29th SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME MISSION SUNDAY
This Weekend we celebrate the international missionary effort of the Church throughout the world. Here in Ireland for many centuries there have been so many great Irishmen and women who have gone to foreign lands to bring the faith of our fathers to those who might not have got the faith otherwise. Today as we celebrate Mission we ask ourselves what is our mission where we are today what are we doing to promote the kingdom of god? Mission Sunday gives us the opportunity to thank god for the faith that we have as well as acknowledging and thanking god for all those faithful missionary men and women who left everything in order to bring the faith and the light of Christ to the far corners of the world.
The readings for this Sunday speak about prayer, faith, and trusting God’s help. They show that God listens to His people and gives them strength. Even when life is hard, God does not leave us alone to bear the burden. In the First Reading – Amalek attacked Israel. While Joshua fought, Moses stood on a hill with God’s staff. As long as Moses’ hands were raised, Israel prevailed. Aaron and Hur supported Moses’ hands, and Joshua defeated Amalek. In the Second Reading we are told to Stay faithful to the Scriptures, which provide wisdom for salvation. All Scripture is inspired by God. We are called to proclaim the word persistently, with patience and encouragement. In our Gospel for this Sunday Jesus tells us about our need to pray and not to lose heart when we don’t get what we pray for straight away. Over a long period of time many people have prayed for various things for example family concerns for healing of body mind or spirit or whatever. Some people ask me why god is not answering their prayers straight away in the here and now of the present moment and I tell them that their prayers will be answered when God sees that they really need whatever they have been praying for. My own experience is that we often pray for things and don’t get them straight away but we get the things we prayed for when we really need them.
Remember that No great work can ever be achieved without long and patient effort and this is the same for us in our prayer lives. The work of patient persistent prayer will yield results as God helps us to get through all our problems big and small. Remember the saying that nothing is impossible for those who have faith and even if our faith is the size of mustard seed it can move mountains. The prayer in today’s gospel is the prayer of petition. If our prayers are always prayers of petition, we run the risk of being selfish and self-centered; except, of course, when the prayers of petition are for others. Like one of the ten lepers in last weeks gospel, we ask, and then when our prayers are answered, we return to give thanks to God. When we meet the judge and the widow in this Sundays Gospel passage we meet them at a crisis point. We have no case history for the widow but we do for the judge. He is a hard man who isn’t influenced by religious principle or by public opinion. Both justice and compassion are absent from his dealings with the widow. She has no influential friends to bring pressure on the judge and she has no money to bribe him: all she has is the justice of her cause and her own persistence. Jesus encourages us to be persistent in our prayer and never lose heart.
We live In an age where we have become accustomed to instant results all the time and we are impatient with what appear to be endless delays in god’s response to us. The danger is that we give up too quickly, that we rest our case too easily and then move on to something else. We have to be persistent; we have to invest time in our faith and prayer will help us to do this. Through this parable, Jesus teaches us the need for perseverance in prayer. This perseverance develops our trust and confidence in God. It helps us to to realize how weak we are when left to ourselves. It keeps us close to God, as we learn how dependent we are on His generous love. If we would realize that God is perhaps closer to us than we realise when we think He is forgetting us for he never forgets us! As we continue the Holy Year of Hope let us continue to be people of faith grounded in patient persistent prayer.
Fullerton T 