16th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Gen 18:1-10a
Second Reading: Col 1:24-28
Gospel Reading: Lk 10:38-42
“We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us,” St. John says. This summarizes the Christian life, says Pope Benedict XVI in his Deus Caritas Est (“God is Love”).
God loves us. “God so loved the world that he gave his only son,” St. John says, “that whoever believes in him may not die, but may have eternal life.” God sent his son into the world not to condemn it, but “that the world might be saved through him.”
God wants to save us. He agreed to pardon Sodom and Gomorrah if he could find any excuse at all. While we were still rebels, “he forgave us all our trespasses, erasing the record that stood against us with its legal demands,” St. Paul says.
“God’s passionate love for his people” is “a forgiving love,” Pope Benedict said. “It is so great that it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.” It is so great that by becoming man he follows him even into death, and so reconciles justice and love.”
God wants to give us good things. “Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you,” Jesus assured us.
“Then why doesn’t God give me what I ask for?” asked an RCIA member in my parish one year.
“Do you have faith?” someone replied. “Do you really believe that you will get what you’re asking for?”
If our will is totally united to Christ’s, we can pray with “filial boldness,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church: with the boldness of a son talking to a father who will give him anything. It is to people who pray like this that Jesus said, “I give you my word: if you are ready to believe that you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer, it shall be done for you.”
“Maybe you haven’t prayed enough,” someone else in the class suggested. “How long have you been praying?”
Jesus told us to keep on asking for what we want with urgency and patience, without losing heart. It is more important to ask, the Catechism explains, than to get what we ask for, because by asking, “we express awareness of our relationship with God.”
“What are you praying for?” someone else in the class questioned hesitantly. “Perhaps God knows it wouldn’t be good for you.”
If our will is not totally united to the will of Jesus, we can expect that, through selfishness or ignorance, we will ask for things that are bad, for ourselves or for others. God cannot grant these requests, “for he desires our well-being, our life,” says the Catechism. In that case, we must always add, “if it be your will.”
God wants to grant our requests. In fact, he wants to do “something even greater.” He lets us exercise our desire in prayer, so “that we may be able to receive what he is prepared to give,” says the Catechism. While we “cling to him in prayer,” he transforms our “praying heart.”
“Is there any father among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give the child a snake instead of a fish?” Jesus asked rhetorically. “If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!”
God is a Giver. In giving, he gives the most precious gift of all: himself. No other gift, no matter how good, can be preferred to him. “Those things I used to consider gain I have now reappraised as loss in the light of Christ,” St. Paul says.
In fact, preferred to Christ, nothing is good. “Whoever tries to keep his life will lose it,” Jesus said. “Whoever loses his life for me will find it.”
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English. The whole course is available in written form and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course and will remain available until the end of August. Father will teach the whole course again, with new insights, starting in September.
