The grace of God is like rain, like water poured out to slake the thirsty ground of our soul and cause life to spring up there and thrive. In the first reading, we have this consoling image of the infallible power of God’s Word: you can try to protect yourself from the rain, you can stay indoors, but eventually the water finds a way to get you wet. Just as the rain cycles back to the sky after watering the earth, so the grace of God raises our heart back to heaven as the Word accomplishes the mission for which it was sent.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us the our Father. This prayer is a powerful example of how the Word rains upon our hearts and directs us back to Its own Source. Jesus is the divine rain who comes to whet our appetite for God. In our love for Him and our desire to learn from Him, He guides our gaze towards the One whose love inspired Him to come so close to us. We have found a place in Jesus’ heart without having done anything in particular, and He wants us to fall into the embrace that is the source of all that love: the bosom of the Father. Praying simply the words, “Our Father” with Jesus, can open our hearts in surrender to this limitless source of being, life, and love.
Quotes:
“God’s word does not return to him void, only through his doing the will of his Father as he filled all things on account of which he had become embodied and reconciled the world to God. He is the One who is said to proceed out of his mouth and out of the womb and vulva, not that God has bodily parts like that but so that we learn the nature of the Lord through our words. Or it indeed could be said that the word of gospel teaching may be called “rainstorms” and the rain that the spiritual clouds pour over the good earth, where the truth of God has reached.”1
Footnotes
- Commentary on Isaiah 15.16, Jerome https://ref.ly/o/accsrevot11/664213