In his homily,
Pope Francis referred to Abraham’s courage and tenacity in appealing to the
Lord to spare the city of Sodom from destruction. Pope Francis drew from the
First Reading, observing that “Abraham is a courageous man and prays with
courage.” Abraham, he said, “finds the strength to speak face to face with the
Lord and attempts to defend that city.” And he does it with tenacity. In the
Bible therefore, the Pope said, we can see that “prayer must be courageous.”
“When we speak of courage we always think of apostolic
courage – going out to preach the Gospel, these sort of things…But there’s also
(the kind of) courage (demonstrated) before the Lord. That sense of paralysis
before the Lord: going courageous before the Lord to request things. It makes
you laugh a bit; this is funny because Abraham speaks with the Lord in a special
way, with this courage, and one doesn’t know: is this a man who prays or is
this a‘phoenician deal’ because he’s bartering the price, down, down…And he’s
tenacious: from fifty he’s succeeded in lowering the price down to ten. He knew
that it wasn’t possible. Only that it was right…. But with that courage, with
that tenacity, he went ahead.”
Sometimes, the Pope said, one goes to the Lord “to ask
something for someone;” one asks for a favour and then goes away. “But that,”
he warned, “is not prayer,” because if “you want the Lord to bestow a grace,
you have to go with courage and do what Abraham did, with that sort of
tenacity.” The Pope recalled that Jesus himself tells us that we must pray as
the widow with the judge, like the man who goes in the middle of the night to
knock on his friend’s door. With tenacity.
In fact, he observed, Jesus himself praised the woman
who tenaciously begged for the healing of her daughter. Tenacity, said the
Pope, even though it’s tiring, is really “tiresome.” But this, he added, “is
the attitude of prayer.” Saint Teresa, he recalled, “speaks of prayer as
negotiating with the Lord” and this “is possible only when there’s familiarity
with the Lord.” It is tiring, it’s true, he repeated, but “this is prayer, this
is receiving a grace from God.” The Pope stressed here the same sort of
reasoning that Abraham uses in his prayer: “take up the arguments, the
motivations of Jesus’ own heart.”
“To convince the Lord with the Lord’s own virtues!
That is beautiful! Abraham’s appeal goes to the heart of the Lord and Jesus
teaches us the same: ‘the Father knows things. The Father – don’t worry – sends
rain down on the just and the sinners, the sun for the just and for the
sinners.’ With that argumentation, Abraham forges ahead. I will stop here: praying
is negotiating with the Lord, even becoming inappropriate with the Lord.
Praying is praising the Lord in the beautiful things he shares and telling him
that he bestow these beautiful things on us. And (appealing to him) who is so
merciful, so good, to help us!”
Pope Francis then urged everyone to
spend no more than five minutes each day to read Psalm 102:
‘Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits. He
pardons all your iniquities,
he heals all your ills. He redeems
your life from destruction,
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