ALL THE WAY TO SUNSET
Continue in what you have learned and have firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it. This admonition of St Paul to his beloved Timothy provides a sturdy basis for our reflections this morning, which center on the theme of faith—and perseverance in faith—through prayer. From the outset we must realize how emphatically rooted our faith is in the living tradition that other faithful Christians have gifted us with! As the joyful heirs of others’ deepest treasures and heroism, we must exist in a state of perpetual thanksgiving.
Our gospel selection from St Luke and the first reading (from the Book of Exodus) together offer us a solid catechesis on prayer: first, prayer as struggle; then prayer as intercession; and, finally, prayer as plain-old, dogged persistence. We should be greatly consoled by the fact that these texts do not present prayer as an activity of the sleek and strong but, rather, of the radically weak.
In the Exodus passage, Moses has to be helped by Aaron and Hur to hold up his arms extended wide in prolonged intercession. In the gospel we see how a poor widow persists in clamoring for justice from a corrupt judge despite her indigence, her fragile age and her social insignificance. Both Moses and the widow are fortified only by their faith, which empowers them to persevere in prayer and never give up. Perseverance in prayer is, thus, proposed to us by Sacred Scripture at this Eucharist as confirming evidence of practicing a lively faith, against all purely human expectations.
Our readings are very realistic and do not portray prayer as some kind of laid-back swoon. We witness an unforgettable example of the fatigue induced by insistent prayer in the drama of Moses up on a hill, extending his hands toward heaven in his passion to intercede with God on behalf of his people as they wage hard battle against their enemy, Amalek, down in the valley. Two men must hold up Moses’ arms when these grow ever heavier as the battle draws out interminably, all the way to sunset. Moses’ prayer is clearly presented as an intense and exhausting effort, a struggle even, an experience of prayer that sometimes appears in Scripture under the image of wrestling with God, as Jacob did throughout one crucial night with the mysterious angel, and he came out wounded. Moses’ wrestling with God in agonic prayer is indispensable because it shows how much the great Prophet cared: this was his way of participating decisively in his people’s battle, which Israel eventually won solely on account of Moses’ ardent intercession.
Moses’ unremitting plea to God, then, shows that prayer is work, real labor, and like any labor it causes exhaustion to both body and spirit. Fatigue is proof of the genuineness of prayer. We spoiled moderns sometimes idealize prayer as a warm bath of consolation into which we immerse ourselves now and then when we’re so inclined, to derive from it a pleasurable, pious satisfaction. But this scene of a Moses exhausted by prayer should correct such naïve expectations. The sight of a cruciform Moses on this hill, struggling in prayer all the way to sunset, offers us, rather, a vivid prefiguration of Jesus with arms extended on the cross on Mount Golgotha, as mediator before the Father on behalf of all humanity. The cross remains forever the privileged locus of all Christian prayer, the place and stance where the disciple rendezvous with the Master to intercede together with him for the world.
In addition, the sight of Moses praying in this laborious way also points to the communitarian aspect of prayer. The Christian community is not only the place where we are called to pray for each other, but also the place where we must serve and sustain each other’s prayer, for instance, for us monks, by joining our brothers in choir when the bell calls us to the Work of God. Mutual support and encouragement in prayer is a task rightly expected from all believers within a Christian community, since we all together constitute the one Body of Christ and, together, are nourished by the one Eucharist. By our call to this community of Spencer, and by our response to that call, we are now seriously indebted to one another: yes, we owe one another our supporting presence and example at prayer. In other words, we are all appointed by Christ to play Aaron and Hur to one another’s Moses by our loyal presence at prayer.
One aspect of the difficulty imposed by prayer is that it must be practiced not whenever we happen to “feel like it” but on a daily basis and many times a day (as many as seven, as St Benedict prescribes), and this not in just any haphazard manner but in a persevering way, and not for a few days only but without ever giving up. The Lord Jesus stresses this specific difficulty in the parable he tells us. Jesus’ insistence on the need to pray always, without ever neglecting prayer, probably reveals the concrete situation of the Christian community that Luke is addressing in his gospel: apparently this community is suffering from a certain laxity in both the ardor of its faith and in its wobbly practice of prayer. Thus, only a few decades after Jesus’ Ascension, Luke’s community is already showing signs of worldliness by neglecting both faith and prayer. In this way it is sadly fulfilling a prediction Jesus’ had made in another parable, when he said: When they heard the word, they received it with joy. But they had no root; they believed for a while, and in time of testing fell away (cf Lk 8:13).
This cyclical cooling down of faith is a universal Christian problem, and thus to be expected among us, too, because of the basic human difficulty with perseverance in love and fidelity in all situations and relationships that strive for fullness of love. Luke is here warning these Christians that to abandon prayer leads sooner or later to abandoning the faith itself. The passing of time proves to be the great test of both faith and prayer. But hearing the Gospel today always creates a time and a space of conversion. Insistent prayer renews faith daily and shows that the life of faith consists of an ongoing and ever-vibrant relationship with the Lord. The fatigue that comes from persevering in prayer is simply the exhaustion to be expected from devoting generous chunks of our time to prayer. The best “method” of prayer is quite simply to just do it, to plunge in whenever and however without any hesitation. Grace will take care of all the rest.
In this connection, let’s not forget that time is the very substance of our life! We’ll never get back the time we devote to another person. To pray faithfully, in this light, is nothing less than to give our whole life for the Lord. Consider also how prayer always includes, at least implicitly, an encounter with death. How so? Because when we pray we “do” nothing, we “produce” nothing, and we therefore experience ourselves as sterile and useless according to the world’s conventional norms, which we often internalize as our own. Precisely for this reason we can often find even the thought of prayer disagreeable, because we definitely do not like to confront our own futility and nothingness, something inevitable in genuine prayer. Then we find ourselves inventing nifty strategies to avoid actual prayer in real time, always, of course, with solid and credible excuses. (Here I can obviously only speak for myself, though perhaps some of you will empathize with such sneaky strategies to avoid looking into the Lord’s inviting eyes.) And yet, at the same time, we ought to be persuaded that the space and the time we devote to generous, silent prayer are precisely the most precious means at our disposal which we can choose to offer God in order that he might come and do something in us, make something of us. Paradoxically—both to our reason and our ego—our emptiness is the very choicest and most efficacious possession we have to offer God, if, that is, what we are truly seeking is union of heart and soul with him!
Now, all prayer implicitly looks forward to the Second Coming in glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. And so Jesus’ words to us today also convey a teaching on the eschatological dimension of prayer. In the chapter previous to today’s reading from Luke, the Pharisees asked Jesus when the Kingdom of God would come (Lk 17:20). Today Jesus completes his answer to them by firing back a question of his own: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? The question is clearly rhetorical: Jesus’ point here, I suggest, is not to ask questions about his Second Coming but rather to help us prepare to welcome the Lord’s Second Coming as a question to us, a question that makes Christians examine their faith here and now. We often ask “Where is God?”, “Where is the promise of the Lord’s Coming?” (2 Pet 3:4).
To these questions of ours the Lord replies by demanding that we give an account of our faith: Where is your faith? he asks us (Lk 8:25). The Lord’s Parousia is not a subject for abstract theological speculations but a reality of faith that has to be lived and experienced in prayer as expectation and desire. There is no better way of putting our petition Thy Kingdom come into practice than by giving ourselves generously to vigilant prayer, actually looking for the Kingdom as it arrives in our lives every day.
Finally, the prayer of the poor widow that demands justice, for its part, points to two other aspects of prayer: boldness and determination. Prayer is never ashamed to beg insistently, maybe even annoyingly. Christian prayer never hesitates to importune God: it doesn’t stop knocking; it’s not afraid of pestering God; it trusts that God can not only “take it” but that the Lord actually encourages such behavior and is even complimented by our determination as his children with inherited rights. Such parrhesía (‘legitimate boldness in speech’) manifests a faith that refuses to turn away from the one and only God to vain idols, for cheap satisfaction, a bold conviction that stakes everything on God’s fidelity and love whether or not God responds in the way and at the time we desire. Such bold prayer clearly requires courage.
No: Prayer and faith cannot be separated. Believing is, in fact, synonymous with praying. The two stand and fall together as the two sides of the same coin: the coin of God’s divine fatherhood of us in Christ. And if it’s true that we can pray only thanks to a lively faith, it’s also true that our faith remains alive only thanks to prayer.
To put the Lord’s teaching on prayer today into practice, we now turn to the sacred action in which all praying culminates: the offering of the precious Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ at this altar, the Holy Sacrifice that is the sole source of eternal life.
