HOMILY PRONOUNCED BY MONS. DIEGO MONROY PONCE; GENERAL AND EPISCOPAL VICAR OF GUADALUPE, RECTOR OF THE SANCTUARY.
ORDINARY XVII SUNDAY

Sunday, July 29th of 2007

A PERSEVERING PRAYER IN LOVE

Brothers: God has been in communication with the humanity through his Son Jesus Christ, who gives his Spirit to us, in order to be moved by him to approach (with filial confidence) all the time our Father God, who never stops loving us.

The prayer, my dear brothers, has to be the most universal idea in order to be valid for any religion of the world; it is eminently a dialogue with God or the Divinity.

My brothers, it is necessary to have two interlocutors that express freely to communicate something. In the Jewish Christian tradition is that and much more. It is in the Christianity, an answer to the divine initiative to enter into a dialogue with the believer. Then, the prayer can be understood as a permanent dialogue in which God takes the initiative to be present in the human life, in his history.

The Holy Scripture is a clear testimony of this that we are saying, because we find in it not only the proof of this dialogue of God’s love with the man, but also we have in it the place or the instrument through which we can enter and keep in this continuous dialogue with He. The prayer is an answer of faith in love.

Dear brothers, from faith, hope and love, the prayer is a thanksgiving; it is praise and a plea. We have a beautiful and perfect example in the 150 psalms that occupies the heart of the Holy Scripture. We can pray with them in any occasion: in the good moments and in the bad ones, in the success an in the failure, in the health and in the sickness, before life and before death.

Throughout the sacred books, we find abundance of prayers that the prophets, the wise people, the personages of the sacred history have elevated to God in the diverse circumstances, like the case of the first reading where we see Abraham interceding by the town of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is not the unique case of intercession for the guilty ones. Moses did it like this. But in the passage of the first reading, we see the intercession of Abraham, and also the divine gift of the forgiveness for the multitude of sinners in attention to a few just people.

Our God and Father is like this, he appears, in the prophets Jeremiah and Ezekiel, also ready to forgive the town if he would find at least one just person.

This Sunday, my dear brothers, the church proposes, according to Jesus, the necessity to pray incessantly; and Saint Luke in his Gospel presents the authentic prayer of the disciple of Christ to us, and also he presents Jesus as the model of constant prayer.

My dear brothers, the content of our prayer is life in anyone of its circumstances: but Jesus besides to insist on the perseverance in the prayer by the love to the father, he teaches us that there are some topics that are necessary. And we have in the prayer of our father, a perfect model of Christian prayer: we see in the first part, as a general note, the expression of the desire to recognize, to desire, and to praise the absolute sovereignty of God as Father; and in the second one, we can say that we show our reality of creatures, of children of God that need of his mercy, at the same time we express a complete abandonment in his loving providence.

Brothers, the plea to God in the prayer is not a stupid insistence, we do not want to convince Him to do whatever we want. God does not expect to be convinced by us, he expect just our perseverance in the dialogue with his love as a father. It is for our own benefit that we have to pray.

The fact that the Christian prayer is always united to the prayer of Christ, it is a very important detail. This is specially the liturgical prayer, it means, the universal prayer of the church, because through the liturgy, the church (body of Christ) prays to the Father for the whole world.

The Eucharist which is the peak of the prayer of the Church, destination and departure point of the life of the Church, it is the most excellent and perfect prayer that it can offer God. Brothers, I do not mean that the individual prayer does not have sense. We have to see the two ways of prayer, and the two ways are necessary and complementary. The individual prayer is necessary because it finds unique occasions of deep relation with God in the ordinary life. On the other hand, the liturgy is the occasion to experience the brotherly charity and the solidarity in the way towards the Father.

Let us become the Eucharistic celebration, specially the one from the Sundays, in the center of our faith, of our deep experience of God, who is with us; of the father who unites us as brothers around Him to grant us much more of which we can ask him.

May our little girl and celestial lady, who is always present in the prayer of the Church, intercedes for us as an excellent member of his people.

AMEN