Monday, October 30, 2023
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
We are asking the wrong question
The question is not whether God
Hears our prayers,
But rather whether we
Hear God’s prayers for us. – Clarence Heller
 Which is why the Pharisees got it so wrong so often, and why we do too. The Pharisees asked themselves what they must do to be saved, rather than listening to God love them from inside their hearts and realize that God’s desire was for them to be still and know Him. They were “saved” already.
We wonder the same thing. What must we do to be saved? Jesus’ answer is full and complete, although it seems impossible. “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.”
And in other words, “Follow me.”
Jesus called to a crippled woman, “Woman, you are set free!” The leader of the synagogue shouted, “Come to be cured another day, not on the sabbath!” Jesus, outraged, said, “This daughter of Abraham has been bound by Satan for eighteen years. Should she not be set free on the sabbath day from this bondage.” And his adversaries were humiliated, but the whole crowd rejoiced.
Jesus’ entry into the social, political, and religious world of men makes all the difference. Still, we watch bad things happen every day, sometimes to us. Fr. Ron Rolheiser asks a question, and then ponders a possible understanding:
Why doesn’t God make things easier? Why do bad things happen to good people? Where is God in all this?
God doesn’t make things easier because God can’t make things easier, at least not without making us and the world into something far less than we are. God has always given us as much freedom, creativity, and spunk as possible. He did not play it safe. He gave us as much godliness as he could without making us into gods ourselves. And that freedom God gave us? He won’t tamper with it.
Which puts us in a life lined with strength and goodness, if we choose to claim it. God’s respect for me demands that I respect myself and then pour out the love and respect I know I have from heaven into earth, and into others whom God has also made. There are many ways to explain why that does not always happen. We are selfish and afraid – so psychology, sociology, ecology, politics and religion offer explanation.
God built us on a razor’s edge, so full of godly fire that we are capable of both martyrdom and murder.
At every moment, even in the presence of Jesus on the sabbath as did the leader of the synagogue, we can fall off the wrong edge.
Given the incredible array of qualities that God put in us, it shouldn’t then be surprising that we are pathologically complex, that human grandiosity has a perpetual itch to set itself against God, and that, when frustrated, we are capable of becoming killers who can take life itself as if we were God. We should never be surprised at how messy life can get or how deranged we can be.
So is it surprising, then, that God prays for us, even in moans that words cannot express? I wonder how that works, to whom does God pray? But I am so grateful that God does pray, and pray for me. This, as does the presence of Jesus on the stage of Satan, rescue, rescue, rescue me.
Rolheiser concludes:
What is surprising rather is that sometimes – in the pre-sophistication of a child or the post-sophistication of a saint – we do see simple happiness, simple meaning, and simple faith.
 (Romans 8, Psalm 68, John 17, Luke 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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