How to pray in two lessons: On the road with Jesus
[homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time]
For four months this year, during all the Ordinary Time Sundays of July, August, September, and October, the Gospel readings from Luke in this Lectionary Year C invite us to follow Jesus “on the road” from Galilee to Jerusalem. Jesus’ career in Luke’s Gospel is structured in three parts: In part 1, he’s in Galilee, in the north, where he grew up. In part 3, he’s in Judea, in the south, in and around Jerusalem, where he dies. The middle part, from the end of chapter 9 into chapter 18, finds Jesus “on the road” from Galilee to Judea, to Jerusalem.
Some of Jesus’ best material is in this “travel narrative,” this long middle section of Luke: the good Samaritan (which we heard two weeks ago); the prodigal son; the beggar Lazarus and the rich man; the Pharisee and the tax collector. And every Ordinary Time Sunday reading this year from July through October comes from Luke’s travel narrative.
How fitting to spend these four months “on the road” with Jesus in this Jubilee Year 2025, as Pope Leo, following Pope Francis, calls us to “continue the journey we started” traveling together as “pilgrims of hope.” We are all, like Jesus in Luke’s travel narrative, on a journey—in life, in faith, in this Holy Year. What makes us not just travelers, but holy pilgrims, is twofold. First, our destination, our goal, is God himself. You can say heaven—it’s the same thing. God is what makes heaven heaven! Our journey is toward God. But, secondly, God himself, Jesus himself, is with us on this journey. He travels with us. We travel with him. That makes us holy pilgrims.
How? How do we do this? How do we travel with God, with Jesus? There are many important answers to that question, but it starts and ends with what today’s readings are mostly about: It starts and ends with prayer. Only through constant prayer, daily prayer, perseverance in prayer, can we travel with our Lord and with one another as holy pilgrims.
How do we do that? How do we begin to learn to pray like that? What if we start the way that Jesus’ disciples do in today’s Gospel: by turning to Jesus and asking him, “Lord, teach us to pray”? Lord, teach us to pray, as you taught your disciples! You are with us as you were with them. Be with us in a special way in these four months and in this Holy Year. Teach us to pray.
What can we learn about prayer from our Lord’s teaching on the road? Basically, he has two lessons. How to pray in two lessons by Jesus! Are you ready?
We’re going to begin with lesson 2, because lesson 2 can be summed up in one word: Persevere. Keep praying. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t lose heart. Continue trusting God and turning to God.
I love Jesus’ shocking analogies—or, rather, anti-analogies—regarding persevering in prayer. He doesn’t say, “Look, good fathers give their children good things, and God is the best Father, so…” No! He says, “Look at bad fathers! Even bad fathers generally feed their kids good food—not, like, venomous animals!” He doesn’t say, “You know that one friend you have who’s so thoughtful and generous, they’d give you the shirt off their back? That’s what God is like!” No, he says, “If your need is great enough, you would even go to someone reluctant helping you, someone who says ‘Go away, it’s too late’—and you wouldn’t take no for an answer. That’s how you should pray!”
Only Jesus could get away with telling us to pester God with our prayers! It’s not even just in this one Gospel. Wait till October, when we get the parable of the unrighteous judge, who finally gives relief to this poor widow, not because he cares about justice, but because she won’t stop hounding him! I’m not telling you to pester God, Jesus is!
Why on earth these bizarre, counterintuitive anti-analogies? I suspect partly because surprising examples are more memorable, and partly because Jesus wants to meet us where we are in this fallen world. Frankly, for people whose relationships with very flawed earthly fathers left a lot to be desired, the idea of God the Father can be an obstacle. Jesus recognizes that!
But it goes deeper than that. I think sometimes when we bring our needs to God, and our prayers seem to go unheard, on some level we may begin to doubt, not that God is good or that he loves us, but that he really cares about the same things we care about, or that there’s any point in continuing to bring them to him. It could be something personal: a chronic health problem, a besetting sin, a painful family problem, a difficult work situation. Or it could be something wider in scope: problems in our community, in the Church, in our nation, in the world.
We pray and pray and pray and pray, for months and years, and things don’t get better. Does God really care? Jesus has one word for us: Persevere. Keep praying. Keep trusting. Don’t be discouraged. Don’t give up. This is how we travel with our Lord and how he travels with us: through persistent prayer. And by our perseverance, our continued trust, we can be signs of hope to others, pilgrims of hope pointing the way forward in the darkness of this world.
Persevere. That’s lesson 2. Lesson 1 is six to ten lines long, but in depth and scope it’s infinite! Lesson 1 is the Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer. Our reading today gives us the short version in Luke; the familiar longer version that we’ll pray in about 15 minutes is from the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew’s Gospel.
We learned this prayer as children, yet theologians, saints, and popes have written long chapters and entire books exploring its mysteries, and there’s always more to say. Today I want to leave you with just one thought about the Our Father: To pray this prayer is to place ourselves in communion, not only with God, but also with one another. We don’t say “My Father,” but “Our Father.” We don’t say “Give me this day my daily bread” or “Forgive me my trespasses.”
We pray for daily bread for anyone and everyone who is hungry anywhere, from the one in five children here in Essex County reportedly suffering from food insecurity to the population of Gaza who are being starved as well as crushed by what Pope Leo called “the barbarity of the war.”
We pray for forgiveness for each other and even for our enemies, for people we hold responsible for suffering in our lives and other people’s lives, whom we must forgive if we hope to be forgiven.
We pray “Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,” meaning not just to save us from sin, but to spare everyone every kind of trial and distress, from illness and injury to depression, anxiety, and loneliness; from natural disasters and extreme weather to lack of safety and security from violence, discrimination, oppression, authoritarianism. All of this is what it means to pray the Our Father. Let’s remember that in 15 minutes!
Prayer is not the be-all and end-all of journeying with Jesus. We need to travel, like the Good Samaritan, ready to act, to be the answer to someone else’s prayer or to our own. Still, it begins and ends with prayer, with closeness to our Lord. May the Lord be with us all on the road. May the Lord be with you.
