A Thief called 'Christ'

Nineteenth Ordinary Sunday Year C

Have you ever been floored by something that changed your immediate circumstances and you never saw it coming?  I have.  It’s no fun. No fun at all. As many of you know, our parish office had been hit by not just one but two burglary break-ins within the last few months. I can’t possibly describe the cocktail of emotions that overwhelmed me, especially after the first break-in. I realised that much of what I was feeling came from the fact that this was unexpected and unforeseeable. I felt ashamed and helpless that I wasn’t able to prevent this from happening. The experience was educational, though. It taught me that although I could never see when the next attempt would happen, I could take additional security measures that could deter future attempts, or at least mitigate the loss. Then it happened again. But this time, thankfully, we were better prepared. We were better prepared because we didn’t take for granted that we were impregnable. There is humility in recognising that we are not.

In today’s gospel, Jesus uses a metaphor that you don’t normally hear. We readily associate him with the Good Shepherd or the Bread of Life. Although we don’t have the usual revelatory ‘I am’ statement that are often introduces the other titles and metaphors, Jesus practically speaks about his movements, especially about his future coming as a ‘thief in the night.’ What can a ‘thief’ teach us about Jesus? The element of surprise found in the metaphor is intended to shake us out of the stupour of complacency that often plagues so many of us when it comes to considering the whole uncertain matter of the future.  We are so ruled by the ‘now’ that our vision of the future is severely myopic. We tend to live in the land of critiquing the very recent past and a future that’s just a day or so away. When we stay here for too long, we trick ourselves into believing we’re making real progress or we sink into despair that we’ve not made any progress at all, thus condemning our endeavours as failures. This is the tyranny of NOW and it’s a dangerous place to live for more than a season.

Jesus is the ‘Thief’ who tells us he’s coming. No ordinary self-respecting burglar would announce the time of his arrival, but if he did he could count on being met by a reception committee. Not only does Christ warn us of his imminent visit, he also provides us with practical tips on how to prepare for his coming without being caught unawares. Christ is prepping us to be part of that welcoming party. The vivid imagery of thievery runs throughout today’s gospel passage and in the three tips he provides to prepare for his coming.

First tip, don’t be sitting ducks for thieves – don’t put out calling cards with expensive items attached to them; don’t flaunt your riches and make them appealing targets, don’t put your valuables in a place where it can easily be stolen. Rather store up treasures where “no thief can reach it and no moth can destroy.’ It is ironic that those who have valuables to protect are the most anxious on earth. The poor, on the other hand, have no need for fancy security seems. They risk losing nothing because they have nothing to lose. If we had been concerned with becoming rich in the sight of God as exhorted by Jesus in last week’s gospel, if we have been making the necessary spiritual investments for eternal life by corporal works of mercy, if we have been storing our treasures in heaven, then there is little to be frightened of when Christ comes as a thief in the night. In our efforts to store up treasures on earth, we forget that every soul who passes from this life becomes a "poor soul", regardless of how rich, or beautiful, or famous, or powerful they were in this world. The answer to the riddle: "How much money did Rockefeller leave behind?" is really quite easy: "Every penny of it." We cannot take anything with us, but we can ship it on ahead of ourselves by living a virtuous life. Our treasures are kept in the safest fortress ever known to man, heaven.

Second tip, don’t be caught off guard – always be ready and never assume that you can foresee how and when the end will happen. The tyranny of the ‘now’ has lured us into a false sense of security. We delude ourselves into thinking that we are an ‘indestructible.’ We live each day on the basis of business-as-usual. We put off our preparations for his imminent coming. We spend time addressing the urgent concerns of the ‘here’ and ‘now’. We count on tomorrow's sun to rise, on there being a future. We lay our plans on that basis. But Jesus says that all this will stop. When or how, we don’t know. But this does not detract from the truth that he is coming and that this is more certain than the most certain thing we know of. Thus, it becomes more urgent than ever to always “stand ready, because the Son of Man is coming at an hour you do not expect.” Notice the argument put forward by Jesus here. He says that if the householder had known when the thief was coming he would have watched and prevented the robbery. That is, if a man knows he is to be robbed at night, and knows the very hour in which it will take place, he will be ready for the burglar when he comes. So, keep ready at all times. Christians should never let down their guard. There is no holiday or break from our Christian duties and responsibilities, a ‘time off’ from being Christian. Christ may decide to pay us a visit when we are ‘off on a holiday’.

The third tip answers the question – ‘How can we always be ready?’ Jesus tells us that we must be ‘wise and faithful’ stewards who do not shirk our responsibility or abuse our authority, and faithfully care for the goods and other members of the master’s household. Stewardship is a way of living that acknowledges that everything is derived from God and continues to belong to God. These things have merely been entrusted to us for the common good of humanity and for the glory of God. Stewardship rejects the claim to an absolute right that comes from ownership. We are accountable to God. Thus, violation of stewardship is a form of stealing. The irony becomes apparent, only ‘thieves’, bad stewards, have need to fear the master of the house, who alone can return unexpectedly to perform an audit like a ‘thief in the night.’ This last tip also reminds us that our waiting is not passive; we are to keep our belts tightened and our lamps burning like men awaiting their master’s return from a wedding. Waiting for Christ to return means working for the coming of the Kingdom of God.

Many Christians seem to feel that waiting for Christ's coming means that we must behave ourselves lest we should suddenly be caught short by his appearing and be ashamed of what we were doing. But Jesus is no policeman, waiting to surprise us in an unguarded moment. Jesus reassures us: “There is no need to be afraid, little flock, for it has pleased your Father to give you the kingdom.” Yes, Jesus is coming ‘like a thief in the night’ to unbelievers and those who are not prepared. But to the faithful, who have lived a life as a faithful and wise steward, his coming is not as a thief but as the Lord of Glory, he comes as our liberation and our salvation. The paradox of the Christian life is that though we look for him to come, yet all the while we are enjoying and experiencing his presence. He is coming, and yet he is with us now. What Jesus wants us to grasp is that these two activities are related. The intensity with which we love his coming is the revelation of the degree to which we are experiencing his presence. The hunger you may feel to see his face is directly proportionate to the present enjoyment you have of his presence. If, to you, the thought of his coming is a frightening thing, then you know little or nothing of his presence now. But if you do know what it means to live by Christ, if moment by moment with your whole being you are taking from him all that he makes available to you, you will find a longing, a yearning in your heart for his personal coming. Thus, we are called to face the future not in fear but to embrace the future in faith, as the second reading tells us, “only faith can guarantee the blessings that we hope for, or prove the existence of the realities that at present remain unseen.”

The Purpose of Life is ...

Eighteenth Ordinary Sunday Year C

One of the most memorable villains in cinematic history must be the enigmatic Mr Smith of the Matrix Trilogy, who constantly spews nihilistic philosophical lines questioning the purpose of life. His philosophical ramblings finally culminate in this fatalistic conclusion: “The Purpose of Life is to End.” During his final showdown with Neo, the hero and main protagonist of the story, his moral counterpart, Smith angrily dismisses causes such as freedom, truth, peace, and love as simply human attempts to justify a meaningless and purposeless existence, and is completely unable to comprehend why Neo continues to fight him despite the knowledge that he cannot win. Neo’s resilience and refusal to accept his fatal ‘end’, was clearly a monumental chink in the armour of his personal philosophy. Ironically, it is only at the very end of his virtual existence that Smith comes to realise the fallacy of the fatalistic ‘truth’ which drives him. He finally gets it. Neo, beaten and bloodied, provides him with the answer: “Because I choose to.” That is what sets Neo and other humans above the machines. It is the freedom of choice, the divine spark: to choose love or hate, to choose life or death, and finally to seek the things below or those above.

Today’s first reading introduces another piece of philosophical rumination which deals directly with the question of man’s existence. It asks and attempts to answer the question many people struggle with, ‘What is life all about?’ ‘What is man’s purpose in this life?’ Thus the Book of Ecclesiastes is a philosophical essay, attributed to being written by Solomon. The author wrote this book from the mistakes he made. He shares his own life’s search. The man had wisdom, riches, horses, armies, and women (that’s an understatement, he had lots of women). Yet, in the end Solomon declared everything to be vanity; in other word, pointless, worthless, meaningless, and purposeless. To pursue vanity is to chase after the wind. Starting with the well-known words, "Vanity of vanities, and all is vanity," and repeating them in the last chapter after having taken us through all the vanities of life, the book contains the important lesson he learns from God, in a sort of ‘roundabout’ way. The Book ends by giving us the antidote of vanity: fear of the Lord and the observance of the moral law. It points out that the secret of a true life is that a man should consecrate the vigour and vitality of his youth to God.  All man’s efforts to find happiness apart from God are of no result. Without God, truly ‘all is vanity’. But with God, nothing is in vain.

In the gospel, we are given two examples of such earthly vanity  - the greedy brother and the rich man in a parable told by Jesus. A man in the crowd begins our story by putting this request to Jesus, “Master, tell my brother to give me a share of our inheritance.” The question sounds oddly familiar. I’ve seen how family battles over inheritance have set kith against kin. The law of primogeniture says (Num 27:1-11 Deut 21:15) that the first born gets a double portion. If you had two brothers, you divided the estate three ways and the oldest got two parts. So guess which son this is. His request suggests that he’s the youngest son. Greed has blinded him to place money above kinship.

Understanding the context of the disgruntled brother sets the stage for the parable. There is a comparison and contrast going on between the two characters in the parable and two characters outside the parable. The rich man in the parable is compared to the greedy brother in real life. Christ in real life acts as judge and arbiter, a role taken by God in the parable. Why is Jesus telling this parable about the rich man who had no greed to a greedy man? Jesus builds up the rich man as a good guy, a content man. This guy is just the opposite of the greedy man. What do we learn? Both thought that life consisted in ‘things’, that the end and purpose of their lives were the acquisition of such ‘things.’ Selfishness and self-satisfaction have blinded them to life’s ultimate purpose and end.

Both the greedy younger brother and the rich man, in their pursuit for wealth without realising that they risk losing everything in a single moment proves the point that ‘all is vanity.’ There is a major reversal in the parable – the man who thinks himself clever is proven foolish; the rich man ends up being poor to God. Notice the poetic justice.  The rich man, like the greedy brother and like so many of us, so obsessed in storing up treasures for ourselves in this place, acquiring knowledge, wealth, possessions and a list of achievements, finally lose sight of the fact that our ultimate goal is our own salvation – making ourselves ‘rich in the sight of God.’ The rich man is not condemned for his wealth or even his greed. His is condemned for forgetting the ultimate ‘end’ or purpose of his life is salvation. He had made no preparations for this. He was too busy investing in this world.

This parable speaks loudly to our generation, it speaks of the purpose of life and what defines it? Have you been defining life in your career, your house, your stock portfolio, in terms of your achievements, the knowledge you possess, the popularity you’ve gain, or the assumption that you will live much longer? What is going to happen when you lose one or more of those things? What happens when you get laid off? What happens when the stock market crashes? What happens when you get some disease which takes away your physical ability? What happens when your friends leave you? If you define life according to these things, you will be devastated. If these things have become the ‘end’ and purpose of your lives, the goals you are ultimately pursuing, the treasures you are seeking for, then the diagnosis is terminal – vanity of vanities, all is vanity!

St Thomas Aquinas teaches that the real end for which man is made is to be reunited with the goodness of God through virtuous behaviour as well as the use of reason in order to know and love God above all. In the words of St Augustine, “that is our final good, which is loved for its own sake, and all other things for the sake of it.” St Ignatius Loyola in setting out the First Principle and Foundation in his Spiritual Exercises writes, “The human person is created to praise, reverence, and serve God Our Lord, and by doing so, to save his or her soul. All other things on the face of the earth are created for human beings in order to help them pursue the end for which they are created. It follows from this that one must use other created things, in so far as they help towards one's end, and free oneself from them, in so far as they are obstacles to one's end.” Thus, the riches of this life are only potentially good. Their goodness is actualised when they serve the greater good – the glory of God and love of neighbour.

The irony we face is that many people would prefer to love the means rather than the end. Man need not just love bad things in order to be condemned to hell. As the old adage teaches us, “The road to hell is lined with good intentions.” Man can pervert his ultimate end by loving seemingly good things, which seem to bring happiness, and mistake these things for the actual, infinite source of happiness - God. Whenever we choose the lesser goods over the greater good, whenever we convert the means into the end, whenever our vision is obscured to see beyond what lies immediately before us, then we are in trouble. Everything comes down to the choice: do we choose these things as a means to the end, or do we choose them as a substitute for the end? Seek the Source of all Goodness, and not just the goods he dispenses. Desire the God of Miracles, not just hunger for the miracles of God. Long for the giver and not just the gifts. Our thoughts should be on the ultimate prize: Heaven. Things of this Earth either lead us to that prize or they may distract us from that and therefore should be placed in their proper place. When we trudge the road of happy destiny we must remember that the road is just a means to an end and not the destination itself.

In an ancient homily given by the father of Eastern monasticism, St Basil the Great assured Christians that when they are prepared to share wealth with the poor in this life, they will certainly reap the reward that is in store for them in heaven, “All the people will stand round you in the presence of Him who judges you all: they will acclaim you as the one who feeds the hungry and gives to the poor, they will name you as a merciful benefactor.” But when we avoid meeting people in case we might feel obliged to part with even a little of what we have and if we can only say, “I have nothing to give you. I am only a poor man,” then be prepared to receive this fate: “Indeed you are poor and utterly destitute. Poor in love, poor in humanity, poor in faith in God, and destitute of any hope of eternal happiness.”

We Dare to Say

Seventeenth Ordinary Sunday Year C

In the new translation of the Roman Missal, the Lord's Prayer is introduced with the words, "At the Saviour's command and formed by divine teaching, we dare to say..." The prayer itself is so familiar to us and because of our penchant to recite it in a hurried mechanical way; we often forget that the prayer is made up of a bold list of radical demands. In fact, the prayer has the audacity of making the following demands of God: we demand intimacy and familiarity with God’s person and name that borders on the contemptuous and blasphemous, we demand the coming of the kingdom, we demand the terra-forming of our trouble ridden earth so that it may become more like a trouble free heaven, we demand daily sustenance from on high, we demand that our sins be forgiven, and finally we demand shelter from temptation and deliverance from evil. If the school of hard knocks has taught us anything, it would be this: never make unreasonable demands, don’t expect the impossible. Well, for man all these may seem impossible; but for God, everything’s possible!

The current introduction by the priest to the Lord’s Prayer found in the most recent translation of the Roman Missal replaces the four options that were available in the earlier translations. The option that comes closest to the original Latin and the present translation is “we have courage to say.” A superficial reading may treat ‘courage’ and ‘dare’ as interchangeable. However, ‘courage’ and ‘daring’ are potentially quite different in meaning. ‘Courage’ does not necessarily invoke a feeling of humility, whereas ‘we dare to say’ inherently recognises our insignificance before the Father. We use the word ‘courage’ to imply some talent or accomplishment on our part, for example, we can say that we have the courage to speak publicly. But when we use the words, ‘we dare to say’, we humbly admit that it has nothing to do with us, in fact, it admits that it not anything which we can ever hope to accomplish. The words convey a profound sense of unworthiness, we are in no position to make any claims or demands.

The whole phrase places the Lord’s Prayer in a different light – it is no longer to be seen as a cry of entitlement, a demand made on God to fulfill our petitions and wishes.  But rather, it is prayer of humility by someone truly unworthy to even stand before the august presence of God, the one ‘who art in heaven,’ what more to address Him with the all too familiar moniker of ‘Father’ and make a series of demands of him.  The catechism tells us that “Our awareness of our status as slaves would make us sink into the ground and our earthly condition would dissolve into dust, if the authority of our Father himself and the Spirit of his Son had not impelled us to this cry . . . ‘Abba, Father!’ . . . When would a mortal dare call God ‘Father,’ if man’s innermost being were not animated by power from on high?” It is by placing ourselves into the position of a child, calling God our Father, that we open ourselves to the grace by which we approach God with the humble boldness of a little child.

The adjective "Our" as used by us, does not express possession, but an entirely new relationship with God. God does not belong to us, rather we belong to him as his people, more importantly as his children. We are his and he is ours, for our sake. This new relationship is the gift of belonging to each other. We are a people bound together by the New Covenant that God has made with us through his Son in the Holy Spirit. While we are indeed individual persons, we are also persons in communion with each other because we have been baptised into communion with the Holy Trinity. It is reminder that unity of mankind is never a product of our machinations. It is wrought by God at the cost of the price paid by his Beloved Son. The "Our," however, excludes no one. We cannot pray 'our' without including every single person for whom Christ died. The Our Father erases all boundaries between us and them, between past and present. It calls us into the family circle, saints crossing elbows with sinners, rich with poor, criminal with law-abiding, powerful with victimised, living with dead. God's love has no bounds, neither should our prayer.

After the initial address, the Lord’s Prayer contains seven demands, or traditionally, seven petitions. The seven petitions can be found in both the Gospel of Matthew and our liturgical version of the prayer. It is interesting to note that the Gospel of Luke contains only five of those seven petitions. I’m not going to confuse you with a detailed exegesis of the differences between the Matthean and Lucan version of the prayer. Our consideration should encompass all seven petitions which we traditionally pray. The number ‘seven’ always symbolised perfection, thus the Lord’s Prayer perfectly summarises all that we need petition to the Lord in any form of prayer.  That is why St Thomas Aquinas calls it the ‘Perfect Prayer.’ Tertullian goes so far as to claim that the Lord’s Prayer is ‘summary of the whole gospel.’

We make seven demands in the Lord’s Prayer. The first three ‘draw us toward the glory of God’ and the last four ‘commend our wretchedness to his grace.’ The ‘more theological’ petitions, that God’s name be hallowed, that His kingdom come, and that His will be done, have already been answered in the person of Christ, but they also anticipate the coming of God’s glory at the end of time. The past, the present and the future, human history and time, collapses in this single prayer. The second series of supplications, that we be given our bread, that our debts be forgiven, that we be kept from temptation, and that we be protected from evil, concern our situation at this very moment in the world we live in. It reflects the situation of the Kingdom that is both ‘now’ as well as ‘not yet.’ The Kingdom has already been inaugurated in the person of Jesus Christ, but will only come to its perfection when he comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead. In the interim, we deal with the daily struggles of life: our economic, material, and spiritual daily sustenance; our relationships with our neighbour; our struggle with sin, temptation and evil.

The first three petitions of the Lord’s Prayer respect the priority of praise over petitions in our own behalf. We do not begin our prayer by making demands of him, our silly and sometimes trivial demands of him. Worship, adoration and praise must always take precedence. This is characteristic of love - to think first of the one whom we love. Take note that in none of the first three petitions do we mention ourselves. The first of the petitions of this prayer asks that the name of our God be hallowed, reverenced, held in awe by all who see him as our Creator and loving Father. It is name which we often misuse and abuse. It is name that often falls into disrepute by our sacrilegious and blasphemous behaviour and language. This first petition invites us to pause and reflect on the sanctity of the name, the sanctity of prayer. It is an invitation to revere the sacred, and thus it becomes an invitation to sanctification – as we proclaim the holiness of God and his name, we too grow in that same holiness.

The second petition calls the coming of God’s kingdom.  Here we are looking first to Christ’s return, but we are also praying for the growth of the Kingdom of God in our own lifetime. Pope Emeritus Benedict says of this petition of the Our Father that "these words establish an order of priorities for human action, for how we approach everyday life".   With this petition we acknowledge the primacy of God.  Where God is absent, nothing can be good.  Where God is not seen, humanity and the world fall to ruin. The coming of God's kingdom is not meant to bring us a utopian situation, a world free of suffering, pain or misery. What Jesus does is establish an absolutely decisive priority.  To pray for the coming of the kingdom means that we pray that his will is accepted as the criterion for all our actions. 

Thus the third petition flows from the second. To pray that the Father’s “will be done on earth as it is in Heaven” is to pray that our will be united to that of his Son so that we would fulfill his plan of salvation for the life of the world. The Kingdom is Jesus Christ in person. Jesus reminds us that those who ‘do the will of the Father’ are his mothers, his brothers and his sisters. When we pray this petition of the Our Father we pray that we may come closer and closer to Jesus, so that God's will can conquer the downward pull of our selfishness and make us capable of the lofty height to which we are called.

Thereafter we have the final four petitions where we present our wants to God. They go up from us in our present world: "give us...forgive us...lead us not...deliver us..." They are an offering up of our expectations which draws down the eyes of the Father of mercies. They ask that our lives be nourished and healed of sin. They concern our battle for the victory of life-that battle of prayer - that we may be made victorious in the struggle of good over evil.

Though we are asked to focus on the “one thing necessary” that is the Kingdom of God, Christ also acknowledges our earthly needs, thus we pray, ‘give us today our daily bread.’ This petition ultimately leads us to recognise God’s goodness who cares for our every need. This petition also presupposes that we have left behind the riches of the world for the sake of faith, and no longer ask for anything beyond what we need to live. Like the Israelites who left behind the security of their lives in Egypt and now depended solely on God’s providence to provide them with daily sustenance, we too are invited to depend entirely on God, to trust in his goodness and to commend our daily cares and concerns to his loving care. Ultimately, this ‘bread’ must mean more than material food which nourishes the body. St. Cyprian reminds us that the Eucharist is in a special sense "our" bread, the bread of disciples of Jesus. We pray according to Cyprian that our bread, Christ, be given to us every day so that we who remain and live in Christ may not depart from his healing power and from his body.

In the fifth petition we beg for God's mercy.  This is the one line that causes many to stumble praying the Lord's Prayer.  It ties God’s forgiveness of our sins to the extent of us forgiving those who have sinned against us. Why would Jesus make this association and link? St. John Chrysostom writes: “We cannot call God our Father in all sincerity if we harbour in ourselves a hardened heart.” But we must remember that the petition for forgiveness is more than a moral exhortation. It is a reminder to us of the God who allowed forgiveness to cost him descent into human hardship and death on a Cross. It calls us to thankfulness for that intervention, and then, with him to work through and suffer through evil by means of love. No matter how much we forgive, we can never match the generosity and love of God in loving us. Only though the example of the God of suffering on the Cross can we truly find grace to forgive those who trespass against us. If you have trouble forgiving, just think of how much you have been forgiven by God, and the price which He paid for you on the cross.

The sixth petition affirms our belief that God does not lead anyone into temptation. Perhaps the greatest temptation that underlies all temptations, is to trust in our own devices and resources rather than in God’s grace and strength. It is the temptation to build our own kingdoms rather than to promote the establishment of God’s. What we are saying when we ask “lead us not into temptation” is that God will not overestimate our strength to resist temptation, that he will be close to us with his protecting hand when temptation becomes too much for us. St Paul has assured us: “God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond you strength…”

The last petition asking for deliverance from evil is not just a mini exorcism; it summarises what this whole prayer is about – the victory of the Kingdom of God over the Kingdom of Evil. It is a battle of cosmic proportions that already has a clear victor – God, and not Satan. But the battle continues to rage in the hearts of many men and women of this world, and cruelly expresses itself in the signs of injustice, suffering wrought by sinfulness, the culture of death, addictions, violence and oppression that we witness taking place around us. But whenever we pray this prayer, we realise, that this is not a battle where we are capable of winning on our own. This last petition reminds us that our lot is not one of despair. We are not defeated. God fights for us and more importantly he has already won the victory for us. What we see is not the ascendance of evil, but rather its death throes. In this petition we ask that we not be robbed of our faith which enables us to see God and binds us to Christ.

There is a Latin maxim that addresses the centrality and priority of prayer in the life, identity and mission of the Church; “Lex Orandi, Lex Credendi, Lex Vivendi”, the law of prayer reflects the law of faith which determines the law of life. How we worship and pray not only reveals and guards what we believe but guides us in how we live our Christian faith and fulfill our Christian mission in the world. As much as we are sometimes taken up with the spontaneity of the praying style of our Protestant brethren, and many of us too are tempted to venture into some innovative and creative explorations on our own, we must always remember that the best prayer, or as St Thomas Aquinas reminds us, the most Perfect Prayer, is still the prayer not formulated by any human poet or creative genius but by Christ, the Son of God himself. In way, God provides us the words to speak to Him.

Thus, our ability to pray in this way can only come to us by the grace of God - it is only because our Saviour has commanded it and because we have been formed by divine teaching, that ‘we dare to say.’ There is no audacity in the tone of our voice or the content of our prayer. We take no credit for this prayer. All glory goes to God and to his Christ, Jesus our Lord. We are not the natural sons and daughters of the Heavenly Father. We have no right to address him by this familiar name. All our words seem banal and fall empty in the light of the pre-existent Word. But because of Jesus through baptism I have become an adopted child. The Father is revealed to us by his Son and we can approach him only through the Son. Because of Jesus, my prayer now derives an amazing and miraculous efficacy. For that reason we dare to call God “Our Father.” Through this prayer, the unapproachable God becomes approachable. The unknown God is made known. The Strange and unfamiliar God becomes familiar and a friend. The prayer unspoken has already been answered!