5th Sunday after Easter 26.5.19 Through the Son
In Our Lord’s time on earth He regularly prayed. Given that
He was God it may seem a strange thing for God to be praying to Himself!
God the Son is equal to God the Father, but Our Lord was
praying in His humanity, in which role He approached God in humility, showing
us what we should do.
We can be certain that God the Son’s prayer was of the most
perfect quality. It would have contained the most essential ingredient of
prayer: a unity between the one praying and the one receiving the prayer.
When we pray we should not be strangers to God. We are not
people who pray only when there is trouble; we pray all the time, every day,
rain or shine.
When we pray we are hoping to achieve perfect union with God
and His holy will. Yet we tend to want things to happen according to our plans,
not His.
Our Lord would have known the mind of His Father because He
had the same mind. They both knew everything!
When we pray,
however, we are often in the dark as to what God wants us to do, or what is
going to happen next.
In such cases we pray in trust, that God will know what is
best even if we do not; and that whatever He wants will happen (Thy will be
done); if I started out wanting something else, then I will come to be of one
mind and heart with Him.
When we pray to God we are aware of His divinity, far beyond
our reach. But we are also aware that we now have the humanity of God the Son
to break through to the distant heavens.
If we unite ourselves with Our Lord in His humanity He will
take our prayer to the Heavenly throne, and our prayers will be effective.
God has given us this link (the humanity of Christ) as the
main approach road to Himself.
He wants us to take advantage of it. It is as though we
remind the Father that the Son has taken us up as His friends! Can we come in
please? It is like turning up at a palace, and the king does not know us. But
we say, Oh, but your son has invited us!
The Father sees us as one with the Son.
It helps if we are trying to live like the Son. But even so,
He is willing to forgive for the sake of
His Son’s sacrifice.
Christ has taken on human nature and has saved us in that
nature.
He has demonstrated all the best human qualities: perfect obedience,
humility, charity…. All this improves the human nature, and gives us something
to build upon.
We engage with His humanity as we hope that His perfection
will have a good effect on us, purifying, us, sanctifying us,
If I can but touch the
hem of his garment (Mt 9,21).
Implicitly in every Mass and sacrament we are praying this: Lord,
in Your humanity heal mine.
And to the Father: please receive me in the light of how You
see Your Son.
And then the Son, in His divinity, takes us to His own throne.
We are absorbed into the inner life of the Trinity, happy to receive anything They
decide to give.
We learn to pray with greater accuracy as to what is needed;
and with greater fervour to bring it about. We become one in mind and heart,
knowledge and will – with God Himself.
eas
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