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Commentary of the Gospell
“I dare to call him Father.”
If yesterday’s gospel reading highlighted the Lenten practice of almsgiving and service of the needy, this morning’s gospel highlights another important Lenten practice: prayer. In the gospel, Jesus declares that, when it comes to prayer, many words are not needed.
Today’s passage is a catechesis on prayer. It is a prayer and a lesson on how to pray. In the early Church, the catechumens directly learned this prayer from the mouth of the bishop and prayed it together as a profession of faith. During the Easter Vigil, they recited it for the first time together with the communities after their baptism.
Jesus teaches us to address God as “our Father.” He wants us to stand before the Father confidently and ask for what we need to live as his sons and daughters. No other religion except Christianity presents God as the Father and Mother of the people.
When we ask: ‘Hallowed be your name,’ we declare to the Father our willingness to glorify his name and to collaborate with him in fulfilling his promises of “you shall be my people and I will be your God” (Ezk. 36:23-28).
“Thy kingdom come,” we pray. With Jesus, the Kingdom of God has already come. The time of waiting is over. However, we continue to pray for its coming because it must develop and grow in every person as a seed of goodness, love, reconciliation, and peace. Prayer makes us discern between the values of this world and the values of the Kingdom of God.
We cannot recite the Lord’s Prayer with sincerity if we think only of our own bread, are greedy for possession and anxious about tomorrow, forget the poor, and neglect social justice. Paraphrasing the Lord’s prayer would mean to say, “Help me, Father, to be content with the necessary, to be free from the bondage of greed and strengthen me to share with the poor.”
God’s forgiveness has only one requirement – to love and forgive our brothers and sisters and be reconciled with them first.
The temptation from which we ask the Lord to deliver us does not refer to any minor weaknesses, struggles of life or persecutions. They do make us stumble and can choke the seed of the Word of God in us. But Jesus wants us to pray that we must be kept away from the temptation of abandoning our faith in the loving and merciful Father.
Prolonged prayers are not intended to persuade God to change his plans! Prayer does not change God; instead, it opens our minds and changes our hearts.