Tuesday of the 1st
week of Lent
February 16, 2016 6:30am
In today’s gospel Jesus kind of
sandwiches his teaching of the Lord’s Prayer it between two lessons.
Prior to teaching the Prayer
itself, Jesus warns against thinking that our prayer has to be lots and lots of
words.
I love his expression, “Do not babble like the pagans.”
So, Jesus wants our prayer to be
sincere, direct, and from the heart.
Even if we are praying set
prayers, like we do in the Mass or the Liturgy of the Hours or novenas or the
rosary, even there, he cautions us to make sure we are into the praying and
that it is coming from inside us.
That is what counts, not the
number of words we recite.
And then, right after teaching
the His Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, he gives us a lesson on the importance of
forgiveness.
And this lesson kind of
underlines that part of the Lord’s Prayer where we ask God to forgive us as we
forgive one another.
The idea is that we cannot pray
for a closer union with God when we are responsible for the lack of union with
someone else.
Prayer cannot be genuine when we
are isolated or cut off from others and there is something we could do to
remedy the situation.
Maybe another way of putting it
is that there must be a consistency between our praying and our living.
So, Jesus gives us some things to
think about when we are praying.
