20th Sunday after Pentecost 18.10.09 Faith
The nobleman did the right thing in approaching Our Lord and placing his request. Our Lord took the occasion to give us all a demonstration of His power, in this case healing from a distance. All things are possible to God.
Our Lord often appealed to us to have more faith. He wanted us to believe in Him without hesitation, that no matter what the problem or how improbable it looked of solution to our resources we should not doubt Him for a second.
There are different ways of asking. We can have assurance in our manner or we can have panic or doubt. He wants us to have assurance. Son, they have no wine.
Once that is established He wants us to ask for all that we need; to pray vigorously and constantly for anything and everything (not frivolous things, but anything good).
Why does He make us ask when He could give us the desired thing anyway? One of His main objectives is to lead us to a love of Him. By forcing us to communicate with Him it brings us to a better understanding of Him and makes us participants in our own salvation. If the prayer is left unsaid the power and love of God are still there but they remain as potential. It needs our request to activate His love, to apply it in the current situation.
It is like food, for example, that will only help us if we eat it. So faith will only work if we use it. Distance is no barrier as the Gospel today indicates. We can pray for anyone anywhere.
By our prayer we stir up an avalanche of graces. And we do not only ‘ask’ for things, but with increasing knowledge of Him praise and thanksgiving will emerge.
All the while we are drawing closer to God. We can pray for rain, or for a safe trip or the healing of an illness, but none of those things can compare with the need to be united with God.
We can pray at different levels. We can pray for the current crisis while at a deeper level we are expressing trust in God, and acceptance of His will.
It is hard for us to achieve this kind of trust in practice.
We tend to say, if a prayer is answered favourably, that God is good.
But, does this mean that He is not good if we do not get what we want?
This cannot be right. God is just as good whether the particular prayer request is achieved or not. He does not increase and diminish in goodness. He is eternally perfect.
This does not mean we are indifferent to what happens. We can still have preferences, and even passionately so.
God would not expect us to be indifferent to things like whether a missing child is found dead or alive.
But without losing any of our legitimate concern for earthly matters, we can increase our concern for the true recognition of God.
If we begin with glorifying God we come to trust that His will is perfect and is working itself out in every situation.
This makes us not indifferent, but peaceful.
A new sense of serenity encompasses us and enables us to deal with the worst, or the best, that can happen.
We will not panic but will act with assurance and accuracy.
Our prayer will always help to improve some aspect of the situation.
We have to pray first and foremost that we come to know God more completely.
That is our main prayer, and the main purpose of prayer.
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