Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me!

+ J. M. J. +

Homily Outline for the 17th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

“Lord, on the day I called for help, you answered me!” These were the words we repeated multiple times in our psalm, and they frame the strong theme of our readings this Sunday… we are to call out to the Lord for what we need and what we desire. Jesus tells us in the Gospel:

And I tell you, ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks, receives; and the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.

Have you every worried that asking God for what you want or need is selfish? Have you ever thought, well, maybe I had better just pray for other people? Here you have the Lord’s clear command: ASK, SEEK, KNOCK! And a promise: RECEIVE, FIND, the door will be OPENED.

In our first reading from the Book of Genesis, we see Abraham apparently bargaining God into sparing Sodom and Gomorrah. At first God offers to spare the cities if 50 righteous men can be found, and eventually Abraham gets Him down to ten! We see here both the mystery of our intercession, but also the fact that even the People of Israel took a while to understand how mysterious God really is! In the following chapter God’s angels manage to get Abraham’s brother Lot safely out of the city, despite the intense wickedness, sexual perversion, and violence of the people there, and then God’s judgment falls on the city. Our prayers have an impact, but God’s will is mysterious, and we never comprehend it fully.

On the simplest level, then, we claim that God answers prayers, and perhaps we have all had the experience of our prayers being answered. At the same time, though, we have probably had the experience of having our prayers apparently fall on deaf ears! Did you every pray for a blue bicycle when you were little, and it didn’t arrive? Or did you pray for the girl you had a crush on to sit next to you, and she didn’t? Or have you ever thought, to quote Garth Brooks, that some of God’s greatest gifts are unanswered prayers?

So, it’s clearly more complicated that it seems at first. One might conclude that prayers just make us feel good, but that’s not what we believe. On the other hand, we could avert our eyes when we see prayers not being answered, rather than face the difficulty head on. We are called, though, to the encounter between faith and reason, between revelation and experience.

This mystery of intercessory prayer involves the mystery of God’s infinite goodness, our limited vision, and our freedom. God is beyond our full grasp, beyond our full understanding. He has chosen to reveal Himself to us, most perfectly in Jesus Christ, and so He wants us to know Him. We are creatures, though, and so we cannot fully grasp our Creator, even as He reveals Himself to us. Part of the rich mystery of our creation is our real but imperfect freedom. We are truly free, even as we so often allow our freedom to be hemmed in by bad habits, sin, and even addiction. We often abuse our freedom by choosing away from God, and so we are enslaved to falsehood and sin. But where there is breath, there is hope, and where there is breath, there is some faint glimmer of freedom. As we see so much in the world around us that is counter to God’s will, we can easily ask whether God’s will is done at all! God has chosen to make us free, capable of love, capable of heroism, capable of holiness, and this then is necessarily a world where the opposite is possible: indifference, selfishness, and vice. The people of Sodom and Gomorrah rejected God, and we see our neighbors and friends reject God, and each one of us has also rejected God at some time and in some way. The world is broken not because God’s will is imperfect, but because we are, not because God wills evil, but because we do.

Even in the midst of this, though, God is always drawing us, calling to our hearts, offering us forgiveness and mercy, and offering grace and conversion even in the midst of disaster. On Thursday evening I received news of a terrible car wreck affecting some of my best friends down in El Salvador where I served in the Peace Corps, and where I visited just a couple months ago in May. My friend Antonio was taking most of his family to the airport to pick up his sister who was coming to visit, and they were in a wreck. Antonio died, along with both of his parents, and three of his five children. Two of his nieces and two of his daughters were injured, but survived. This sad news has been heavy on my heart and mind. This morning, before the funeral which took place with six caskets present, I was able to speak with the two daughters who survived, Nereyda, the eldest child, and Maria Jose, the youngest, who lost her twin sister Emely. I spoke with Antonio’s wife, Edith. She had not gone with them on Thursday. I was truly inspired by her courage and hope, even just talking to her on the phone. I assured her of the prayers of many people, and she spoke of the power of prayer, of her strong sense of being lifted up and sustained by prayer in these very dark days.

A picture taken this May when I visited my friends. From the left: Nereyda, who survived; I can't tell the two little twins apart, but one died, Emely, and one survived, Maria Jose; Edith, the mother, was not in the wreck; Lupita, standing in the pink shirt, died; Antonio, the father, died; myself; Cristian, on the right, died.  Not pictured are Antonio's parents, Antonio and Juana, who also died.  May they all rest in the peace of Christ.

Why would God allow such a thing to happen? My friends, we are truly free. God does not play games with us, as if we were marionettes. He does not tug on our strings, jerking us away from one disaster or another. It appears that Antonio may have fallen asleep at the wheel, but we will never know for sure. I am certain that God did not cause the wreck, and I am certain that our choices really do have consequences, some of them beautiful, some of them terrible. On Friday evening I prayed the Rosary for my friends, the living and the dead, in the dark church, and I gazed upon the crucifix, and I gazed at the tabernacle lit only by the vigil lamp, and I know that God was listening. My friend Edith now faces the task of nursing her two remaining children back to health, and of making a new life without her husband. In the midst of this she can feel the power of being lifted up by the prayers and love of many people, among them many she will never meet.

In this light, listen again to St. Paul speaking to the Colossians:

You were buried with him in baptism, in which you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead. And even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross.

Jesus is God’s answer to our prayers. Jesus is God Himself come into our midst, shouldering our burdens, nailing them to the Cross. In Jesus our freedom is redeemed, and the path to eternal life is opened before us. In Jesus our prayers are answered, even when we can’t see when or how. We come to this altar now, with all of our needs, some of them buried deep in our hearts. We come with our hope, with our sorrow, with our fears, with our dreams. We receive from this altar the Lord Himself. We call out to Him for help, and He answers us by offering us His own flesh and blood.



I dedicate this homily to the memory of my six friends who died on Thursday: Antonio hijo, Antonio padre, Juana, Cristian, Lupita, and Emely. May they rest in the peace of Christ. Que en paz descansen.

+ A. M. D. G. +