Catholic Commentary
The Efficacious Prayer of the Humble
16He who serves God according to his good pleasure will be accepted. His supplication will reach to the clouds.17The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds. until it comes near, he will not be comforted. He won’t depart until the Most High visits and he judges righteously and executes judgment.
Sirach 35:16–17 teaches that sincere, humble prayer rooted in alignment with God's will pierces through to the divine presence and refuses to cease until God's righteous judgment intervenes on behalf of the suppliant. The passage emphasizes that authentic worship flows from inner disposition rather than external ritual, and that the persistent prayer of the lowly possesses spiritual force capable of breaking through the distance between heaven and earth.
The prayer of the humble doesn't politely knock on heaven's door—it pierces the clouds and breaks open the distance between earth and God's throne.
Verse 16: Service Rooted in Right Disposition
"He who serves God according to his good pleasure will be accepted." The opening phrase, kata eudokian in the Greek Septuagint (literally, "according to good pleasure" or "with good will"), is theologically loaded. Ben Sira is not merely speaking of ritual correctness but of interior disposition—the alignment of the worshiper's will with God's will. The Hebrew root underlying this thought (rāṣôn) evokes a delight or favor that flows from genuine submission. Sirach has already spent the preceding verses (35:1–15) establishing that God accepts no bribe and plays no favorites; what He receives is the sincere heart. The word "accepted" (dektos) echoes the language of sacrifice: just as a burnt offering is "accepted" at the altar when properly offered, so the humble servant's entire person becomes a living oblation acceptable to God (cf. Romans 12:1).
The second half of verse 16 introduces the spatial metaphor that governs verse 17: "His supplication will reach to the clouds." In ancient Near Eastern cosmology shared by Israel, the clouds marked the threshold of the divine dwelling—the storm-cloud was the chariot and canopy of YHWH (cf. Psalm 104:3). For a prayer to "reach the clouds" is not mere poetry; it signals that this prayer arrives at the very antechamber of the divine presence. The word for "supplication" (deēsis) implies urgent, petitionary prayer born of need, not casual liturgical recitation. Ben Sira is already hinting at the social context: this is the prayer of someone who has no earthly advocate and therefore cries upward.
Verse 17: Piercing, Persistent, and Ultimately Victorious
"The prayer of the humble pierces the clouds." The verb "pierces" (diakoptō—to cut through, to break open) escalates the imagery dramatically. The clouds are no longer merely reached but penetrated and broken apart. This is the prayer that does violence to the distance between earth and heaven in the most reverent sense—it will not be stopped. The "humble" (tapeinós) is a key Siracidc category: not the economically destitute alone, but the one who has been brought low by injustice, grief, or oppression and who knows that God is their only recourse. This connects deeply to the anawim tradition of Israel—the poor of YHWH whose entire existence is oriented toward divine dependence.
"Until it comes near, he will not be comforted." This clause reveals the psychology of this prayer: it is not resigned or passive. The one praying experiences real distress, real uncomfortedness, and that unresolved anguish itself functions as the fuel of perseverance. The prayer does not stop because the suppliant's need does not stop.
"He won't depart until the Most High visits." The verb "visits" (episkeptomai) is one of the great theophanic words of the Old Testament—used of God's redemptive intervention at the Exodus (Exodus 3:16), in the birth of Isaac (Genesis 21:1), and ultimately of the Incarnation itself (Luke 1:68, 78; 7:16). God's "visit" is never neutral; it overturns situations. The passage closes with a twofold assertion: God "judges righteously" and "executes judgment." The word for "judgment" (krisis) involves both vindication of the innocent and condemnation of the oppressor—two sides of the same divine act. For Ben Sira, this is not a future eschatological hope only but a present theological confidence: the humble person prays knowing that divine justice is already set in motion by the prayer itself.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage along several interconnected axes.
The Catechism and the Nature of Prayer: The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC 2559) opens its treatise on prayer by citing Augustine: "Man is a beggar before God." The humble suppliant of Sirach 35 embodies exactly this posture. CCC 2628 identifies "petition" as the form of prayer most proper to our creatureliness—an acknowledgment of dependence—and notes that it is the prayer of those who recognize they are powerless before God that most purely glorifies Him. The "piercing" prayer of verse 17 is the theological ground for the Church's confidence that the Liturgy of the Hours and the prayers of the faithful are genuinely efficacious, not merely symbolic utterances.
The Church Fathers: St. John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Matthew (Hom. 23), dwells on the power of humility in prayer, arguing that what gives prayer its "weight" before God is not eloquence or length but the lowliness of the one who prays. Origen, in On Prayer (§ 9), teaches that the humble soul, by stripping itself of pride, ascends naturally toward God—the image of piercing clouds is for Origen a figure of the soul's contemplative ascent. St. Augustine (Enarrationes in Psalmos, Ps. 33) teaches that the cry of the poor (vox pauperis) is the very voice of Christ in His members, linking this passage to the Christological dimension of humble prayer.
Mariology and the Magnificat: The Church sees in the humble pray-er of Sirach 35 a type of the Virgin Mary, whose Magnificat (Luke 1:46–55) is the supreme example of the prayer of the anawîm that "pierces the clouds" and brings about divine visitation. The Council of Vatican II (Lumen Gentium §56) describes Mary as the daughter of Zion in whom all Israel's longing reaches its fulfillment.
Theodicy and Perseverance: The passage also provides a Scriptural foundation for the Church's teaching that unanswered prayer is not divine rejection but divine timing (CCC 2737). The phrase "until the Most High visits" preserves both urgency and patience simultaneously—a properly Catholic balance.
These verses speak with particular power to Catholics who find themselves in situations of injustice, illness, or grief where human remedies have been exhausted. Ben Sira's theology of humble prayer is a direct rebuke to two temptations common today: the first is the prosperity-gospel assumption that God responds to the powerful and successful; the second is the secular dismissal of prayer as wishful thinking. Sirach insists that neither wealth nor eloquence nor social status determines the efficacy of prayer—only the disposition of the heart.
Practically, these verses invite the contemporary Catholic to examine the honesty of their prayer. Do we pray "according to God's good pleasure"—genuinely open to His answer rather than lobbying for our preferred outcome? The phrase "he will not be comforted until" suggests that authentic perseverance in prayer is not stoic acceptance but honest, continued crying out—the kind of prayer that prays through a dark night of the soul rather than around it.
Parishes engaged in social justice ministry, prison ministry, or accompaniment of the grieving will find here a theological foundation for intercession on behalf of those who cannot advocate for themselves. To pray for the marginalized as the marginalized pray—with urgency, persistence, and confidence in divine visitation—is itself an act of solidarity and faith.
Commentary