Saturday of the Thirty-SecondWeek in Ordinary Time
The need to pray
Then he told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary. He said, “There was a judge in a certain town who neither feared God nor respected any human being. And a widow in that town used to come to him and say, ‘Render a just decision for me against my adversary.’ For a long time the judge was unwilling, but eventually he thought, ‘While it is true that I neither fear God nor respect any human being, because this widow keeps bothering me I shall deliver a just decision for her lest she finally come and strike me.'” The Lord said, “Pay attention to what the dishonest judge says. Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones who call out to him day and night? Will he be slow to answer them? I tell you, he will see to it that justice is done for them speedily. But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Lk 18,1-8
We have repeatedly spoken of the intercessory prayer but, as it is allowed by the today passage, it will not be so bad to resume the subject. Today the Lord calls us to pray and to ask, even urgently, everything we need. He is pleased with us if we involve him in the events of our life as a father when a son asks for something, because the recognition of his prevailing position is implicit in this request. The Lord always hears the prayers which we address to him, but sometimes it happens that these are not fulfilled: it means that his project is bigger and more far-sighted than ours. The evangelist 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 is for us” (1Jn 514-15). The intercessory prayer, in other words, protects us from the fact that the will of the devil, which is the cause of all the evil, is not done, but it must be intimately open to accept the will of the Lord. 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 desire to satisfy us is so great that, sometimes, even the Lord has implemented a change in his plans. Our prayer can get this too, because a father, when he can, always changes his programs to meet the demands of a son. But sometimes it happens that the Lord’s plan is so great as we do not have alternatives: we must then accept it and by accepting it we step into. The only sure thing is that we must ask, always and anyway, because through our requests for intercession our faith is actualized.