2024: The Year of Prayer
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, 2024
Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will proclaim your praise.
Those words from Psalm 51—eminently suitable for homilists, and words I pray often as I prepare to preach, or before I preach—are also the opening words of the Invitatory, the introductory prayer to the Church’s daily and hourly prayer, the Divine Office or Liturgy of the Hours, which is prayed every day by priests, deacons, religious, and many secular lay Catholics. These words from Psalm 51 are closely bound to today’s Responsorial Psalm, Psalm 95, which, in the Divine Office, is the normal Invitatory Psalm, the invitation to prayer, prayed at the start of every day, making Psalm 95 the most frequently prayed of all 150 psalms in the book of Psalms.
The Psalms are the Church’s original prayer book, and the heart and soul of the Divine Office. The privileged role of Psalm 95 as the normal daily opening prayer gives us good reason to focus on the character of this particular psalm and what it has to teach us about the nature of prayer—particularly in this year, 2024, which we have been invited to observe as a special Year of Prayer by our Holy Father Pope Francis.
Why is that? Well, it’s really about next year, 2025. In Catholic tradition the quarter century years, the years divisible by 25—2000, 2025, 2050, 2075, and so on—are generally celebrated as holy years or jubilee years, like how people typically celebrate birthdays and anniversaries every year, but there are the special numbers that make for bigger celebrations. The reason the Church does this is that the counting of years is based on the approximate date of the birth of Jesus. So, for instance, the year 2000 marked approximately two thousand years since Jesus was born. Since the Eternal entered into time, redeeming time itself, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II. This is the most momentous event in the history of the universe; the Big Bang, the creation of the Universe, is trivial in comparison! We could have no more fitting reference point for counting our planet’s revolutions around the Sun. So next year, 2025, is like a year-long special celebration of the Incarnation of Jesus—and, in a way, that makes this year, 2024, a kind of Advent year of preparation. In the words of Pope Francis:
In this time of preparation, I would greatly desire that we devote 2024, the year preceding the Jubilee event, to a great “symphony” of prayer. Prayer, above all else, to renew our desire to be in the presence of the Lord, to listen to him and to adore him. Prayer, moreover, to thank God for the many gifts of his love for us and to praise his work in creation, which summons everyone to respect it and to take concrete and responsible steps to protect it. Prayer as the expression of a single “heart and soul” (cf. Acts 4:32), which then translates into solidarity and the sharing of our daily bread. Prayer that makes it possible for every man and woman in this world to turn to the one God and to reveal to him what lies hidden in the depths of their heart. Prayer as the royal road to holiness, which enables us to be contemplative even in the midst of activity. In a word, may it be an intense year of prayer in which hearts are opened to receive the outpouring of God’s grace and to make the “Our Father,” the prayer Jesus taught us, the life program of each of his disciples.
That is what you and I are invited to in the months ahead: to let this coming Lent, this Easter season, and the long Ordinary Time that follows be a special season of prayer and preparation, an Advent season, for the coming Jubilee.
How can we do this? How can we get started? Let’s begin with our responsorial psalm, the normal Invitatory Psalm, Psalm 95. Like the other psalms sometimes prayed in the Invitatory—Psalm 24, 67, and 100—Psalm 95 is first of all a hymn of praise to God the Creator for the goodness of creation and his own goodness. There are many other kinds of psalms—they can be angry, sorrowful, informative, and many other things—but the Church’s prayer each day begins with the goodness of creation and God’s own goodness.
There’s also another note in Psalm 95, an urgent call to attentiveness:
If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Notice how Moses the prophet, in the reading from Deuteronomy, stands between God and the people of Israel, who are afraid to hear God’s voice themselves. They want to follow God, but not too closely! Close enough to benefit from his power, but not so intimately as to face the demand of personal commitment to a relationship with the God of holiness.
But Jesus is more than a prophet like Moses. He comes as “a great light in the darkness,” “in a land overshadowed by death.” He brings a new teaching with authority: not a prophet’s God-given authority, but his own divine authority. God himself has come into our midst. There’s no prophet any more to stand between us and God. We are each invited to intimacy with God. The invitation to prayer comes not from the pope or from the Church, but from God himself!
This invitation begins, in Psalm 95 and the other invitatory psalms, with the goodness of creation and the goodness of the Creator. This is not the whole of prayer, but it’s the right place to start every day: by recognizing anew that this good world is a gift, a dim reflection of the infinite goodness of God, and every day that we wake up and draw breath in this world is a gift. A gift that, first, we should receive with appreciation and gratitude, and, second, that should turn our hearts to the Giver himself.
This is something I’ve said before, but it bears repeating in this Year of Prayer: What if we all challenge ourselves, take it as a goal, upon waking up every morning, to try to offer to God, as nearly as possible, our first deliberate thought each day, or the first thought that you can? It doesn’t have to be elaborate. Something with the sense of
Thank you, God, for this new day of life. Thank you for all your goodness to me. I give this day back to you. May everything I do today give you glory and benefit those around me.
It’s not a whole day’s prayer, but it’s a good start. The most important thing with prayer is to start! Does that sound like a good idea? Would you like to do that? If so, take it as “his voice” speaking to you, God’s invitation to you.
Don’t be discouraged if you forget! Maybe for hours, maybe for days. Whenever it comes back to your mind, take it as “his voice” speaking to you. Take a moment to lift your heart and mind to God and renew your intention. They say it takes three weeks to form a habit and three months to make a permanent lifestyle change. You’ve got exactly three weeks until the first Sunday of Lent, and three months will take us to the Fifth Sunday of Easter, so now’s a great time to try to start to form a habit. With God’s help! God has invited us, and if we ask for his help, rest assured, it’s because he’s already helping us.
Lord, in this Year of Prayer, open all our lips, and our mouths will proclaim your praise. Amen.