Mt 6,7-15 – Tuesday of the First Week of Lent
«Praying then, do not waste words like the pagans». This note, placed at the beginning of today’s Gospel page, introduces Jesus’ teaching on the Our Father and is a word that questions us profoundly. You can pray wasting words and you can pray authentically. In fact, not all prayer is automatically a relationship. The pagan mentality is that which thinks it has to convince God, almost as if it has to persuade him through the quantity of words or the intensity of religious performances.
It is the idea of a distant God, to be bended, to be reassured, to be insistently urged to intervene. Jesus overturns this perspective. He says that those who pray must first perform an act of awareness: remember that you are addressing a Father. Not to someone to convince, but to someone who is already convinced that he loves us. “Your Father knows what things you need even before you ask him.” Prayer does not serve to inform God, but to transform us. God doesn’t need our words; we are the ones who need prayer. Praying is an act of conversion, not a divine requirement. It’s the way we learn to recognize ourselves as children.
We are like children who feel the profound need to tell their father or mother what they carry in their hearts. And parents allow them to say it, even if they already know what is needed. Because there is something liberating in being able to express what lives inside us. Prayer, then, is a form of tenderness that God exercises towards us: he grants us a space in which we can be true, without masks, without strategies. It is not an accumulation of words, but reliance.
Then there are the words of the Our Father. Each of them is a life program. They are not just formulas to recite, but criteria to embody: recognizing the sanctity of God’s name, desiring his Kingdom, welcoming his will, live forgiveness, ask for the necessary bread, fight against evil. If someone wanted a map to guide their Christian growth, they could take the Our Father and commit to putting it into practice. The heart of the Gospel is contained there, and there one learns to pray without wasting words, but by giving one’s life.
Tuesday 24 February 2026 (Tuesday of the 1st Week of Lent)
