October 6, 2010
Wednesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time
By Colleen O’Sullivan
But when I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the Gospel, I said to Cephas in front of all, “If you, though a Jew, are living like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?” (Galatians 2:14)
He said to them, “When you pray, say: Father, hallowed be your name, your Kingdom come. Give us each day our daily bread and forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us, and do not subject us to the final test.” (Luke 11:2-4)
Piety
Praise the Lord, all you nations!
Give glory, all you peoples!
The Lord’s love for us is strong;
The Lord is faithful forever.
Hallelujah!
(Psalm 117)
Study
Galatians 2:1-2, 7-14
In today’s first Scripture reading, Paul has written a letter to the Christians in Galatia, whom he had brought to faith in Christ on a previous mission trip. (Earlier, in Jerusalem, it had been agreed that, in general, Paul would evangelize the Gentiles and Peter the Jews.) Among the topics he addresses is the whole subject of whether or not a person has to follow Jewish rituals, including circumcision for males and Jewish dietary laws, in order to be a follower of Christ. From our perspective in 2010, this might seem like an arcane discussion, but it was a huge issue in the early Church, one that could potentially have split the young Church. As Paul is writing, the Galatians, who themselves had formerly been pagans, are being pressured by Jewish Christians to take on all the Jewish customs or risk being regarded as non-Christian.
Peter, according to Paul, isn’t helping the situation at all, because he has been eating and living like a Gentile, but then suddenly backs down in the face of opposition from Jewish Christians, giving the impression that he agrees with them. Paul and Peter have a face-to-face confrontation in Antioch on the subject. “I saw that they were not on the right road in line with the truth of the Gospel.” Reading that sentence, we realize that this is not your ordinary power struggle between two leaders in the early Christian community. This is about the very heart of the Gospel, about who Christ is and what it takes to be his disciple. Becoming a Jew first is not a prerequisite to following Christ and being a part of the Body of Christ.
Luke 11:1-4
Over the years, my doctors have sent me several times to have MRIs to diagnose various and sundry ailments. I despise MRIs! I don’t like the noise even with the ear plugs. I get panicky at the thought of being stuck in that tube, motionless, for 45 minutes. So, each time, as I’ve been sliding into the machine, I’ve been grateful to have been brought up in the Catholic Church, because I know the words to so many prayers passed down from one generation of Christians to the next. Reciting a number of them has always gotten me through the MRI experience.
I was thinking about that as I read today’s Gospel passage. We are indeed blessed to have such an abundant repository of prayers at our finger tips. But how often do we merely recite these prayers (sometimes in an MRI machine) without giving much thought to what we’re actually saying? The Our Father, the prayer Jesus taught the disciples when they asked him to teach them to pray, flows so effortlessly from our lips many times in the course of a week. I suspect that if we were to concentrate on the meaning of the phrases, it wouldn’t come so easily. The words might even make us squirm a little.
The first thing that jumped out at me was praying, “Give us each day our daily bread.” Several years ago at St. Mary of Sorrows in Fairfax, we had a priest from Jamaica come and talk about his ministry with the poor there and how our contributions to Food for the Poor can work to alleviate hunger on this Caribbean island. He related how, upon arrival in Jamaica, the bishop took him on a tour. At one point they passed two little boys sitting beside the road. One of them was eating beans and rice. The other was just quietly sitting next to him. They stopped the car and the priest began to talk to the little boy who wasn’t eating anything. “Don’t you like beans and rice?” he asked. “Oh, yes,” came the reply. “But it’s my brother’s turn to eat today.”
I would guess that most of you who are reading this don’t literally have to worry about daily bread, but plenty of people throughout the world, including more and more people in this country, wonder each night as they go to bed if they or their children will have enough to eat the next day to keep them going. If you’re thinking about what you’re saying when you pray for daily bread, it’s hard not to think about all our hungry brothers and sisters.
Another phrase that made me uncomfortable was the plea for God to “forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” When you give serious consideration to what you’re praying, it’s difficult to say those words and look God in the eye. I, for one, hope God is more merciful and forgiving to us than we often are to one another.
Action
If you don’t already give to Food for the Poor, you can check out their website at: www.foodforthepoor.org. For approximately the cost of one meal in a good restaurant in the Washington, DC, area, you can feed a hungry child for a month. God can use your offering to answer someone else’s heartfelt prayer for enough food to survive another day.
If you’re already a contributor to Food for the Poor, instead take a few minutes to think about those who have hurt or wronged you in any way, and consider whether or not you have truly forgiven them. If we’re honest, most of us probably still have a few people on our “yet-to-be forgiven list.”
