Lec
# 53- 5th Sunday of Easter- May 3, 2015- Fr. Bresowar
My
brothers and sisters in Christ, it is once again wonderful to be with you here
to celebrate this 5th Sunday of Easter! Easter last for 50 days,
leading up to Pentecost, and so we continue to celebrate His Resurrection and
its eternal implications for all of us, and we look forward to His glorious
Ascension and Sending of the Holy Spirit in Pentecost, as well as always, His
Triumphant return!
Jesus
says to us in the Gospel, “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask
for whatever you want and it will be done for you.” This isn’t the first time
Jesus admonishes us to ask God for favors, “Ask and you shall receive, seek and
you will find, Knock and the door will be open to you.” He says this in the
Gospel of Matthew. In John’s Gospel, chapter 14, He tells us to ask anything in
His name, and He will do it. In Mark He says, “Therefore
I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it,
and it will be yours.”
In fact, this theme of asking the
Father is laden throughout scriptures, it is mentioned frequently. It comes up
in the Acts of the Apostles, in Paul’s letters, in the letter to the Hebrews,
in the letters of St. John and St. James. And in the Old Testament, in the
Psalms, in Isaiah and Daniel and the Song of Songs.
God wants us to ask and to seek. I
think often times people are too quick to give up though when what they ask for
is not received. Many people have lost faith in God when they ask for a miracle
of healing for example, and they do not receive it. Or when they ask for a
difficult situation to be resolved, and it is not.
This truly can be a test of our
faith.
So the question becomes, why does God
ask us to seek Him with this special requests, and then not answer them?
I think a better question might be,
does God truly not answer them, or does He answer in a way which is even better
than we could imagine.
If we knew the value of seeking and
asking, we would never stop. So many times, people only talk to God when they
need something, or a situation is desperate.
Also, if we knew truly what God is
going to give us, we’d realize that our prayers have been answered and continue
to be.
The problem I think is that we only see
in the micro, and God sees in the Macro. When a prayer is not answered how we
think it should be, that doesn’t mean that our prayers are not answered or that
God is indifferent. He already knows fully what we can only know in a slight
way by faith. He knows what he has prepared, He knows the reward of our faith
and perseverance in suffering; He desires to give us so much more than what we
are even asking for, and he is teaching us to seek and to ask for those gifts
which are not temporary. A healing is temporary, when given it has a purpose,
when not, it has a purpose, all the same it is temporary, eternal life is
forever. Are we asking for eternal life and the food that gives life and never
dies?
I believe that if he answered
everyone of our request, whenever we asked, then we would never learn what we
really need to ask for, and instead we would simply operate out of the concept
that we know what we need better than He does.
Who amongst us would have asked God
to come and die on a cross to destroy death? We couldn’t have asked for that
because it would not have been possible for us to know that death and suffering
were going to be destroyed by God taking on flesh, and destroying it by dying
and rising. No one except God knew that plan. It was alluded to but it still
went against every human instinct.
And yet, before Jesus came, people
were asking for God to take away the pain, take away the suffering, end the
grief of death, end the suffering of the innocents. Asking to be relieved of
their personal trials, and the trials of their loved ones. They also asked for
worldly gifts like food, water, money to provide, reasonable things to ask for.
And some not so reasonable things to ask for.
Much like we do today, they spent a
good amount of time in their prayer telling God exactly how their request
needed to be answered. They couldn’t have imagined how everything they were
truly seeking was going to be given to them, because they lacked faith. They
saw, as many of us do, in unanswered prayers, a God who doesn’t care or is
indifferent.
Nothing could be further from the
Truth.
Whenever we seek good in our lives,
or an end to misfortune, what we really are seeking is Heaven, rather we
realize it or not.
This life, and all we endure, is
temporary, and God has put it in our hearts to desire Heaven, which is not
temporary, the eternal life where all things are right, and there is no more
suffering. We must not fall into the error of trying to make this temporary
worldly existence eternal life.
What does Jesus truly want us to
seek? What should we be asking for?
St. Thomas Aquinas spent his whole
life in pursuit of the Truth, and when God appeared to Him at the end of his
Life, He said to Him, “Thomas, you have written well of me, what would you
like?” And Thomas said to Him, “All I want is You.”
Because what else is better than God?
What could we possibly seek that is better than Jesus?
What we will find, my brothers and
sisters, is when we knock on the door, seek the Kingdom of God, and ask for
Jesus, everything that we want and then some will be given to us, even if we
were not aware of what it was we wanted in the first place.
God won’t answer every prayer request
immediately, or He could, but it wouldn’t teach us to seek the right thing,
mainly Him.
God, I want to do your will, I want
You, I don’t care about anything else. I know it is painful, because I don’t
always understand why certain things happen, why certain hardships or worldly
injustices are allowed, why you ask of me certain things that seem very
difficult, why some have more blessings then others, why some suffer more than
others, but I trust you, with the Faith that you have given me, that you know
what I need more than I do and that you will give that to me and to all of us
who remain in you. And he does, wisdom is learned in patience.
May this become our prayer until the
day we are in the Kingdom of God. And truly it is our prayer, the prayer He
gave us, we say it every day when we say the Our Father. You kingdom Come, your
will be done, give us this day our daily bread, and forgive our offenses, teach
us to forgive others as you have forgiven us, save us from the temptations of
the devil and from sin. For sin is the only thing which can separate us from
You.
Only you Lord, that’s our hearts
desire. Teach us to desire only You, for we know by Faith, that there is no
thing better than You and the eternal life you have promised to those who
follow your commands.
