Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C (2025) - Fr Robert Krishna, OP

How we read a text depends on what questions we bring to it. We might think of Abraham’s negotiation with God as being about whether a just God will destroy just and unjust together, but historically, this text has been read in relation to a different problem: prayer, and when God listens to it. Abraham negotiates with God for the salvation of the city until God says that he will not destroy it if there are ten just people in it. One result of this was the idea of a minimum number of people, ten, that constituted a praying community necessary for all public prayer in Judaism, called a minyan. But the idea of a minyan goes further than Abraham, since his prayers stopped at ten just people. But if someone prays as part of a minyan, even if his prayer is imperfect or he is a sinner, his prayer will be heard, says Maimonides, the medieval Jewish sage.

This reflects a genuine and ever-present anxiety, which Jesus picks up on in today’s Gospel: we all know the imperfection of our prayer and of our lives. We know, too, the experience of our prayer apparently not being heard, when we do not get what we are praying for, even if that prayer was for something good and selfless like someone’s healing or life, or for the end of war. Even saints have not been immune to this. St Paul VI publicly lamented that God didn’t hear his prayers after his friend, Aldo Moro, was kidnapped and murdered by the Italian Red Brigade. And we cannot help wondering whether the problem lies with us, or with the absence of God.

Jesus, in response, corrects our understanding of prayer, by pointing out who God is, and telling us to seek him. We can often think of prayer as a kind of transaction or a mad E-bay auction. If I close my eyes and say such and such a prayer for so and so many days, God might just give me what I ask for. But God is not waiting for us to say the correct magic words so that he can reward us. Rather, when he gives us certain things in answer to prayer, through prayer, he expands our horizons, our capacity to receive until we can receive the greatest Good of all, the Good for which we were created, God himself. Prayer is God taking our hands and stretching them out slowly and patiently so that we can receive what he has prepared for us. So, Jesus’ instruction on prayer begins and ends with the fact that God is our Father, and intends to give us what is good, and even the ultimate good thing, the Holy Spirit who unites us to God. In seeking any good thing, Jesus implies, we are reaching out to God, the source of all that is good. And like Abraham, we grow in our desire by exploring the contours of God’s generosity, asking him again and again for what we need. In the Lord’s prayer, Jesus redirects our desires to be united to his. He would have us seek to keep holy the name of God, seek the coming of his kingdom and not our power. He calls us to recognise our dependence on God and seek from him what we need for the coming day, both the natural sustenance of bread and the supernatural sustenance of the Eucharist. In his prayer, Jesus leads us to recognise our sinfulness and our suffering at the hands of others, our need to forgive and be forgiven, both of which require God’s grace and his strength. And the words of the prayer he gives show us that we need God’s help in keeping us from the trials that would break us. Where we are closed in on ourselves and what we think we need, Jesus’ words draw us closer to God and his will.

But the problem of apparently unanswered prayer remains. Intellectually, we might even know that when God does not give us the good things we pray for, it is not because he is being stingy or we haven’t jumped properly through the correct hoops: it is because he knows what we need at that moment. God is not turning away from us, but inviting us deeper into union with himself. But the problem remains. I can even look back at my own life, and see the good that has come about because of things I prayed might not happen. But I still cannot help lamenting at least some of my losses and mistakes, and wishing I could change them. No matter what good comes out of the present tragedies afflicting the world, it doesn’t make them less tragic.

There isn’t a nice, neat solution to this problem, except to say that to wish for an end to them is to wish for the end of history. That, too, is at least part of what we pray for when we pray for God’s kingdom to come, but while history runs, and imperfect, flawed human beings collide against other imperfect, flawed human beings in a world subject to change and growth, suffering and sorrow, death and tragedy will form part of it. However, our share in suffering this, and praying for an end to it, is part of how God heals the world throughout history, how he manifests his kingdom here and now. Because we suffer and we pray as members of the Body of Christ, the Church. Christ is present in us and with us when we suffer and when we pray. Christ in and with and through us, our suffering and our prayer, even what seems like our unanswered prayer, reaches out to those who are suffering. And so, we continue to pray, trusting that our knocking, our seeking, our asking, will be rewarded by God with the gift of the Holy Spirit who will heal the world and us in it.

Fr Robert Krishna, OP is undertaking postgraduate studies in Sacred Scripture and currently living in Adelaide, South Australia

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