PART ONE
I
When I was a young priest I had an experience that pained and puzzled me for many years. Charles was a younng man who was gifted athletically and, even more, academically. He truly had a bright future. Charles’ bright future was transformed into utter despair for his family in ten seconds by a misdirected drive-by shooting.
All my efforts to help and support the family, both emotionaly and pastorally, were a depressing failure. The response of the father of Charles was so intense that evenetuallly his anger led him to reject not just the Church but also God. I , too, was rejected by the family and soon lost all contact with them. My theology 101 was not up to the challenge of the horror of the streets. It was the beginning of learning to appreciate the questions of life much more than all the answers that I learned in the seminary.
The experience of Charles’ family, and so many more tragedies, in due course led me to bring Jesus to the center of my struggle with the pervassive iniquity that I encountered so frequentlly in my inner city ministry.
God’s’ revelation clearly invites us into an encounter with Jesus. Jesus’ primary message is for us to repent and believe the Good News for the Kingdom of God is at hand. A significant part of the Christian journey consists in a movement that travels from our kingdom as the center to God’s Kingdom as the true center. This refocusing is a long and challenging part of our walking with Jesus. Most often, it is the work of a lifetime. This journey involves many conversions where the eyes of our heart gradually see, in spite of everything, God has a better plan for our happiness.
When we begin to pray for things, most often, we have a plan and even a long-range strategy for our happiness. This is our kingdom, the creation of our dreams and desires. In this scenario, we most often begin with an image of God up in heaven waiting to hear our prayers and respond to what we need to achieve happiness. In this situation, we are the center of things and God is there to help us, more or less, like an extremely well-resourced butler.
When we fail to place God at the center, we tend to create our own god. Most often this god’s main task is to respond to our needs and plans. This is the god so many people are angry with. This is a god with punishment and hell on his mind. He is not the God of love who in the Garden of Gethsemane called Jesus to enter into the passion and death. “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you. Take this cup away from me, but not what I will but what you will.” (Mk 14:36) No, this God of love offered his Son and let him enter into the evil of death to embrace and share in all the suffering of God’s children throughout history and thus open a way to deliverance and new life.
II
We are on a journey in prayer from an unthinking “give me” attitude, usually propped up by the mandates of a consumer culture, to a gradual change that prays “hallowed be thy name, thy Kingdom come, thy will be done.” This gets us ready to pray for what we need more than for what we want. “Give us our daily bread, forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us. Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from evil.”
The experience of the father’s loss of a son raises the critical question: why does God not answer our prayers especially when they involve something as fundamentally good and sacred as the life of a son or daughter.
Our prayers have a way of relentlessly pulling us more deeply into the mystery of good and evil. It starts out with prayer for toys for Christmas and escalates to prayer for a better score on the test to getting a job to obtaining food and rent for the family to longing for good results on the cancer exam to clinging to hope for the survival of a loved one to deliverance from the growing threat of terror and war. Jesus laid out this dimension of reality in the parable of the weeds and the wheat. (Mt 13:24-30) The dark side or reality will be with us to the end.
The mystery of God’s response to what we pray for and what we want is caught up in the consequences of sin revealed in the early chapters of Genesis. In the final analysis, this is not God’s answer to our specific and general petitions. It is an invitation to enter into the mystery that expresses God’s response to the ultimate face of evil that sin created. In addressing this evil God was coming to terms with billions of situations like the unjust and agonizing death of Charles. This is the God who has witnessed centuries of the insane violence of endless wars. This is the God who has encountered interminable human slavery and its offspring of entrenched racism. This is the God who continually sees the degradation of women and sexual abuse in all forms. This is the God who addressed so many circumstances continually defiling human dignity. Then, there is the ultimate evil, death that is part of every human life.
God has a singular response to all this evil in his Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ Crucified and Risen.
