Lenten Reflections 2014 - Day by Day Gospel Text - Mark 6: 7-15 Reflection The Lords Prayer is an inexhaustible resource for spiritual reflection. Books - enough to fill a library - have been written to delve into its depths. But, along with everything else that might be said about the Our Father, we can say for starters that it belongs to Jesus teaching on how not to pray. Do not pray as the hypocrites do, Jesus tells his disciples, so as to impress others. And do not pray with many words as the pagans do, so as to impress God. God is ready to answer before we ask. Pray then like this, he says--and then he introduces the exemplary prayer. The first and perhaps the primary feature of the Lords Prayer, then, is that it is short. It cuts to the chase. It is offered as an alternative to the pagan way of prayer, which is to rattle on interminably. Just like the hypocrites, the pagans are hoping to make an impression; the former on their neighbors, the latter on their gods. And that, in turn, reflects a difference between the gods to whom the pagans appeal and the Father to whom Jesus refers his disciples: if we hope to interest the gods in our plight, then we need to impress them, by means of verbosity, or histrionic speechifying, or indefatigable gum-flapping (none of which, it is probably needless to say, is unique to paganism). But we need not impress our Father. Our Father is already deeply impressed by us and our needs. Startlingly enough, he is more impressed by our needs than we are. He knows our needs better than we do. He knows of needs for which it will never occur to us to pray. These too impress him; these too he can be trusted to meet. So incredibly deeply do our needs impress him that he came to us as one of us, in the flesh, to absorb our bottomless neediness into the flesh of his own heart. So incredibly humble is our Father that he hopes only to leave an impression upon us, who are so terribly hard for him to please. Prayer Almighty God, the fountain of all wisdom, you know our necessities before we ask and our ignorance in asking: Have compassion on our weakness, and mercifully give us those things which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask; through the worthiness of Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen. (The Collect for Proper 11) Reflection and Prayer Submitted by: Fr Steve Schlossberg
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 10:37:07 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015