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20th Sunday After Pentecost, 17 October
2004 |
18:1 Then Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. 2 He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. 3 In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ 4 For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, 5 yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” 6 And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7 And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? 8 I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Like the story of the dishonest manager (Luke 16:1-13), this story has a disconcerting tone to it. We wonder what Jesus is doing comparing God to an unjust judge, even if that comparison is for the purposes of contrast. Even when Luke goes out of his way to explain to us the purpose of this story, persistence in prayer, it is still possible for us to miss the import of this message. I have seen and heard numerous people cite this passage as justification for any number of abuses of prayer. Even if I do not get what I want, what I seek, I will continue to pray until God gives it to me. My persistence will pay off. I often wonder what people are thinking when they say such a thing. Certainly one of the points of this lesson is that God, in contrast to the unjust judge, hears the prayers of the people and is inclined to dispense justice without the tribulation the Widow endures just to get a hearing. Does God need multiple reminders? Are we to assume that God is not interested in justice unless we bring it to his attention? If, on the other hand, God hears us better than the unjust judge, why are we not getting a response? Why must we be persistent? These are disturbing questions, but they reveal an even more disturbing attitude, which is that prayer is all about me and what I want. A deeper look at this story, as well as some of the other things that Jesus has to say about prayer reveal something different.
There is a difference between what most people pray about today and what Jesus likely means by prayer in Luke’s Gospel. Today most people think that prayer is, at best, part of a dialog or conversation that we have with God. At worst, people think that prayer is us telling God what to do for us or give us to make our lives better. In Luke’s Gospel, references to prayer have to do with the coming reign of God. It is this messianic, and in some sense apocalyptic understanding of prayer (apocalyptic meaning dealing with the end of one age and the start of another) that is lost in most understanding of this and other texts. The Lord’s prayer is asking God to help us live the future reign of God in the present. In it we ask God to help us participate now on earth in the things of that future reign that are coming through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. When Jesus says elsewhere that he will grant prayers spoken in his name he is not delivering to his followers, ancient and modern, a formula by which we might have his power harnessed for our purposes. Instead he is stating that when we pray in his name, we pray in his way of being in the world, loving forgiving and serving. When he says, “Ask and it will be given to you,” he is not stating, as some evangelicals claim, that we have but to ask and God stands ready to give us what we want, but rather that when it is God’s future that is the focus of our hopes and prayers then we are surely praying for something that will come to pass. And in this text for today, when he is asking if there will be faith on earth when the Son of Man comes, he is not suggesting that with enough faith, our persistent prayers will be answered affirmatively, but rather that if our faith were place with the coming reign of the Son of Man, as it happens in Jesus, then our faith will be placed in the right promise and the sure future.
According to some scholars, the messianic hopes of the people of Jesus day were fixed on the new age that would be ushered in as the messiah would come. This age, predicted by Isaiah and other prophets, came with specific expectations. Many traditions about what the messianic age would be like and how it would come had developed over the centuries. One tradition taught that if all of God’s chosen people would keep the Torah perfectly for just one day, the messiah would come. Another tradition taught the people to pray fervently and faithfully each night that the messiah might come that day. I believe that these types of traditions form the background for this particular saying of Jesus in Luke’s Gospel. Here Jesus appears to buy in to the concept of persistent prayer for the coming reign of God. But of course the messianic expectations of the people will both be fulfilled and shattered by who Jesus is and what Jesus does. The people faithfully pray for a messiah. But will they have the faith to see the messiah in action, and the messianic age begin in a messiah that defeats not the political powers opposed to the Israelite monarchy, but rather the power of Sin and death that oppress all humanity? This is the question, both for those original hearers of Jesus and for us today. For the messianic reign has indeed begun in Jesus, though it is not yet fulfilled. The victory over death has occurred in the death and resurrection of our Lord, but is not yet fully realized in the world. Thus we too continue to hope for the final coming of the messianic age that is already present, but not fully apparent among us. For in Jesus, God has indeed answered the prayers of humanity, who persistently cry for justice and an end of oppression. Yet so many of us lack the vision and the faith to see them. We still live as if the world has not changed. We still return violence for violence and hate for hate. We fail to see the signs of God’s new age and so we fail to live as if it were true. Fortunately, God’s action does not depend, as the people of old once thought, on our ability either to keep the Torah, or to pray. God has already acted in Jesus, and continues to act decisively in our world, despite our lack of faith. Faith, or the lack of faith, neither hasten nor postpone the action of God to bring justice to our world and our lives, after all. What our prayer does, what faith in God’s way of being in the world does, is connect us to the hope and fulfillment of God’s promises in such a way that we are able to affirm humanity at the same time as we say no to injustice in our lives and in our world. One way in which this might be made concrete in our world today is to look at the current “War on Terror” that is being waged by our government. Both candidates for U.S. president have followed a line of thinking that says, “we must bring those who commit acts of terror and the nations that sponsor them to justice.” This is good and right, but only to a point. What most people, both candidates included, fail to address seriously are the issues of poverty, injustice, and oppression that make certain peoples vulnerable to the desperation that leads to terrorism. A serious prayer for and call for justice would also examine the roots of the problem and address them. Could we not fight terrorism by also attacking at its roots? Could we be persistent in prayer AND action by seeking to bring to justice those governments, including sometimes our own, who have aided those around the world who exploit and take advantage of the poor for personal financial gain, by seeking to redress those wrongs by bringing food, medicine, education and other life giving gifts to those most affected rather than the death giving military response that seems to be favored at this point? Can we be faithful to a Lord who chose to die rather than raise an army? Can we follow one who called on us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us? If not, then Jesus question as he comes to us each and every day of our lives, whether he will find faith among us, is certainly appropriate and the answer may not be as pleasant as we like.
The fortunate thing here, again, is that God’s coming reign does not depend on us at all. God is at work for justice even when we are not. God loves and cares for all humanity even when we dehumanize and discard one another. God’s way of bringing justice is to join our suffering and redeem it, even when we suffer and visit suffering on one another. That is what we learn from Jesus way of being in the world. And it is precisely this one who calls us and inspires us to follow this new way; just as God called people to resist oppression and form free societies here and elsewhere in the world; just as God called people to resist oppression with non-violence that lead to change in South Africa and India abroad, and in our cities and towns during the civil rights movement in our own nation over the last century. Those who lead these movements were people who understood that violent response to injustice only breeds more violence and injustice. God’s way is to follow another path to freedom as oppression’s root cause, death, is made impotent by the resurrection of Jesus. The only question left is will we have the faith to participate in that freedom now? Or will we fail to see it, and only hope and wonder why God is not answering our prayer the way that we want? In this case our persistent prayer is not about getting justice the way we want it so much as to connect us to God’s way of being in the world and to make us a part of his coming reign, which indeed is coming swiftly. Rev. Dr. Luke Bouman |
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