Simple Rather Than Flashy

Homily for Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

In his Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul seems to bounce back and forth between encouraging them and taking them to task. In today’s passage, he gets to the heart of his warning to the Corinthian Christians. He draws a direct line between them and Eve who was corrupted by the lying serpent. The Corinthians have also been corrupted by lies.

St. Paul charges them with being too tolerant, with allowing charismatic, confident, smooth-talking preachers who have distorted the Gospel that he had preached. It’s a powerful metaphor. Eve’s deception led to a rupture in humanity’s relationship with God. Paul is worried that the Corinthians are on the brink of a similar spiritual disaster—trading truth for something flashy but false. He asks them whether his humble way of presenting the Gospel has led them to believe that better orators have presented a better Gospel.

In the Greco-Roman world, traveling philosophers and rhetoricians often made their living through patronage, and the Corinthians may have seen Paul’s refusal to accept money as a sign of weakness or lack of legitimacy. Paul flips that logic on its head. He insists that his refusal to take payment was a deliberate act of love and integrity. He wanted to distinguish himself from those who were “false apostles, deceitful workers,” who were more interested in self-promotion than in serving Christ.

Jesus may be making the exact same argument in the Gospel passage that we proclaim today. He bids the apostles to pray a simple prayer, a prayer that we still recite today. He warns against babbling and using many words because we think that our prayer will be better received if it is more elaborate.

The Lord’s prayer (or the “Our Father”) is the prayer that developed into our Liturgy of the Hours and even our Eucharist. The earliest Christian churches prayed the Lord’s prayer three times a day: in the morning, at the Eucharist, and in the evening. Though simple, the prayer is direct. It not only addresses God, it also contains an admonition to be merciful as God is merciful.