Breaking the Word

27^th Week in Ord. Time, Thursday – 06^th October 2022 — Gospel: Lk 11,5-13

Expect Best Things

In today’s gospel, Jesus used two analogies to help his disciples understand how prayer works. First, he spoke of knocking on a friend’s door to ask for a favour. The second analogy contrasts evil human beings with the heavenly Father. Jesus used hyperbole to demonstrate this point.  It is true, that no good father would give his children snakes or scorpions. If human’s, evil as they are will still give their children only what is good, then the heavenly Father will do more than that. If we ask, God will give the greatest of gifts, the Holy Spirit. God is more loving than any parent. He is willing to give the very best to those who admit their need for divine assistance. And what is great is that God knows, even better than we do, what will be truly most beneficial for us. God wants to bestow the very best on us. All we need to do is turn to Him, open our hands, and receive what God gives.

27^th Week in Ord. Time, Wednesday – 5^th October 2022 — Gospel: Lk 11,1-4

Hidden Sacraments

The Gospel of Luke gives more importance to Jesus’ practice of praying than any other Gospels. The only prayer that Jesus’ explicitly taught his disciples was the “Our Father”, which is simple and yet a profound prayer. In it Jesus teaches us our true identity. First of all, we become the beloved children of God by our baptism. This is the reason why we have the privilege of calling God, our Father. Through our identification with Jesus in baptism (Gal 3,27), we become his brothers and sisters, and therefore, adoptive sons and daughters of the Father (Rom 8,16). Because we are God’s children, we are called to trust him, just as a child trusts a good father who cares for and loves his children. Secondly, this prayer also teaches us to rely on God the Father to provide for us in earthly and spiritual needs. We ask our Father for the most basic of needs: daily bread and forgiveness. Daily bread refers not only to the earthly food we need to sustain our bodies, but also for the spiritual food we need to sustain us: the Eucharist.   Forgiveness points to the sacrament of Reconciliation. We ask our merciful Father to wash us from our sins, like a little child who needs a cleansing. Thus, we need both the sacraments of the Eucharist and Reconciliation to remain connected to the divine.