Translation of the Epistle for the Fifth Sunday After Easter (Jas 1: 22-27)
Dearly beloved, be ye doers of the word and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves, For if a man be a hearer of the word and not a doer, he shall be compared to a man beholding his own countenance in a glass: for he beheld himself and went his way, and presently forgot what manner of man he was. But he that hath looked into the perfect law of liberty and hath continued therein, not becoming a forgetful hearer but a doer of the work: this man shall be blessed in his deed. And if any man think himself to be religious, not bridling his tongue but deceiving his own heart, this man’s religion is vain. Religion clean and undefiled before God and the Father is this: To visit the fatherless and widows in their tribulation, and to keep one’s self unspotted from this world.
Continuation of the Holy Gospel According to St. John (ohn 16: 23-30)
At that time Jesus saith to His disciples: Amen, amen, I say to you: if you ask the Father any thing in My name, He will give it to you. Hitherto you have not asked any thing in my name: Ask, and you shall receive, that your joy may be full. These things I have spoken to you in proverbs. The hour cometh when I will no more speak to you in proverbs, but I will show you plainly of the Father. In that day you shall ask in My name; and I say not to you that I will ask the Father for you: for the Father Himself loveth you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came out from God. I came forth from the Father and am come into the world; again I leave the world and I go to the Father. His disciples say to Him: Behold, now Thou speakest plainly and speakest no proverb. Now we know that Thou knowest all things and Thou needest not that any man should ask of Thee: by this we believe that Thou camest forth from God.
The Saving Words of the Gospel.
In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Ghost. Amen.
Transcription of Audio
“If you ask anything in My Name, you shall receive it,” says Our Lord.
I’ve had no small amount of people come to me and register their discontent with Our Lord saying, “I asked God for something, and I didn’t get it,” and then they say, “and I even asked in the Holy Name of Jesus and still didn’t get it. So, He didn’t keep up His part of the bargain.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s very telling, actually, when you consider your relationship with Him a contractual one.”
He’s not a performing flea that is supposed to jump through our hoops and do our will. When we say the Our Father, we pray that His will be done. And when we say that, we’re also admitting that we live in what’s called a moral universe. And a moral universe means that we have a free will and that we are capable of not doing His will. And so, we pray that His will be done. Although many would like to pray more that their own will be done and God be the doer of that. And nonetheless, James puts us straight and he tells us we should not only be hearers, but also doers of the will of God. And therefore, we’re not helpless victims. We’re not consumerists. We are cooperators in a plan that He came up with, and He’s invited us to participate in. And so, this is really the consolation in all of this, that our striving to live in a way that pleases Him is His initiative first. And He doesn’t set us up for failure.
When Our Lord speaks of receiving things that we ask for in His Name, Augustine talks about this, I believe it’s in the “Letter to…” “Letter Number 22 to Procula” [sic] in which he discusses those things that we ask for that we don’t receive, and he seeks to give certain reasons for the lack of seeming correspondence to the petition. And he said, “Sometimes we are simply distracted in our prayer and, therefore, we’re speaking to God as our mind is elsewhere.” And he said, “God’s not going to bless that.” And he said that he understands. he kind of consoles this sermon… or in this letter, he kind of consoles this woman that he’s writing. It’s a noble woman, and he says, “I have experience of distraction in prayer.” He said, “David speaks of his own distraction in prayer when he says, ‘I sought after my own heart.’” And he says how… what does he mean by ‘seeking after his own heart?’ That he’s saying that he has a disparate heart, it goes in different directions, and that he has to constantly bring it back to Our Lord. And this is the never-ending struggle to stay focused in our prayer.
And so, distractions are not a moral problem until we give in to them and pursue them. It’s also helpful to us, if we have distractions in prayer, to pay attention to the nature of the distractions, because the distractions often are revelatory of our own disordered attachments. They can show us perhaps where we’ve lacked trust in Our Lord, or perhaps somebody that we haven’t forgiven. And so, Our Lord in His mercy can even dispose of these distractions to show us a hindrance to greater union with Him.
Then Augustine speaks of the impropriety of that which we ask for. He says, “What parent is going to give a four-year-old a sword for his birthday? What parent, who is asked by his four-year-old, ‘I want to ride a horse,’ he’s gonna say, ‘Okay, get up on the horse.” He said, “God…” – these aren’t bad things. – He says, “Having a horse, or riding a horse, or having a sword,” He said, “these are not bad things, but there’s a proper time for it.” And he says, “So often what Our Lord does is He says, ‘It’s a good thing but not yet.’”
He says, “Sometimes we don’t receive what we ask for because we’re bad, not because we ask in a bad way, like the distracted prayer, or we ask for something in improper time, but there’s something within us that is not ordered towards the will of God. And therefore, if Our Lord were to simply give us what we ask for, like a genie out of a bottle, we would be confirmed in our own sinfulness, our own mediocrity. And it wouldn’t be charity on His part because we would think everything was just fine. But because not everything is just fine in my relationship with Christ, He doesn’t give me that, so I can reflect on my situation.
He says, “But what if I am righteous and I ask for righteous things, in a righteous way, without distractions, with purity of heart, and it’s a good thing?” And he uses the example of the conversion of a loved one. And so, he’s talking about things that are very tangible from our own lives. And we all pray for the conversions of loved ones. We try to be good. We try to ask in a respectful way. And so, he’s a man of our age too, this Augustine fellow. Well, he says, “Continue asking. Continue asking. And continue being righteous in your asking, in your way of life.” and he says, “Ultimately, you simply have to trust.”
And when I read that, I was reminded of Ratisbonne, the Jewish convert, who was converted through the Miraculous Medal. And his mother was dying, and he had been praying for years for his mother’s conversion. He became a priest, and when he got news of his mother’s death, and she hadn’t become Catholic, he was in bits. He was just torn apart, and he was crying. He’s in front of the Blessed Sacrament, pleading with Our Lord, “What happened? I prayed so much. I offered so many Masses, so many Adorations, so many prayers, sacrifices, penances?”
And the Lord said, “Why do you worry?” He said, “I received all of that, and I received her into Heaven as well.” And so, he confirmed him in his righteousness, in his own righteous asking, and his perseverance, and this ultimate abandonment of trust.
Now there’s a key, though, which Our Lord uses, and He says, “In My Name.” And this is really the key to understand what Our Lord wants from us.
St. Catherine of Siena says, “There are more tears shed over answered prayers as over unanswered prayers.” Why? Because we often don’t know exactly what we ought to ask for. And if God were to give it to us, it would bring about all sorts of complications in sorrow. Why? Because our expectations, our desires are too puny compared to what Our Lord actually wants to give us. We can want all sorts of goods, but what our Lord wants for us is the ultimate good, which is Himself. And so, to ask in His Name means that I’m inserted in Him. He’s inserted in me. There’s a correspondence here. There’s a relationality here that is very intimate.
And so, when Protestants say, “Do you know Jesus? Have you accepted Him as your Lord and Savior?” You say, “Well, that’s very little actually to know Him and to accept Him as my Savior, because He wants something far greater for us than that. He wants to possess us. He wants to dwell within us. He wants to transform our minds, our hearts, our desires to become His.” And so, this transformation into Christ, as Paul talks about in Galatians Chapter 2. It says, “It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives within me.” That’s what Our Lord desires for us. Not to be outside of us as simply somebody we love. Not to be outside of us as Our Lord and Savior, but beyond those realities. To become our identity. And so, to ask in His Name is not some magical charm, like the Sons of Sceva in Chapter 19 of Acts of the Apostles, these itinerant exorcists who use Our Lord’s name in a magic way.
And they say, “In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, whom Paul preaches, we cast you out.” And the demon takes them to the cleaners. He beats them all up. It was the seven brothers. And they said, “Jesus, we know. Paul, we’ve heard about, but who are you?” Why? Because they weren’t united to Christ. They were using the Holy Name of Jesus like a magical charm in a superstitious way. Notice, too, that at the heart of paganism, at the heart of superstition, is the attempt to manipulate laws that are outside of me through certain means, and this lack of correspondence between cause and effect is really the definition of superstition.
Sometimes we can also be victims of our own superstition by living a sinful life and saying prayers. If we’re in the state of sin, we should continue to pray, but our prayer has no merit. But how is that in Jesus’ Name if I have declared myself an enemy of Christ through my sin? It becomes really superstitious because this is something that’s now so foreign to me, because I’ve turned my back on Him.
What Our Lord wants for us is a configuration, our configuration with Him, so much so that what we want is what He wants. When he allowed St. Gertrude, who had a great devotion to the souls in Purgatory, He allowed her to choose the souls that would leave Purgatory on certain days. She said, “When He showed me the souls, I knew which ones He wanted and that’s what I chose.” So, it wasn’t some arbitrary choice that she made, her will was configured with the will of God. That’s what he’s saying. That’s really asking in His Name, not through some magical charm of saying the right words, but through our own transformation. So, notice how this is the opposite, complete opposite of superstition, where we tried to manipulate laws that are outside of us and above us. Rather, Our Lord transforms us in this relationship with Him.
That’s what He wants for us, and may it be so.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Holy Ghost. Amen.
~Fr. Ermatinger