THE SPIRIT COMES TO OUR AID
To enter the Kingdom
of God we must
struggle... we do not struggle alone because with prayer and help from the Holy
Spirit, God is always with us and His grace is sufficient.
In the Mass, we are
invited to call upon God confidently as "Our Father." The prayers of
the Mass, especially "the Lord's Prayer," show us that the most
important aspect of our prayer to God is our relationship with Him. He looks
upon us as His children. More specifically, He sees within us the person of His
beloved Son, Jesus. Together with Jesus we form God's own family. In the
Responsorial Psalm we acclaim, "The Lord is faithful in all His words...
[His] Kingdom is for all ages" (Ps 145:13).
This is a great truth
of our Faith. St. Paul declares that we should be "doing the will of God
from the heart, willingly serving the Lord and not men, knowing that each will
be requited from the Lord for whatever good he does" (Eph 6:6c-8a). We
grow in sharing the image of the Son principally through our sharing in the
Eucharist, His Body and Blood, which gradually transforms us into Himself, for
we are what we eat and we are called to go forth and be "Eucharist"
to one another.
In today's Gospel,
someone asks Jesus, "'Lord, will only a few be saved?' He answered them,
'Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I tell you, will attempt to
enter but will not be strong enough'" (Lk 13:23-24). What did Jesus mean
by this expression? The door, which He has in mind, is Himself. "I am the
door; if anyone enters by Me, he will be saved" (Jn 10:9). In prayer we
can look at the Cross and through the cross, Jesus opens the way for us to
enter into His Kingdom. We must follow Jesus in the way of the cross as we carry
the crosses in our lives.
The word
"strive" can also be translated as "agony". To enter the Kingdom of God we must struggle against the forces
of temptation and whatever would hinder us from doing the will of our Father.
The Good News is that we do not struggle alone because with prayer and help
from the Holy Spirit, God is always with us and His grace is sufficient. There
is no need for us to wonder how we should pray. How should a little child speak
to a loving parent? That is how we, in union with His Son, Jesus, should pray
to God, Who is "Abba," our Father.