Jesus reminds the Sadducees that God told Moses that "I am God of Abraham, the God of Israel, and the God of Jacob? He is not God of the dead but of the living, "
Pope Benedict points out when God reveals himself as God of our Fathers, he is not a god limited to a place, but a god of men, for men, with men. He is not bound to one spot, but he is present and powerful wherever man is. He shows himself to be He who is always near, whose power is boundless; He is always to be found where man is and where man lets himself be found by Him.
This makes prayer even more meaningful, valuable, and indispensable.
Pope Benedict in his homily on Pentecost invited us to be more dedicated to prayer thus availing ourselves more and more to the power of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth.
In prayer we let ourselevs be found.
Tobit and Sarah in today's reading bowed to pray. In prayer they opened themselves up to God. Hope remained though despair was pressing in from all sides. Prayer fortified their spirit, their life, and drove away the pollutants of despair and misery.
One thing to note.
Their prayer was unanswered. What they prayed for did not come about. They prayed for death and God gave them life. The power of prayer resides in the fact that it is not limited to our desires but it lets God in to do his work. God is never limited by our feeble prayer request.
Their are times when we do not know how to pray, as St. Paul tells us, but this is when the Spirit will groan for us, pray for us in our need.
This is truly the power of the Advocate.
Sometimes, we discover as we continue to read Tobit, we truly are thankful for unanswered prayers.
scripture quote for memory:
"And as well as this, the Spirit too comes to help us in our weakness for, when we do not know how to pray properly, then the Spirit personally makes our petitions for us in groans that cannot be put into words and he who can see into all hearts knows what the Spirit means because the prayers the Spirit makes for God's holy people are always in accordance with the mind of God." Rom 8:26-27
quote of the day
"to invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk" Thomas Edison
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