Prayer and the Pray-er

WORD 2day: Tuesday, 5th week  in Ordinary time

February 11, 2020: 1 Kings 8: 22-23, 27-30; Mark 7: 1-13

Solomon prays and Jesus teaches what is not truly prayer! Solomon acknowledges the goodness of God as the crux of all prayers and Jesus teaches us that as long as we really don't experience and strive to grow worthy of God's goodness, our prayer will merely be a lip service: "this people honours me only with lip service, while their hearts are far from me. The worship they offer me is worthless, the doctrines they teach are only human regulations," quotes Jesus from Isaiah. 

This is no new or isolated teaching of Jesus - it is in fact the linking thread all through his teaching of faith and expressions of faith. It has to be something that is lived from the core of our beings not merely a performance for the sake of the those who are seeing, those who are expecting and those who are valuating us constantly. That is the essential difference between a performance-prayer that the pharisees and scribes upheld in contrast to the integral prayer that Jesus lived and taught.

In short Jesus was trying to contrast between a mere prayer and a pray-er! It is not enough that we say prayers, we need to become pray-ers... persons who pray; pray with their lives, pray with their everyday choices, pray with their value system, pray with their entire self - they do not merely say or perform prayers, but become in themselves pray-ers! That is what Jesus was...every bit of his being, all the time was united with the One who sent him, thus he was a pray-er! Let us seek ways of growing to be true pray-ers.