Vigils Reading – 17th Sunday
ASK, SEEK, AND KNOCK
From a commentary by The Venerable Bede
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Our Lord and Savior wishes us to attain the joy of the heavenly kingdom,
and so he taught us to pray for it, promising to give it to us if we did so. Ask, he
said, and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be
opened to you.
We should consider most seriously and attentively what these words of
the Lord may mean for us, for they warn that not the idle and lazy but those who
ask, seek, and knock will receive, find and have the door opened to them. We
must therefore ask for entry into the kingdom by prayer, seek it by upright
living, and knock at its door by perseverance. Merely to ask verbally is not
enough; we must also diligently seek to discover how to live so as to be worthy of
obtaining what we ask for. We know this from our Savior’s words: Not everyone
who says to me, “Lord, Lord” will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those
who do the will of my heavenly Father.
There is a need, then, for constant and unflagging prayer. Let us fall upon
our knees with tears before our God and Maker; and that we may deserve a
hearing, let us consider carefully how he who made us wishes us to live, and
what he has commanded us to do…
Seek first the kingdom of God and its justice, and these other things will
be given you as well. To seek the kingdom of God and its justice is to long for the
graces of our heavenly homeland, and to give constant thought to the kind of
upright living that will deserve to obtain them; for should we chance to stray
from the path that leads there we shall never be able to reach our goal.
To ask God for the justice of his kingdom is to ask principally for faith,
hope and love. These virtues above all we should strive to obtain, for Scripture
says: Mercy surrounds those who hope in the Lord; and To love is to fulfill the
law, for the whole law is summed up in one word: You shall love your neighbor
as yourself. And so the Lord graciously promises that the Father will give the
good Spirit to those who ask him, in order to show that those who of themselves
are evil can become good only by receiving the grace of the Spirit…
As we do our best, then, to follow in our Lord’s footsteps, let us ask God
the Father for the grace of his Spirit to lead us along the path of that true faith
which works through love… Then, if we keep the almighty Father’s
commandments, he will certainly reward us with the eternal blessing which
from the beginning he prepared as our heritage through Jesus Christ our Lord,
who with the Holy Spirit lives and reigns with him, God for ever and ever.