Saturday of the Sixth Week of Easter
To seek and to obtain
Amen, amen, I say to you, whatever you ask the Father in my name he will give you. Until now you have not asked anything in my name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete. “I have told you this in figures of speech. The hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures but I will tell you clearly about the Father. On that day you will ask in my name, and I do not tell you that I will ask the Father for you. For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God. I came from the Father and have come into the world. Now I am leaving the world and going back to the Father.” Jn 16,23b-28
Our prayers of intercession, of which we have often spoken, are routed in these verses of the gospel of today. Sometimes we address to the Father, some others to the Lord Jesus Christ or to the Holy Spirit, or we entrust it to the Virgin Mary, which delivers directly to the Father, to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. Our intercessory prayer is heard and answered on the basis of the love and the power of God, but also because of our faith: “In that day you will ask in my name, and I do not tell you that I will ask the Father for you. For the Father himself loves you, because you have loved me and have come to believe that I came from God”. The functioning of our prayer is based on the principle of the leverage: there is a problem to be solved too great for us (the resistance of the lever), there is the power of the leverage which is to God, and there is a fulcrum which is made by our faith. Because of the importance of the subject, let’s listen again to what the Lord told us in the prayer of two months ago. He listens always to us, but sometimes it happens that he does not hear us: it means that his project is bigger than ours. John says: “And we have this confidence in him, that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. And if we know that he hears us in regard to whatever we ask, we know that what we have asked him for is ours” (1Jn 5,14-15). The intercessory prayer protects us only from the fact that the will of the devil, which is the cause of all the ills, is done, but it must be open to accept that the Lord’s will be different from ours. It is the condition of the evangelist John: our request, to be granted, must be “according to his will”. It seems to us, however, that his love for us is so great that, to hear us, sometimes even the Lord has put in place a change of his plans. Our prayer can obtain also this, because a father, when he can, always changes his programs to meet the demands of a son. Sometimes it may happen, however, that the Lord’s plan is so great such to have no alternative: we must then accept it, and by accepting it, we step into. The only sure thing is that we have to ask, always and anyway, because through our requests for intercession, our faith is actualized.