The second part of a five-part series on building a life of prayer by by Father Francis Martin, S.S.D.
Jesus Teaches Us how to Pray — Abba!
One of the most remarkable parables of Jesus on prayer is recorded in Luke 18:1–8:
He told them a parable on the necessity of always praying and never
loosing heart. Once there was a judge in a certain city who respected
neither God nor man. A widow in that city kept coming to him saying,
“give me my rights against my opponent,” and for a time he refused.
Finally, he thought, “I care little for God or man, but this widow is wearing
me out. I am going to settle in her favor or she will end by doing me violence.” The Lord said, “now listen to what that corrupt judge said. Will
not God then do justice to his chosen who call out to him day and night?”
What a daring image this is! Jesus is urging us: “be like that woman and just keep bothering God.” Who else would have ever said that but the Son of God Himself!
In Luke 11, there is another striking teaching of Jesus on the importance of prayer. The disciples had come to Jesus and asked him, “teach us how to pray.” And so he told them, “now when you pray, say Abba.” You say “Abba Father, may your name be held holy, may your kingdom come, give us today the bread that we need. Forgive us as we forgive others, save us from the evil one.” This is the way to pray. Now when Jesus took this opportunity to teach us to pray, he wasn’t saying, “these are some words that you can say when you want to pray.” He doesn’t care about the number of words we use. Jesus is saying, “this is the way your heart should be when you pray. These are the priorities that ought to be in your mind when you pray.” When you pray, you look at Almighty God as Abba, Dad. Jesus was teaching his disciples that when we pray the first thing we do is to relate to God as Dad.
Years ago I lived in Jerusalem for a time, and I can still remember the day when I was in a grocery store one day and heard a little boy who was lost cry out, “Abba, Abba, where are you?” His father leaned over the counter and said, “Here I am, what’s the problem?” I thought to myself, here is this Aramaic word Abba, which a child says to his own father, and is preserved in modern Hebrew in the same way. Now the disciples heard children back in their day use that same word all the time. So when Jesus said, “now when you pray I want you to say Abba,” that was a revolution. No one had ever talked about God that way before. This is how Jesus himself talked to the God. We find his own prayer that way in Mark’s gospel in the Agony in the Garden when he was overcome and he said, “Abba, I can’t go on.” Mark is very careful to write that Jesus said Abba. St. Paul says that our ability to talk to God in this way is the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives—that the Holy Spirit bears witness to our spirit that we are children of God and moves us to cry out, “Abba, Father” (see Galatians 4:6).
So Jesus has told us that when we start to pray this is the way we relate to God. Do you understand? This means that by the work of the Holy Spirit we are to have a divine affection for God. In fact, as faith takes root in our life and we really begin to love God, all our emotions begin to line up. All our life starts to get in order, because we have begun to relate to God as He really is, to love Him and to trust Him. We begin to treasure His will so that whenever God says anything to us we can say to Him, “it’s enough, Almighty God, that you want this, it’s enough that you don’t want this. That’s all I need to know, I love You, I trust You.” This is the way that God wants us to relate to Him. It comes about as the Holy Spirit works in us a deep change so that we really love God.
Father Francis Martin lives in Gaithersburg, Maryland. He is Professor of Biblical Studies at the John Paul II Institute for Marriage and Family in Washington, D.C.
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