Mt 7,7-12 – Thursday of the First Week of Lent
«Who among you will give a stone to his son who asks him for bread? Or if he asks for a fish, will he give a snake? If, when we pray, we remembered this word of Jesus, perhaps our trust would be different. Very often, however, our prayer is crossed more from desperation than abandonment. And this is a contradiction, if we really believe that God is Father. What kind of father would be someone who, faced with his son’s request, responds with evil?
Jesus leaves from human evidence: even a fragile, imperfect father remains oriented towards the good of his child. It’s true, the news sometimes gives us dramatic images of fathers and mothers who betray their responsibility. But Jesus is not referring to the degenerations of human love, he speaks of what a father is called to be in his deepest truth: someone willing to give everything for the good of his child. And God gave everything. He “took the bread out of his mouth”, we might say, and the name of this bread is Jesus. “God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son.” He did not give us a stone, but his own Son. He sent him for our good, for our salvation.
So why do we continue to pray like desperate people? Just because we don’t see some requests granted? Is prayer perhaps a way to get what we want, or is it first and foremost an act of surrender? Do we pray to be heard or to entrust everything into the hands of the Father, even when we don’t fully understand what we are experiencing? It is not enough to pray: we need to convert our prayer. Moving from demand to trust, from fear to trust, from anxiety about the result to the certainty of being loved.
And the passage ends with a word that is a true life program: «Whatever you want men to do to you, you too do to them. For this is the Law and the Prophets.” The so-called “golden rule” is not a moral slogan, but a summary of the Gospel. It means: live by giving to others what you yourself wish to receive. Live anticipating in your behavior the good you hope for. Trust in the Father and charity towards brothers are inseparable. Those who truly trust in God learn to resemble him. And what is given in love is not lost: in the hands of the Father it is kept and, in ways that we often do not immediately understand, multiplied.
Thursday 26 February 2026 – (Thursday of the 1st Week of Lent)
