Dear Sisters, dear brethren, Prayer is one of the great puzzles of the Christian life. It is something that should be so easy and straightforward, yet it is rarely so. Our Lord does not pretend that it is. According to our Lord, prayer is something that is not easy, though it is simple. How can it be simple? Because it is a matter of trust, of childlike trust in God as ‘our Father’. We don’t need to learn to breathe, as it comes naturally to us at birth. We don’t need to learn to eat for the same reason. We learn language as infants, but we do so without being fully conscious of the task.
Yet the apostles had to ask our Lord to teach them how to pray. What triggered this question was their seeing Him praying. Now prayer is something that our Lord certainly did not have any difficulty with. For Him it was certainly like breathing for us: something that came naturally. So when His disciples saw Him pray, they wanted to learn how to do the same.
The prayer He teaches them in answer to their request is the one we call the Lord’s Prayer, which we know in two versions: St Matthew’s which is far more familiar and used, and St Luke’s. St Luke’s shorter version has our Lord tell us to address God simply as ‘Father’, not even as our Father. Nor does Luke mention ‘who art in heaven’ as a description of God. This is ‘Abba’, the God who is in Christ, and Christ is in Him. The kingdom of heaven is among you, as our Lord says on other occasions. Nor does Luke include the prayer for the Father’s will to be done on earth as in heaven.
Instead, our Lord tells His disciples to pray for our daily bread to be given, not just this day, but every day. Yet we can tell that this prayer is, like St Matthew’s version, one given by our Lord rather than prayed by Him, because of the petition in both prayers that God forgive our sins, because we ourselves forgive each one who is in debt to us, as we learn in the parables.
But what are we to make of the final petition? Where Matthew has ‘do not lead us into temptation but deliver us from evil’, Luke merely has ‘and do not put us to the test’. What does this mean? The two versions are not that different, it must be said. The ‘test’ of which our Lord speaks is the same word in both versions, meaning a trial, a great tribulation. This can be personal or communal. But it involves human wilfulness and culpability. The scriptures speak in many places of a great trial, and this can come at the end of an individual’s own life; the final test to which we are put by Satan before he finally either defeats us or loses us to God.
But how can God be responsible for this? If it comes from Satan, how can God be part of it? Can God ‘lead us into temptation’? There are different ways of looking at this. Of course God does not will evil upon us. He does not wilfully or uncaringly push us into temptation, into trials which may defeat us. But nonetheless He can allow this to happen.
Think, first of all of Christ Himself. It is absolutely clear from sacred Scripture that Christ was led into temptation in the wilderness ‘by the Spirit’. At the beginning of His public ministry, when our Lord went into the desert ‘to be tempted by the devil’, it is stated that this was God’s own will, not just His permissive will, but something that God willed to happen, so that Christ would be strengthened in some way by this encounter with Satan. And so it was. We remember from the accounts we hear each year on the first Sunday of Lent, that Satan subjected our Lord to three temptations, but that this did not happen merely because Satan willed it, but because God willed it. God foresaw that Christ would be strengthened by the experience, and would learn important truths about His mission, about human nature, and about Satan’s deceptive power to make evil appear good.
All right, so this was a special case in which there was a clear good purpose in God leading Christ into temptation. But this is not always the case. It is not always the case that a trial of temptation must lead to a good end. Take another case: In psalm 80 it says that ‘I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt. Open wide your mouth and I will fill it.’ This instruction is for the people to recognise their Lord and God, and to be fed by Him, in other words – ‘give us each day our daily bread.’ But then the psalm continues: ‘But my people did not heed my voice, and Israel would not obey me. So I left them in their stubbornness of heart, to follow their own designs.’ In other words, God can allow those who reject or neglect Him to die in their sins. He can give them up if they persistently turn their backs on Him. This is what it means to be led into the great trial, the final trial when it is too late to come back to God, indeed the whole point of this idea is that the one who abandons God and shuts his ears to God’s voice will eventually have nothing left in him with which to resist the devil’s final burst of power.
That this is so we can also learn from St Paul, who in the Letter to the Romans says: The anger of God is being revealed from heaven against all the impiety and depravity of men who keep truth imprisoned in their wickedness…That is why such people are without excuse; they knew God and yet refused to honour Him as God or to thank Him; instead they made nonsense out of logic and their empty minds were darkened. The more they called themselves philosophers, the more stupid they grew, until they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for a worthless imitation…That is why God left them to their filthy enjoyments and the practices with which they dishonour their own bodies, since they have given up divine truth for a lie and have worshipped and served creatures instead of the Creator.
So here St Paul shows us how God can indeed put men to the test, can lead them into temptation, not by any malice on His part, but because men have refused the light of truth. So, Paul goes on, God has left them to their own irrational ideas and to their monstrous behaviour. And so they are steeped in all sorts of depravity, rottenness, greed and malice, and addicted to envy, murder, wrangling, treachery and spite.
St Paul paints a picture uncomfortably like so much of the modern world we live in, and indeed not unlike the world of Sodom and Gomorrah in the first reading. How grievous is their sin! Cries God to Abraham, and announces His intention of destroying them and their cities. It is Abraham’s prayer that holds back God’s hand from this act, this putting the men of Sodom and Gomorrah to the final test which they must fail on account of their wilful wickedness.
I wonder how many times God has held back from plunging the modern world into that last fatal test, so disturbingly like that of which St Paul spoke in the Letter to the Romans, all because of some modern-day Abraham interceding for the world? Did not God inspire Abraham to pray in this way so as to show him the power of prayer? Does not God do the same then for us? Does He not show us the power of prayer to hold back the world from being plunged into a test it has recklessly deserved? And this is because there are holy men and women who pray for us all ‘not to be put to the test’? Give thanks to God for the Carmelite sisters who, I believe, will be seen on the last day to have helped save so may souls from being put, all through their own stubbornness and wickedness, to the final dreadful test. May God indeed not put us to the test, but rather keeping us from being deaf to Him by not constantly, daily, putting into effect His teaching on prayer. Father, we pray you, do not put us to the test, but send us your Spirit to keep us faithful to daily prayer so as to grow in love and faithfulness each day until our lives shall end in you alone.
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