From pastor’s desk on the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
We cannot stress enough how important prayer is. This Sunday’s readings again direct our thoughts to the theme of prayer. This time, however, we are reminded that prayer must come from a sincere and humble heart, and it should lead us to a deeper relationship with God. If we are boastful and insincere, then our prayers cannot be answered, for as we repeat in the psalm, “The Lord hears the cry of the poor.” When we acknowledge that we are really poor and weak before God, only then can we obtain the necessary graces for our life. The more we become void of our ego, the more the Lord can act in us and through us. This is the way of an authentic spiritual growth—through humility and surrender to the Lord. For that reason, our Blessed Lord Jesus set as an example of humble prayer, a tax collector, who was perhaps rich in material possessions, yet he humiliated himself before God. In contrast, a pharisee, who was supposed to be an example of religiously pious life and humility, was only boasting about himself, how “good he was” compared to others.
The theme of humility is very hard to comprehend in our modern minds, especially in America, where everyone since childhood is taught that he or she is “the best,” even if in reality he or she is not so good. Unfortunately, children learn a false sense of worth when they do not hear the truth about themselves. In this way they begin to build a false sense of security, which eventually collapses when they grow up and they begin to make important first decisions. When we are not told the truth about ourselves, we cannot become who God is calling us to be. In order to realize the potential that is stored in each and every one of us, God calls us to a loving relationship with Jesus Christ. Jesus is God, and when we enter the relationship with Him, we fulfill our human potential to the fullness, as did the Blessed Virgin Mary.
When we begin a sincere prayer, perceiving it more like a conversation between friends than a duty, we realize that we enter a loving relationship with Jesus Himself. Then we are able to open ourselves to truth about life and be transformed by grace.
Saint John Paul II, commented on this anthropological (human) dimension of relationship with Jesus in his Encyclical letter, Redemption Hominis:
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as already has been said, is why Christ the Redeemer "fully reveals man to himself". If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly "expressed" and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created!
(Redemption Hominis, 10)
John Paul II, who was not only a saint and a pope, but also a great philosopher, realized that only in Jesus we can fulfill all our desires and develop authentic humanity— that is called holiness. Next time when you pray, take to heart the notion of humility and stand before God as you are: weak, frightened, sinful, dependent. Then you will hear the words of Christ: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him” (John 3:17) and “Be assured of this, that I love you.”
I wish you all a blessed week. Fr. Janusz Mocarski, pastor