8 October 2025 -- Wednesday of the 27th week
Homily
John the Baptist, like other spiritual teachers of his time, including the Pharisees, Sadducees, and teachers of the Law, taught his disciples methods, gestures, and formulas for prayer. So the disciples of Jesus, many of whom had been disciples of John, asked Him one day to teach them to pray ‘as John taught his disciples.’ They were no doubt intrigued by the fact that they often saw Jesus withdrawing, especially at night, to pray in secret, but that He taught them neither method nor formula. Jesus' response, summarised in what we call the ‘Our Father’, is not a ‘prayer formula’ that He invites them to repeat, but rather a very rich teaching on what prayer is. (It is generally accepted by exegetes that this version of the Our Father in Luke, which is shorter than Matthew's, is the most original).
The first teaching is found in the word ‘Father’ and implies that we must adopt a filial attitude towards God, full of affection, trust and, in a way, ‘complicity’. This attitude is expressed first in the expression of the desire that the name ‘Father’ given to God be revered everywhere and that His reign of peace, justice and love be established everywhere, here on earth. Next comes the request for daily bread, which is a way of recognising that everything we have is a gift from God, followed by the request for forgiveness of sins and for deliverance from temptation.
This is, in a few very brief sentences, a description of the attitude of the person praying. Jesus does not give an easy answer to His disciples' question. In fact, He does not answer the question directly. He does not say, ‘Prayer is this or that.’ He does not say, ‘Prayer consists of reciting this or that formula.’ Rather, He says: ‘When you pray, say...’ That is to say, when you are in a state of prayer, or when there is a prayer in your heart and you want to express it in words, you can, for example, use the following words: ‘Our Father, hallowed be thy name, etc.’
If Jesus does not answer the question directly, it is probably because what is most important to Him is not that we learn to pray, but rather that we learn to transform our whole life into prayer. When we pray, that is, when we are in a state of prayer, we can use the words He teaches us. If we are not in a state of prayer, the words, even if taught to us by Jesus, will be empty.
When we talk about ‘saying our prayers’ or ‘doing our prayers,’ we already have a reified view of prayer. Prayer is not something that human beings use; it is first and foremost an attitude or a state of communion.
Armand Veilleux