Father Thomas Matus, OSB Cam.

In the story of the Lord’s prayer that we find in Luke (Luke 11:2-4), the words are different, and the surrounding narrative is very different from what we nd in Matthew (Matthew 6:9-13). We use a translation of the Lord’s prayer as given by Matthew in our liturgies and our personal prayers.

Of course, if you know some other language—let’s say Italian—you could pray with the words: Padre nostro che sei nei cieli... which is still a translation from Matthew. But Luke’s version is different, and in fact we have four gospels in the New Testament, which, in spite of their similarities, tell alternative stories that are different in many ways, and the fourth, according to John, is especially dissimilar with respect to the first three.

So this means that we have alternatives to the gospel within the gospel, and alternatives to the words of prayer within the prayer words of the New Testament. We can extend this to the liturgy. In spite of current efforts to reestablish liturgical uniformity, there are in fact alternative liturgies, often with ancient traditions behind them, and even in what we call the Roman rite, people are always going to find alternative ways of celebrating the Eucharist.

This push toward uniformity is nothing new. In the second century, some people tried to write a single story about Jesus and a single version of the words he was supposed to have said. But somehow the decision was made to accept four different gospel narratives as equally belonging to the Scriptures that Christians read and learned from.    
Each New Testament gospel is alternative to the others, and the words of Jesus—even those over the bread and wine—are different in each of them. Peter’s profession of faith in Jesus as Messiah is different in each one, and the experiences recounted by the disciples after the resurrection of Jesus are all different and maybe even mutually incompatible.

So here is what we have: alternatives to the Scriptures within the Scriptures, alternatives to liturgical forms among ancient and current liturgies, and even alternatives to our af?rmations about faith within the same faith that unites us. Yes, faith does unite us, but it also empowers us to say different things about it, to pray from faith in different ways, and to afirm our belonging to faith communities through different ways of structuring our communities.

As Catholics, we are aware of current tendencies that seem to exclude alternatives, aiming to make things more uniform, whether the expressions of faith, the words of prayer, or the life style of individuals and communities. These tendencies are there, and they are on our minds; so I wanted to say something about them. But this is not what today’s gospel reading is about.

The first line in Luke’s story shows us Jesus who is praying, and his disciples ask him to teach them how to pray as he does. This is essential: prayer is about asking, searching, and knocking, and Jesus is a searcher who asks and knocks. There is ironic humor in his parable about the guy in bed who doesn’t want to answer the door when his friend knocks, but does so anyway, just to get rid of him. The irony of the parable is that people who pray should be like the one who knocks and keeps knocking, but the One to whom Jesus addresses his prayer is nothing like the man asleep in bed with his kids tucked in beside him.

Most human beings resist inopportune requests and knocks on the door at night, but the Abba that Jesus prays to is the Great Alternative to our human reactions and behavioral habits. Humans often want to say, ‘no’, to knockers and askers. Prayer implies trust in a ‘yes’ that leaves the door open.

When Jesus says, “Ask, and it will be given you, search, and you will find,” he hides the One to whom the prayer is addressed. But he manifests the hidden One in the passive verb, “it will be given,” and in the second person verb, “you will find.”

The English word, ‘God’, is originally an abstraction, a participle from a verb meaning, ‘to invoke’. God is ‘the invoked’, but what is essential in prayer is not our having a concept of the One we are praying to. The essential is our being askers and searchers, like Jesus, people whose praying is based on the trust that our asking will always meet a Giver and our knocking will find a yielding door that never was locked and bolted in the first place.    

So let us pray for the grace of being searchers and askers and knockers, always. Amen.