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, 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: and this is because He is, Personally, the
"Gift of God" which means that He, the Holy Spirit, is the Gift-above-all
the Father wants to give us, and Jesus wants us to receive; 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 furthest layers of the Old Testament:
The Lord said, “Because the outcry against
Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, I must go down and see
whether or not their actions fully correspond to the outcry against them that
comes to Me. I mean to find out.” Then Abraham’s visitors walked on farther
toward Sodom, but the Lord remained standing before Abraham.
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 Who would die and
rise again to free us from our sins. And
in fact, 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.
Then it was that
the Holy Spirit came down upon the Church to extend Jesus' salvation to all
mankind.
This had been
foreshadowed in Psalm 110:
The LORD said to my Lord: "Sit at My right hand till I
make Your enemies Your footstool."
Jesus,
therefore, 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 for all men and women of good will -- makes His enemies and the enemies
of our salvation into 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 fulness of
truth concerning Jesus, His purposes, and His will:
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:
No one knows the things of God
except the Spirit of God. (1 Corinthians 2:11)
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 then, 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 the sins of too many of her own children. Mother Church suffers in, and is influenced
by, a society that today, is bound, thwarted, and corrupted by a self-righteous
political correctness, moral abandonment and spiritual lawlessness, which grows
ever stronger among men in our western world.
The law, 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 personal greed and malpractice of all
sorts. The desire for power over others
and personal pleasure can and does lead men and women of apparent rectitude to
do great evil in secret; while the desire for popular acceptance together with
the fear of public disapproval, motivate many much more forcefully than does
obedience to God or respect for their fellow man. 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
power, pleasure, and popularity 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 give witness to the truth of Jesus’ Good News, and
to sustain and nourish our hope for an eternal destiny of human full-filment
and heavenly beatitude in the family of God our Eternal Father, with our Lord
and Saviour Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Divine Love and Life. 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 His grace and the power of His Spirit Whom He shares with us; and in thus
fighting to overcome sin in our lives we will, ultimately, 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 and praise. God alone is Holy, and true holiness for a
child of God is not a worldly commodity to be 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 God’s Gift alone; and even then, such prayer is largely a matter
of listening and longing, looking, waiting and aspiring, trusting and
delighting, 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 the love of Jesus 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 to
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?