Does prayer change the Father or us?

Homily
17th Sunday of Ordinary Time
25 July 2010
St. Lawrence Center/TEC National Congress
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Abraham on the surface seems to change God's mind. He persists, like Jesus asks his disciples to persist in their asking, and seems to win God over by his persistence, even as he apologizes all the while for his being annoying. Yet Abraham does not change God's mind, at least not in the way that we might think of someone deciding not to do evil and deciding instead to do something good. God is good. He cannot be anything else. He is not evil one moment, and good the next. When we hear of God planning to inflict what appears to be evil as a punishment, He is not thinking of doing evil anymore than someone who injects chemotherapy is doing evil. The intent is to destroy the bad, which a good God does allow to coexist with goodness, with as little damage to the good as possible, for the sake of the good. That is always God's intent, for He is good. He cannot be anything else. He is not anything else, or He is not God. So Abraham does not convince an evil God to be good by his pleas, or an unmerciful God to be merciful. He engages God in a discussion about what is good and merciful; and in this case, Abraham is the instrument of God's goodness. Theologically speaking, what is happening can be described as this: God wills absolute things absolutely, and contingent things contingently. That is, if God wills something absolutely, we will not change God's will, for he knows what is good better than we do, and any apparent evil that God is involved in must not be evil at all, not even as a means to an end. Yet God does not will everything absolutely, as we see in Abraham's plea and in Jesus' instruction to his disciples to pray with persistence. God wills contingent things contingently. He appears to change or to respond to some prayers of his people, not changing himself from bad to good but changing his faithful people through their own prayers to be the instruments of his goodness. So the axiom holds true, even when we are encouraged to pray persistently and to ask many things from God, which we are in this weekend's scriptures, that prayer does not change God, who is always good, but prayer does change us, who are not always good. It is through prayer that we become knowers and doers of the good, and as Luke tells us, the gift of one who prays unceasingly is the gift of the Holy Spirit, which which gives us a full communion in God's eternal goodness.
When we pray the Our Father, we pray a perfect prayer, because it is how Jesus taught us to pray. It is perfect in content, yes, and sufficient for a full consecration of one's life to God, even as it is a short prayer. But more perfectly, it is the prayer that Jesus himself prayed, and because He taught us to pray 'Our Father' instead of 'My Father', the Our Father is a prayer that we pray together, right before receiving communion, but it is also a prayer that Jesus prays in us and with us and through us. When we pray the Our Father, it is Jesus praying through us to His Father as much as it is us praying alone. That is what really makes the Our Father perfect. Perfect in its content, yes, but more importantly, we have confidence that it is Jesus Himself who did pray and does pray in this way, and it is a prayer that cannot and should not be prayed individually, but always with Jesus, and through Jesus and in Jesus.