"The Christian Life is A Battle"--Fought with Prayer

Moses, putting the warrior in prayer warrior. By the way, the Sacred Page blog is an excellent resource for Catholics wanting to learn more about Scripture, and for non-Catholics who want to know what Catholics teach about Scripture. Excerpts:

...Our First Reading is Exodus 17:8-13:

In those days, Amalek came and waged war against Israel.
Moses, therefore, said to Joshua,
"Pick out certain men,
and tomorrow go out and engage Amalek in battle.
I will be standing on top of the hill
with the staff of God in my hand."
So Joshua did as Moses told him:
he engaged Amalek in battle
after Moses had climbed to the top of the hill with Aaron and Hur.
As long as Moses kept his hands raised up,
Israel had the better of the fight,
but when he let his hands rest,
Amalek had the better of the fight.
Moses’ hands, however, grew tired;
so they put a rock in place for him to sit on.
Meanwhile Aaron and Hur supported his hands,
one on one side and one on the other,
so that his hands remained steady till sunset.
And Joshua mowed down Amalek and his people
with the edge of the sword.

We should recall the context here. After the Ten Plagues and the Passover, Israel has left Egypt a few weeks ago, crossed the Red Sea, and now entered into the Sinai Peninsula: a vast, rocky, mountainous desert. Amalek was a nation of nomads that controlled the northeastern part of the Sinai Peninsula and the southern part of the Negeb (the south Judean desert). The Amalekites were not happy to have the Israelites moving through the outskirts of the their territory, and they sent bands of scouts to trail them. According to Deut 25:18, the Amalekite raiders killed off the weakest of the Israelites who lagged behind the main camp—the ill, the elderly, poor families with many children, etc. The Amalekites were an ancient expression of the culture of death.

Now on their way to Mount Sinai, in Exodus 17 the Israelites are attacked outright by the bulk of the Amalekite forces, and they are forced to respond, despite the fact that they are not military men but former slaves, and have few if any proper weapons. It is a situation of great peril that could end with the complete annihilation of the Israelite people in the middle of a desert wasteland.

The young man Joshua goes out to lead those forces the Israelites could muster, while Moses goes to the mountaintop to beseech God in prayer. The moral sense of this text is a good example of the complementarity of prayer and action, of ora et labora. The people fight and pray: both are necessary, for the same reason that faith and works operate together.

How curious that Moses’ prayers are necessary! Why doesn’t God just send victory without them? Surely he could! Yet this is the mystery of God’s will: that he chooses to incorporate our participation in the fulfillment of his plans (See Aquinas, Summa 2, 2, Q. 83, art. 2). He ordains to grant victory to Israel through Moses’ intercession. Prayer is a cooperation with God’s will for us.

In the Old Testament, there were no “secular” wars. Every battle was both a physical and spiritual conflict, because the opposing armies always called on their respective gods. The conflict of nations was the conflict of their divinities, and the stronger divinities won. So in Exodus 17 as well: there is a spiritual battle going on here between the LORD God of Israel and the gods of the Amalakites, just as earlier in Exodus the LORD took on the gods of Egypt through the ten plagues, defeating the Nile god, the crop god, the livestock gods, the sun god, etc. In this spiritual conflict, prayer is vital—God chooses to use it as his means to victory. This calls to mind later spiritual conflicts in the ministry of Jesus, when the disciples cannot defeat and demon and the Lord tells them: “This kind comes out only by prayer.”

As a Church, we find ourselves very much in the position of the Israelites on their way to Sinai. We have left Egypt (=slavery to sin by crossing through the sea (=Baptism), but now that we are free people we find we have a fight on our hands.

People are surprised sometimes to discover that the Christian life is a battle. They supposed, perhaps, that things would be easier after baptism, or after conversion. But you see, slaves don’t have to fight. In Egypt, the Israelites weren’t in the army—they just slaved away in obedience to their Egyptian masters. That’s like the life of sin: its not really a struggle. You don’t fight temptation, you just obey it. It’s not slaves, but free men who have to fight, who have to serve in the army. So it is in the spiritual life. When we leave our addictions behind, having experienced conversion, we enter this life of freedom, but discover that freedom entails struggle, that freedom cannot be maintained without fighting.

What gives us the power for this fight? Prayer. That’s the true source of our victory. But it must be persevering prayer that continues until the final victory is won.

Benedict XVI points out that Moses, with both arms lifted up in prayer, strikes a pose on the mountaintop much like Christ on the cross. So we can see Moses here as a type of Christ, prefiguring the great prayer to the Father that was the Passion and Crucifixion, the great prayer which defeated the Enemy of God’s people definitively. We participate in that great Prayer of Christ on the cross at every Mass...