Fr. William Fennelly: Prayer is something that we often either take for granted or perhaps ignore and perhaps we might find ourselves doing both things at the same time. So the question we sometimes forget to ask is: “why do we pray?”. And if we forget to ask why we pray, then there must be a danger that one day we may simply forget to pray altogether.
This Sunday’s readings can help answer the question “why do we pray?” at several levels.
At a very simple level we pray because we recognise that alone or by ourselves we are powerless. In the first reading from Exodus, Moses recognises that the attack of the Amalekites is a real danger to the people of Israel: by themselves they may not have the wherewithal to resist, and their escape from Pharaoh will have been in vain. They have no military strategy or super secret weapon to save them. Moses turns instead to constant prayer “from the rising of the sun to its setting” (Ps 113:3). He does so by having faith in God, knowing that Israel’s “help is in the name of the Lord” (Ps 124:2).
And Moses doesn’t pray alone; he literally has to get Aron and Hur to hold up his arms in prayer. So too with the widow we heard about in the gospel: she has nobody to defend her rights; only by constant “prayer” and not in this case to God, but to the unjust judge, can she hope for justice.
It’s right that we should recognise our own powerlessness and consistently bring our needs to the Lord. But if that were all there was to prayer we would have to say that the more powerful somebody is, the less he or she would need to pray. If you’ve plenty of money or enough strong men behind you then perhaps you don’t have any need a God who defends the widow and the orphan. Perhaps this is why the unjust judge, entrusted with considerable power and authority, has “neither fear of God nor respect for man” (Lk 18:4). Why bother praying for divine assistance if you already have the military might or the political clout or the money to defend yourself and others against aggressors and injustices?
There is a clue at the end of the gospel passage: after telling us how God will see justice done swiftly in answer to our constant prayer, Christ adds, “But when the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?” (Lk 18:8) It seems he will find lots of praying going on, at least from those who recognise their powerlessness; but will he find any faith?
We might initially think that’s a strange question. If people are praying to God, surely they have faith in him? But in the gospels even the demons know that God exists, and they beg him to act in certain ways. In that very basic sense you could even say that they pray to God; though we couldn’t say that the demons have “faith”.
What Christ asks of us is not merely that we should pray insistently for our own needs and for justice to all, though certainly we must pray for that. He asks us to have faith: that is, he calls us to believe in God and his word, and freely to commit our whole selves to him (Dei Verbum, 5).
Prayer isn’t about persuading God to do what we want, however noble or desirable that may be; it is about inviting God to shape us in faith into what he wants for us. Prayer can’t change God; but it should change us.
Through our prayer our faith is nourished and deepened: and that is one reason why Christian traditions of prayer, whether liturgical or private, focus on the scriptures. Praying with the scriptures, using words given to us by God, we enter more deeply into “the wisdom that leads to salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim 3:15); we learn more profoundly the holiness to which our Lord calls us.
As Christians we have Christ himself as our model: God made man was himself a man of insistent prayer during his life, and ultimately on the cross, pleading for us and alongside us for our redemption. Ancient Christian tradition sees Moses’ prayer with arms extended as prefiguring the cross (cf. Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, 97). The self-emptying of the cross is the point around which all the scriptures and all history turn, and it must be the focus of our prayer as we seek to answer Christ’s call to follow him. So we discover that as we do prayer that in fact prayer does us and changes us.
Why do we pray? We pray to be like Christ and we pray to be with Christ, now and forever.