Friends, today’s Gospel urges us to expect the Father to answer our prayers because he loves us.
“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.”
Keep
in mind that prayer is not designed so much to change God’s mind or to
tell God something he doesn’t know. God isn’t like a big city boss or a
reluctant pasha whom we have to persuade. He is, rather, the one who
wants nothing other than to give us good things—though they might not
always be what we want.
The
entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us
to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote.
Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the commandments,
sacraments, sacramentals—all of it—are finally meant to conform us to
the way of love. When they instead turn us away from that path, they
have been undermined.
Jesus said to his disciples:
"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."
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