Today's gospel (John 4:43-54) is an object lesson in the uses of prayer. A court official at Cana had a son dangerously ill at Capernaum. He asks for Jesus' help and receives news of his son's recovery even before he has arrived home. He and his family believed the gospel! He asked for the moon and he got it. Job done... Or is it?
No doubt on that day there were other households in Capernaum who saw no such relief from the miserable burden of the loss of a child. None of them came to ask Jesus for his help, as far as we know. Nobody who asks Jesus' help in the gospel meets refusal. And yet they too surely lifted up their voices to heaven for the recovery of their children. Why was the prayer of this court official heard and yet not all the prayers of parents for their sick children are heard?
Why, in fact, pray? God is perfect and cannot change. We cannot conceive of His transcendence over creation. This is why some people become fatalistic. Everything that happens is kismet - destiny. No prayer is possible from this position.
So, again, why pray? We are talking here about the prayer of petition. We can offer prayers of adoration and thanksgiving, not to mention contrition, but all these are about what we owe to God; not what He does for us. Do our prayers of petition risk making God into a sugar daddy?
St Augustine's answer to these conundrums is simple: as we approach the living eternal God, source of all, we pray for what God has determined from eternity that we should obtain by freely asking. And here is the wonder. When our court official approached Jesus, Jesus had already thought of him first. He offered him this meeting from eternity, and the court official made a hundred decisions that day that might have risked his not encountering Jesus. And yet at some point, he put aside his business and his work worries; he turned from the lunchtime entertainment in Cana's taverna; and he went in search of the man that everyone was talking about. But God had sought him first. Jesus did not respond to his prayer as a pure response; He inspired the prayer in the man who cooperated with that grace.
So, what about the times our prayers are not answered? Are those prayers useless? Is God being mean by saying no or not yet? Those prayers do not change God, says C. S. Lewis; they change us. Job's prayers did not save his household and his possessions. They took him rather to a much more exalted place of utter dependence on the God who would share His very goodness and happiness with us. When God does not answer our prayers as we wish, it is because there is something much more valuable that we need to focus on.
Magic tries to manipulate the world to our will. We have to be very careful not to think that prayer is meant to do the same thing. Of course we must ask for our daily bread and our necessities, but in the end God's greatest gift is always himself.
The unanswered prayer is not a slap from heaven, even when it feels like it. It is a call to go beyond and come deeper into the mystery of a God who longs to give us His Almighty Heart.
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