"The Prayer of Man Is the Weakness of God"

The Lord listens to the sufferings of his people, and it falls to the men of the Church to present them to the Lord through prayer. Indeed, “when the Lord takes up the defense of his people, he is a relentless warrior.”

But the suffering of the people must be felt in the depths of the heart, as God did for the people led by Moses. It was around this theme that Pope Francis developed the homily of this Saturday morning, at the Mass celebrated in the chapel of the Saint Martha House, in the presence of a group of canons of Saint Peter’s Basilica—the basilica, the Pope was careful to recall, “where all the prayers of the world arrive.”

At the heart of the homily was the Gospel in which Jesus invites us to pray without growing weary, recounting the parable of the widow who insistently asks an unjust judge to obtain justice. “Thus,” the Pope affirmed, “God does and will do justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night,” as happened with Israel led by Moses out of Egypt. “When Moses calls out, he says: ‘I have heard the complaint, the lamentation of my people.’ The Lord listens. And in the first Reading we heard what the Lord did, that all-powerful word. When the Lord takes up the defense of his people, he is like this: a relentless warrior who saves his people. He saves and renews everything: ‘The whole of Creation was fashioned anew in its own nature as before.’ ‘The Red Sea became a road without obstacles, and those whom your hand protected passed through with all the people.’”

Knocking at the door of God’s heart
The Lord, the Pope went on, “heard the prayer of his people, because he felt in his heart that his chosen ones were suffering,” and he saves his people in a mighty way: “Here is the strength of God. And what is the strength of men? What is the strength of man? This strength of the widow: to knock at the heart of God, to knock, to ask, to complain of one’s problems, one’s sorrows, and to ask the Lord for deliverance from all these sorrows, these sins, these problems. The strength of man is prayer, and the prayer of humble man is also the weakness of God. The Lord is weak only in this: he is weak before the prayer of his people.” “The summit of the strength of God, of the salvation of God,” the Pope explained, “lies in the Incarnation of the Word.”
Then, addressing the canons of Saint Peter’s, the Pope reminds them that “their work is precisely to knock at the heart of God, to pray, to pray to the Lord for the people of God.” “And the canons of Saint Peter’s, in this Basilica which is the closest to the Pope, where all the prayers of the world arrive, receive these prayers and present them to the Lord: ‘it is a universal service, a service of the Church.’”

Source: News.va