Suy Niệm Tin Mừng Thứ Tư tuần 27 Thường Niên

Suy Niệm Tin Mừng Thứ Tư tuần 27 Thường Niên

Tại sao các môn đệ xin Chúa Giêsu dạy cho họ cách cầu nguyện ?. Có phải họ xin Chúa day họ cầu nguyện vì họ cũng giống rất nhiều người như chúng ta, những người giống như thánh Phaolô và Thánh Phêrô và Thánh Barnaba. Chúng ta tha thiết cầu nguyện và hành động nhưng hai việc này có thể làm trong sư mâu thuẫn! Làm thế nào để chúng ta có thể biết và làm theo như thánh ý của Thiên Chúa?

Một số người cho rằng lời cầu nguyện mà không bao giờ thất bại là lời cầu xin cho "Ý Cha được thể hiện" như những lời cầu xin của chúng ta, trong khi thực hiện những ước muốn của chúng ta là để được hiểu biết Thiên Chúa, chúng ta nên luôn luôn tin tưởng và đạt niềm tin của chúng ta trong ý muốn và kế hoạch của Thiên Chúa. Trong lời cầu nguyện của chúng ta, chúng ta phải lắng nghe Thiên Chúa, dành nhiều thời gian trong sự hiện diện của Thiên Chúa. Điều mà chúng ta cần phải cầu nguyện trước tiên là chúng ta cầu xin cho chúng ta biết thay đổi. Để lời cầu nguyện được thành sự thật, chúng ta phải mang theo trong mình, những nhu cầu của chúng ta, kẻ thù của chúng tôi và nỗi sợ hãi của chúng ta với Thiên Chúa và lắng nghe những gì Thiên Chúa muốn nơi chúng ta để Thiên Chúa có thể ban cho chúng ta những gì chúng ta thực sự cần thiết.

"Lạy Cha ở trên trời, Chúa đã ban cho chúng con một tâm trí để nhận biết Chúa, một ý chí để phục vụ Chúa, và một trái tim để yêu Mến Chúa. Xin hãy cho chúng con hôm nay những ân sủng và sức mạnh để chấp nhận thánh ý Chúa và lấp đầy trái tim của chúng con với tình yêu của Chúa rằng tất cả những ý định và hành động của chúng con để có thể làm Chúa được hài lòng. Xin giúp chúng con có lòng thương và tha thứ cho những người thân cận, bạn bè láng giềng của chúng con như Chúa đã dành cho chúng con".

REFLECTION

Why did the disciples ask Jesus to teach them how to pray? Even if these men were not particularly pious, they would have at least a rudimentary knowledge of Jewish prayers. They must have been to the synagogue or perhaps the temple in Jerusalem a time or two. They had to be interested in God or knowing and associating with Jesus would not have held much of an attraction for them. Perhaps they ask because they are so much like us who are like Paul and Cephas and Barnabas. We earnestly pray and act but can be at odds! How can we know and do God’s will?

Some say that the prayer that never fails is: “Thy will be done.” Our prayers, while making our desires known to God, should always submit to God’s will and plan. In our prayer we must listen to God, spend time in God’s presence for just as we cannot be outside during daylight and be unaffected by the radiation of the sun, so we cannot be unaffected when we come into God’s presence. The first thing prayer always changes is us. In order to really pray we must bring ourselves, our needs, our enemies and our fears to God and listen to what God wants from us so that God can give us what we truly need.

May Your Kingdom come!

Wednesday 27th Ordinary Time

Opening Prayer: As I enter this sacred time and space, I quiet my turbulent mind: You are all-powerful, Lord, and I can entrust to you all my worries and concerns as I seek simply to be with you and listen to your words of life. You know what I need, what I desire. I make mine the words of today’s psalm as I turn to you and praise and glorify you: “Gladden the soul of your servant, for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul” (Psalms 86:4).

Encountering Christ:

1. Jesus Was Praying?: Of all the Gospel writers, St. Luke shows Jesus praying most often. Jesus was praying in a certain place, he tells us. And he mentions this multiple times throughout his Gospel. Imagine that. Jesus, the incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity, going off alone every day to pray. Why would God himself need to take time away from his pressing activities to pray? This simple fact reveals so much. First, it gives us a glimpse into the life of the Trinity. Remember, the Trinity is three Persons in one Nature. Three real Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, with real relationships. Jesus went off to pray because he cared about those relationships, about nourishing them and being nourished by them. Second, in his human nature, our Lord entered into the limits of time and space. His Trinitarian relationships, in some mysterious way, needed to participate in that. We share that same human nature, and we have been made participants in the divine nature through baptism. So we too can expect that the development of our relationships with the Trinity will require time alone with God. It’s all well and good to say that we are “always praying,” and that is indeed our ideal. But if Jesus himself felt a need to go off to be alone with his Father and the Holy Spirit on a daily basis, why would we ever think that we could make our Christian journey without doing the same? The Catechism (2697) puts it eloquently: “Prayer is the life of the new heart. It ought to animate us at every moment. But we tend to forget him who is our life and our all… we cannot pray ‘at all times’ if we do not pray at specific times, consciously willing it. These are the special times of Christian prayer, both in intensity and duration.”

2. Teach Us to Pray: The disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. They had been watching him. They had been traveling with him, seeing how he passed his time. Clearly, prayer was an anchor for the Lord. Clearly, the disciples recognized that their own life of prayer was not at the same level as Christ’s prayer. But they wanted to grow, to improve. They wanted their prayer life to be what it should be. So, they asked the master to teach them. That’s what disciples do: they learn from the master; they thirst for more and seek to grow. How is my thirst? How is my desire to grow, to learn, to follow Jesus more closely? To be someone’s apprentice means much more than learning some information about something. It is not just a part-time slice of one’s life. To be an apprentice, a disciple, is to learn a whole style of living; it’s a full-time adventure. And since Christ is infinite in his divine wisdom, we will always have more to learn from him. Our full-time adventure of discipleship will never end. We just have to keep nourishing our desire to live more like Jesus, to learn from him, to discover in all the ups and downs of our daily life all the lessons he wants to teach us and all the graces he wants to give us. Then, when we are ready for the everlasting adventure of heaven, he will take us home.

3. Merciful Father: The Gospels give us two versions of the Our Father, the basic Christian prayer. The one we are more familiar with is St. Matthew’s, but the one given today by St. Luke is recognizably the same in its structure and content. So many things strike us about this prayer, which is itself a revelation about what being a Christian really means. It shows that Christianity is eminently relational. We address God as “Father.” We address him together with our brothers and sisters: “Give us this day…” We address him in the context of needing not only material support but also relational healing: “forgive us our sins.” This great, unique religion of the Incarnation is a vibrant, ongoing restoration of relationships that sin has broken. Even our moral duties are presented by Our Lord in this prayer as relational: “for we ourselves forgive everyone in debt to us.” Christianity is not a moral code. Christianity is not a one-time acceptance of a creed. Christianity is a friendship journey, with all the vibrancy and drama that come with a commitment to any meaningful relationship. If it ever starts to feel dry, boring, or predictable, we can be sure that we have strayed from its true path.

Conversing with Christ: Lord, I echo the petition of your first disciples: Teach me to pray! I want my life of prayer to be all that you want it to be. I know that prayer is a mystery, that one who prays regularly is always going to find new challenges, new delights, new avenues to discover. Never let me neglect my prayer life. Never let me fall into routine. Never let me stop seeking to go deeper and deeper into the friendship you so generously offer me.

Resolution: Lord, today by your grace I will make an appointment to talk with someone I respect about my prayer life, trying to identify how I am doing and what next step I can take to continue growing in prayer.

Reflection Wednesday 27th Ordinary 2018

In the first reading Paul writes about Peter as the apostle of the Jews and himself as the apostle of the pagans. He also mentions special concern for the poor.

In the Gospel reading Jesus gives us the most popular, perhaps the most important, prayer in our Christian tradition, the "Our Father." We learn so much from this prayer given by Jesus himself. When we pray we pray to our Father, not to the all powerful God and Creator, not to the Supreme Lord and Master.. Jesus invites us to share this intimacy with his Father in heaven and to experience this in prayer. So often and so many times in Sermon the Mount accccon Mathew Jesus spoke of his Father, of our Father. We pray that we always put God first; we pray that God's kingdom may rule and that his will be done. We pray that we do our share in establishing God's reign. We ask for our daily bread for our bodies and also for our souls and spirit, his body and his blood which he has lovingly left us in the Eucharist. We ask to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: this was precisely his mission, to forgive our sins through his passion, death and resurrection. We pray for the grace to learn to forgive others. In the silence of our hearts, we know that when we pray to our Father, we are one not only with Jesus in heaven but also with our brothers and sisters in heaven and on earth. We are invited to pray that we may do God's will rather than our own will. We should ask, seek and knock so that we may discover what God's will is for us, and then ask for the courage and the strength to do it. As Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he also reminds us through the Gospel to remember to pray. So, when we pray, we must bring ourselves, our needs, our enemies and our fears to God and listen to what God wants from us so that God can give us what we truly need

REFLECTION 2018

In the first reading Paul writes about Peter as the apostle of the Jews and himself as the apostle of the pagans. He also mentions special concern for the poor.

In the Gospel reading Jesus gives us the most popular, perhaps the most important, prayer in our Christian tradition, the "Our Father."

We learn so much from this prayer given by Jesus himself.

When we pray we pray to our Father, not to the all powerful God and Creator, not to the Supreme Lord and Master.. Jesus invites us to share this intimacy with his Father in heaven and to experience this in prayer. So often and so many times in Matthew's Sermon the Mount Jesus spoke of his Father, of our Father. We pray that we always put God first; we pray that God's kingdom may rule and that his will be done. We pray that we do our share in establishing God's reign.

We ask for our daily bread for our bodies and also for our souls and spirit, his body and his blood which he has lovingly left us in the Eucharist. We ask to be forgiven our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us: this was precisely his mission, to forgive our sins through his passion, death and resurrection. We pray for the grace to learn to forgive others. In the silence of our hearts, we know that when we pray to our Father, we are one not only with Jesus in heaven but also with our brothers and sisters in heaven and on earth. We pray, "Lord, teach us to pray."