Asking With Confidence For Whom We Need Most

Seventeenth Sunday in Course 2025

This is a Jubilee Year, and today we have what we might call “jubilee readings.” Traditionally the Holy Father declares a Jubilee Year on the quarter century, so 2025 is pretty automatic. There have also been special Jubilees. In the OT, the year of Jubilee occurred once every fifty years. In those years, Jewish slaves were liberated. If a family plot of land had been sold, it was returned to its original owners for their use. So Jubilee means freedom; in the US South, Black slave communities sang of a future Jubilee when they would be freed; that made Abe Lincoln a kind of religious prophet for his signing of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863.

But the fundamental meaning of Jubilee is liberation from moral enslavement today. Think of people addicted to alcohol, drugs, or perverse sexual practice. In fact, think of any habit of sin, perhaps a habit that has given a manager a financial advantage, like underpaying employees or racially discriminating in hiring.

In today’s Scriptures, we have a gem of prayer, excerpts from psalm 138. “I will worship at your holy temple and give thanks to your name, because of your kindness and your truth,” In the book of Exodus, which tracks the Hebrew liberation from Egypt and their journey to the Holy Land, Moses is given the Ten Commandments as the human part of a covenant between God and man. Then God passes before Moses and declares the divine part of the covenant, beginning with His Holy Name: “The Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in mercy and faithfulness.” In brief, God wants only the good for them and for us. God loves us without reserve. The key Hebrew words are chesed, or covenant love and emeth, perfect faithfulness. In the psalm we prayed, we give thanks to God’s name for His covenant love and faithfulness. The words used are the same, because the intent of God is the same. When we keep the covenant, God showers us with faithful love.

So Saint Luke, in recording the teaching of the Son of God, Jesus, on prayer, is telling us to pray as if we believed the One we are speaking with is exactly that kind of loving, faithful Father. We begin by blessing His hallowed Name and pray that we be part of the breaking in of His kingdom in our time and culture. Only then do we ask for what we need. First of all, that is our “daily bread,” which in the Greek original is more like “super-powerful bread.” We automatically think of the Eucharistic bread we share here. Then we ask, “forgive us our sins for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” That is covenant talk, and Jubilee talk. There are people who have offended us, and the longer we go without forgiving them, the harder it is to even remember if we’ve forgiven or not. So in this Jubilee Year, forgive all the debts you are owed morally, even to people who have moved out of our lives, or have died.

Jesus then gives an example of a human exchange, in which a guy goes next door to his neighbor, declares a family emergency and asks for bread for an unexpected guest. That would have been maybe a frequent event in a land where there is no convenience store down the block. Then Jesus compares these pithy exchanges with the Father who is full of loving kindness and faithfulness, God, and asks if He would ever refuse us the greatest gift, the Holy Spirit, God Himself, when we ask. (Just a hint, the answer is a resounding “no.”)

St. Paul, writing to the church of Colossae in Asia Minor, gets specific about the gifts that the Father has for them. All went down into the font and were baptized with water and the Holy Spirit—remember the Father never turns down that request—and came out of the font for a risen life of faith in Christ. Forgiven, all who ask, and living a new life in Christ because every transgression has been nailed to Christ’s cross. We should daily give thanks for that gift, which opens heaven and our hearts to all the other gifts, small and large, that the Father wants to bestow.

Now we can understand better the first story we heard today about Abraham and God bargaining over whether His mercy would extend to Sodom and Gomorrah. It seems a little humorous to envision Abraham clipping off five or ten unjust people each time he makes a request for God’s mercy. He finally gets down to asking if there are only ten just people in the city, would God relent His punishment. God agrees, but Abraham senses that any more would be too much. After all, the really wicked people of those cities were committing crimes that cried out to God for punishment. We remember them and shudder when we hear the name of the crime—sodomy.