does this through the Holy Spirit, ever secretly at work in our lives and in
our world.
Even more
important, however, is the implicit teaching contained in those words of Jesus:
namely, that we can ask for nothing better than the gift of the Holy Spirit: this
is because He is, Personally, the "Gift of God" which means that He,
the Holy Spirit, is the Gift the Father wants to give, and Jesus wants us to
receive, above all; and therefore He is, indeed, the supreme Gift for which a
disciple of Jesus can, and should, pray.
Let us try to understand why.
In the first reading we had the vague hint of the
Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity - three Persons in one God – found in
the deepest layers of the Old Testament:
And the Lord
said, “Because the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because
their sin is very grave, I will go down now and see whether they have done
altogether according to the outcry against it that has come to Me; and if not,
I will know.” Then the men turned away from there and went toward Sodom, but
Abraham still stood before the Lord.
.
Three "men" had come to Abraham's camp in
the heat of the day and had accepted his hospitality; then, as you heard, they
spoke as one: "The Lord said … I will go down to Sodom." Not "we will go down", but "I
will go down". However, we are then
told that it was two of the three who "turned away and went toward Sodom,
while Abraham was still standing before the Lord." Somehow those heavenly guests of Abraham were
one and three.
As you know, the Son and the Holy Spirit were sent by
the Father on earth, as it were to sinful Sodom, for our salvation. The Son was born of Mary and was called Jesus
because He it was – the Son of Man - Who would die and rise again to free us
from our sins. After dying on the Cross,
Jesus rose to heaven as He had foretold (Luke 22:69):
Hereafter the Son of Man will sit on the
right hand of the power of God,
and it was the Holy Spirit Who came down upon the
Church to extend Jesus' salvation to all mankind.
This had been foretold in Psalm 110:
The LORD said to my Lord: "Sit at
My right hand till I make Your enemies Your footstool."
Jesus, therefore, the Son of Man, having conquered sin
and death, is now seated at the right of God the Father in glory, while the
Holy Spirit -- working in and through Mother Church and, indeed, all men and
women of good will -- makes His enemies and the enemies of mankind’s salvation a
footstool for His feet.
Now, perhaps, you can begin to see why we should want
to receive, above all other gifts, this Gift of God, the Holy Spirit, into our
lives.
For He is, first of all, the Spirit of Truth, Who alone can lead us to the truth of Jesus and
about Jesus:
When the Helper comes, whom I shall send
to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth Who proceeds from the Father, He
will testify of Me. (John 15:26)
Again, He is the Spirit
of holiness:
Jesus Christ our Lord was declared the
Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness by the resurrection
from the dead. (Romans 1:4)
Who, therefore, can lead us to holiness of life more
surely than the Holy Spirit, the very Spirit of holiness.
Moreover, He alone knows God's will for us, what He
expects of you and me individually, and what He has prepared for us (1 Corinthians
2:11):
No
one knows the things of God except the Spirit of God.
The Holy Spirit knows us through and through: for if,
according to the Scriptures, no other human being can know us as we know
ourselves:
what man knows the things of a man
except the spirit of the man which is in him?
how much more true is it, that the Holy Spirit Who
knows the things of God Himself and who dwells in the hidden depths and secret
folds of every human heart, knows us infinitely
better than we could ever know ourselves?
Finally we should pray for God's Gift because Jesus
Himself has put this request first and foremost in the prayer He taught His
disciples:
Father, hallowed be Your name. Your
kingdom come.
Only the Spirit of holiness can hallow the Father's
name; and He, moreover, is the One Who has been sent by the Father to make
Jesus' enemies a footstool under His feet and thus bring in the Kingdom of God:
Father,
hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come.
People of God, Mother Church is suffering greatly
today for the sins of the world no doubt, but also for her own sins. There is no sure defence, nor can there be,
against personal sin ... it is the work of one far more powerful than men:
Satan, the Devil. Against such a foe, only
God, the God of truth and love, holiness and power, can defend and redeem
us. When, therefore, society as a whole
turns away from God, when governments accord Him no power or authority in their
social structures, then we are guided and governed by nothing more than
strictly limited human wisdom at the best which is totally incapable of
defending us against sin. Politicians,
and government ministers of all sorts, here and abroad, strike attitudes and
use pretentious words that, often enough, serve no other purpose than to hide,
cover up, not only human ineptitude and institutional malfunctions, but also international
greed and malpractice of all sorts.
Money can and does lead men and women of apparent rectitude to do great
evil, not only in secret and against individuals but, what is much worse,
against the public body. The desire for
popular acceptance together with the fear of public disapproval, motivate the
political body as a whole much more forcefully than does solicitude or respect
for their fellow men.
Therefore we must remember:
We have received, not the spirit of the
world, but the Spirit Who is from God,
that we might know the things that have been freely given to us by God. ( 1 Corinthians 2:12)
We must treasure "the things freely given to us
by God", that is our faith, His truth and grace, and the hope which it
inspires in us; we have to reject the worldly craving for popularity and
political correctness if we would hope to have the Holy Spirit of God at work
in us: forming us, secretly but surely, in the likeness of Jesus. The world loves to plan and plot now for its
own future profit and advantage; we, as disciples of Jesus, must live in the
present in such a way as to sustain hope for our eternal destiny, and that we
can only do by the active rejection of sin in the present and the persevering
practice of prayer for the future.
Which one of you convicts Me of sin? (John 8:46)
We can, as did Jesus in the desert, turn away from
temptation and reject sin in our lives by the power of His grace, in the power
of His own Spirit Whom He shares with us; and in thus fighting to overcome sin
in our lives we will, inevitably, practice and grow in true virtue. The
acquisition of holiness, however, is not within our sphere of competence, so to
speak: we cannot plan to become holy of and for ourselves, for such endeavours,
be they moved by spiritual simplicity or, more likely, by spiritual ambition,
by virtue of their being fatally flawed with presumption, can result in nothing
more than an imitation holiness for human appreciation only. God alone is Holy, and true holiness for a
child of God is not a worldly commodity humanly conceived and fabricated, so to
speak; neither is it even the faithful following of a predetermined path
apparently walked by saints or taught by spiritual guides: it is a human
sharing in the very nature of God, and only persevering prayer can help us
toward that which is essentially His Gift
alone; and even then, such prayer is largely
a matter of listening and longing, looking, waiting and aspiring, come what may.
The Holy Spirit, the Gift of God, alone can lead us to
that holiness which God wants of us individually: He is the Spirit of holiness,
indeed, He is the Spirit of Love, and love of Jesus, love of God, is the
only truly authentic holiness for human beings.
We have to humbly and perseveringly pray for that; firmly trusting
that the Father, of His great mercy and goodness, will give it to us, for
Jesus' sake, in His own way and according to His own measure, not as the
world or our own pride would have it.
Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, on
a day such as this, let us confidently and whole-heartedly renew our hope in
His promise:
If you who are evil, know how to give
good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the
Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?
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