Homily for 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
17th Sunday of Ordinary Time

July 28, 2019

Luke 11: 1-13
Nativity, Washington, D.C.

“Jesus was praying in a certain place” (Luke 11: 1).

In the gospels Jesus is a man of prayer as much as he’s a teacher and worker of miracles.  His prayer really was the secret of his teaching and his actions; all he said and did flowed from his relationship with God.

You may say, “But Jesus is God.  How could he pray to himself?”  True, Jesus is God, the 2d Person of the Holy Trinity, God the Son, in human flesh.  But in that human flesh he is completely human, with a human mind, soul, and will.  All of these he must submit to the divine will; so as a man, he prays; e.g., in the Garden of Gethsemane, he prays, “Not my will”—his will as a human being afraid of suffering and death—“but your will be done,” i.e., I, Jesus of Nazareth, the human son of Mary, desire to do your will, God my Father.

So the apostles ask Jesus to teach them how to pray.  St. Luke then links Jesus’ prayer to his exhortation to us to persevere in our prayer thru the examples or parables that follow.  You noticed, no doubt, that Luke’s presentation of the Lord’s Prayer is somewhat briefer than Matthew’s, the version we’re more familiar with (Matt 6:9-13).  No need to discuss that.

When Jesus prays, he prays on the most intimate and familiar terms, addressing God as his Father—abba in Hebrew—a name full of affection and trust, like “Daddy” or “Papa.”  Jesus teaches us to speak to our creator, the lord of the universe, with the same familiar term, to call God our “Father.”  He reminds us that we’re all God’s precious children, all one great family, all brothers and sisters, regardless of our many differences.  He invites us to have the same confidence in his Father that he does.

He also invites us to hallow God’s name (not “hollow” it), i.e., to keep God’s name hallowed or holy, to revere and respect it.  It’s our prayer that every man and woman will know and honor God’s name.

The 2d commandment of the Decalog that God gave Moses on Mt. Sinai is, “You shall not take the name of the Lord, your God, in vain” (Ex 20:7), falsely or empty of meaning.  Many of us do take the Lord’s name in vain; we exclaim, “Oh, my God,” or text “OMG” as if it were the most trivial thing in the world.  Similarly, we often say something like, “I swear it’s true,” or “I swear I’ll be there.”  That’s an implied oath calling God to witness to the truth of our words, as in the court oath we’re all familiar with:  “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God.”

So, sisters and brothers, as we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we might ask whether we truly reverence God’s holy name.

Then, as we pray the way Jesus teaches us, we commit ourselves to forgiving those in debt to us.  That’s not a financial statement but a moral or relational one, and Jesus sets it as a condition for God’s forgiveness of us:  “forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us” (11:4), i.e., everyone who has offended us somehow.

That may be the hardest thing Jesus commands.  It is a command, not merely advice.  He repeats it elsewhere in the gospels, as in his parable of the servant who wouldn’t forgive a small debt after his own huge debt was forgiven (Matt 18:23-35).  Yet Jesus gives us his own example, praying on the cross that his executioners and those who unjustly condemned him be forgiven; he even makes an excuse for them:  “They know not what they do” (Luke 23:34).

Sometimes we sin very willfully and knowingly.  Sometimes we sin out of weakness, fear, laziness, etc.  But God’s always willing to forgive, and we count on that.  Otherwise, we’re in big trouble.

We’re also in big trouble if we refuse to forgive relatives, co-workers, public enemies, others who sin against us, deliberately or out of their own weakness, ignorance, fear, etc.  How do we go about something so hard to do?

By asking for God’s grace—for ourselves and for the one or ones we’re angry at.  We need healing for ourselves because we’ve been wounded.  The other may need healing or maybe conversion.  We do want sinners and evildoers to repent and be converted, don’t we?  When we pray for that, we’re praying for their ultimate and greatest good, whether its some cousin we’re furious at, or some politician or a terrorist.  We’re aligning our own will with God’s will:  “God desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:4).  To be saved ourselves, our will must be aligned with God’s.

You’ve probably heard on the news that the Trump Administration has decided to re-activate the federal death penalty.  Some people are cheering that.  Putting aside for the moment that St. John Paul II and Pope Francis have both condemned capital punishment, if the motivation for the death penalty is vengeance—getting even with some murderer or other criminal—that in itself is a serious sin; vengeance is always wrong, whether it’s personal and private, or public and “official.”

Today’s gospel reading ends with reference to the Holy Spirit as a gift from God the Father (Luke 11:13).  That’s a gift we need to pray for constantly, that we may think, speak, and act as disciples of Jesus—in our prayer and in everything else.