February 28, Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
Isaiah 55: 10-11; Matthew 6:7-15
Today, we are invited by the Church to consider another pillar of our Lenten practice: PRAYER. In the Gospel, Jesus reminds us that prayer does not refer to the quantity of words we utter before God. Rather, prayer is an invitation to renew and reinforce our relationship with the God – our beginning and our end.
The Lord Jesus gave us the model of all prayers to teach us how to approach God in the Lord’s Prayer. God is ‘our Father’: the source of all that we are and we can become. And the fact that we call him ‘our Father,’ not ‘my Father’ is already an indication that we are all called to be connected to each other through him. We are sisters and brothers in Christ, God’s beloved Son.
The first part of the Lord’s Prayer manifests to us what it is that we should truly aspire for in life. That ‘God’s Kingdom come and that his will be done’ means that the bigger picture of whatever we desire and do in our life should be that all of us may contribute to the reign of love, peace, truth and justice in our world. A very tall order, indeed, given the weaknesses we have as human beings!
The second part of the Lord’s Prayer contains our admission that we need God’s help in order to obtain the necessary resources to fully grow as humans. And so we ask his assistance and provisions for our material well-being (our daily bread). We also invoke his help to help us improve and mature in our interpersonal relationships (in experiencing and offering forgiveness). Lastly, recognizing that there is also evil in the world, we ask God’s protection from the workings of the evil one.
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer throughout this Season of Lent and beyond, let us do it slowly and with full consciousness of our need to truly grow in our relationship with God our Father and mature in our spiritual life.
Radio Veritas Asia (RVA), a media platform of the Catholic Church, aims to share Christ. RVA started in 1969 as a continental Catholic radio station to serve Asian countries in their respective local language, thus earning the tag “the Voice of Asian Christianity.” Responding to the emerging context, RVA embraced media platforms to connect with the global Asian audience via its 21 language websites and various social media platforms.
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