A Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Readings: Sirach 35:12-14, 16-18 2 Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18 Luke 18:9-14

Perhaps this is a provocative assertion, one whose truth you might initially be inclined to deny, though it probably corresponds to your own practice. It is also a good example of a theological conundrum, one in which we cannot help but make assertions that appear to be contradictory. 

What is the statement? 

The prayers of the righteous are more powerful than those of the unrighteous.

At first blush, are you inclined to deny this? Do you want to insist—and quite correctly—that God hears all our prayers? And might you not add that God loves all of us equally? 

Good objections! But of course, there is a difference between God hearing all prayers and God granting all of them. No one is asserting that God does not hear or, should wisdom so ordain, grant the prayers of the unrighteous.

While we are all equal in dignity, God does not love all of us in the same way. Better to say that God loves each of us fully. Nothing is lacking in his love. But God’s love is like any other; it corresponds to that which is loved. 

Even if, at first glance, you want to dispute that the prayers of the righteous are more efficacious, have you not denied that in daily life when you have asked someone whom you consider to be holier than you to pray for your intention? It is such a natural thing to do. So much so that, if you have not done that, could it be because you have never encountered someone whom you judged to be holier than yourself? 

Priests and religious receive such requests all the time. How would I know who is holier? I often doubt that I am, but I throw myself into the request. There is a reasoning, a wisdom deeper than I possess, at work.

And here is the most salient consideration in this discussion. Sacred Scripture clearly comes down on the side of the righteous. Begin with the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Jesus decidedly does assert that one prayer was more righteous and therefore more powerful. He simply inverts our expectations as to who was really the virtuous one.

This should not surprise us because the Scriptures hue to our common practice rather than our initial skepticism about the prayers of the righteous being more effective.

James 5:16: “The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.”

Proverbs 15:29: “The Lord is far from the wicked but hears the prayer of the just.”

1 Peter 3:12: “For the eyes of the Lord are on the righteous and his ears turned to their prayer, but the face of the Lord is against evildoers.”

John 15:7: “If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask for whatever you want and it will be done for you.” 

(See also 1 John 3: 22, James 4:3, 1 Kings 17:22 and Job 42:8.)

So, while first impressions might speak against the prayers of the righteous being more effective, common practice and Scripture seem rather sure of the assertion.

But the claim becomes even more confounding when we try to make theological sense of it, though that may be because prayer itself is perplexing to human reason.

Why is prayer a puzzle? If God, who is all-wise, runs the universe—are we all together on that? Then how can we conceivably think that we should make suggestions to the Almighty? And is that not what a prayer of petition does?

Yet hopefully, there is no need to quote all the Scripture passages in which our Lord tells us to pray for what we need. Whether it makes philosophical sense or not, we do not simply pray for what we need; we are commanded to do so.

Here we have reached a theological conundrum, a rational impasse, not unlike those found in the sciences. Our limited theories require that we hold, at least for now, two apparently contradictory assertions: God’s eternal will should not require adjustment, yet somehow God responds to prayers.

Reconciling those two assertions requires an explosive understanding of how God can be all knowing—so knowing that God foresees our prayers, responds to them and yet never deviates from his eternal course. 

However puzzling the power of prayer might be, we should still try to understand why the prayers of the righteous are more powerful than those of the unrighteous. 

The answer has to do with the nature of God and the world that God created. Born from the equal parentage of Hebrew wisdom and Greek philosophy, Catholicism has always insisted that there is a congruity between God and the cosmos that God created. Even our fallen world still reflects what are called the transcendental qualities of God: God’s truth, God’s goodness, God’s beauty and the oneness of God. 

Put another way, God does not create arbitrarily. He does not make the world something utterly unlike himself. No, at its best and deepest, the world corresponds to and reflects the glory of God. 

And what does it mean to be righteous other than to be aligned with, to partake in, God’s truth, goodness and beauty? So we can say that to be righteous is to enter into the almighty God. The prayer of the righteous is more powerful because it is more rooted in the only power there truly is, God.

In heaven, among the saints, the will of God prevails over all. Jesus told us that we should strive for the same on earth—among ourselves and within ourselves—when he taught us to pray, “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10). The righteous among us are already more aligned with, and therefore more imbued with, God’s power.

Christ’s parable reminds us that, living under the reign of sin, we are not very good at identifying true righteousness. But wherever it is found, righteousness means to be rooted in the deepest reality of the universe: God. The world was created to correspond to God’s truth, God’s goodness and God’s all-powerful love. 

However hard it might be to recognize, we should each earnestly strive to become righteous because to do so is to access the only life, the only vitality, that lies open to us: God’s truth, God’s goodness, God’s beauty, God’s all-powerful love.

The Rev. Terrance W. Klein is a priest of the Diocese of Dodge City and author of Vanity Faith.