Well, we have not much time left with Luke’s Gospel, Advent being scarily near! As we prepare to say our good byes, one of the things we may want to take away from his Gospel – that we also find in the Book of Acts – is the theme of prayer, and it manifests itself in different ways. For example, where in Mark’s Gospel the action is fast paced and there is never a time to stop, or where in Matthew’s Jesus spends much time to teach with lengthy sermons, Luke will always notice when Jesus catches his breath, stops, and even take some time to be on his own and to pray. For example, at the Transfiguration, Luke is the only one to notice that Jesus was praying when it happened. For those of us who have studied throughout the Book of Acts, we also know that the Apostles, among their busy days teaching, traveling and sometimes being arrested, always remembered to pause, and offer to God petitions, thanksgiving and praises (Like Paul and Silas in Acts 16:25–34). Enabling the work of the Holy Spirit by a deep life of prayer was the motor that kept them going. Another example of how prayer was an important theme in Luke is that he also added specific parables Jesus told about prayer that we don’t find anywhere else. This summer, we talked about the parable of the “friend at midnight” (Proper 12C) and today we’ve just heard the parable known as the “Unjust Judge” – so we see that Jesus taught a lot about prayer and in case we didn’t have the memo, Luke makes sure to remind us. For example today, he starts the retelling of the parable by saying: “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” – so you know, he wants to make sure we get it!
But before we jump to conclusions about what the parable is all about and what it says about how we should live the Christian life, I think it’s important that we sit a bit with how Jesus tells the story, because there is probably much more to discover than a neatly, packaged, ready to use moral to the story, and we’ve already touched on that a bit when we talked about “The friend at midnight”. In that section (Luke 11:1-13) Jesus compares prayer to a man who goes to see his neighbor because an unexpected guest has shown up and he doesn’t have bread to feed him, so he asks his neighbor to lend him something to eat and the neighbor is like: “Leave us alone, we’re all in bed already. Come back another time”, but the man keep knocking until the other one is so annoyed that he ends up opening up and give him what he needs. We had rebaptized the story: “The parable of the grumpy neighbor”. And so what we have today is very similar, correct? There is this poor widow (Widows were generally poor, having no support system) and someone is trying to take advantage of her (Not uncommon as well, since they had no protector either, see Luke 20: 45-47 where Jesus says: Beware of the scribes (…) They devour the widows houses). But this widow, she rebels when someone tries to steal from her and she keeps asking the judge to help her get her possessions back. Like our grumpy neighbor, the judge is not sympathetic to start with, actually Jesus let us clearly know that he is one of the bad guys (“[He] neither feared God not had respect for the people”) but then, exactly like the grumpy neighbor, he ends up being so tired and so annoyed, the story in its original Greek even says “he is worried the woman would give him a black eye”, he ends up surrendering and do what he is asked to do, as the easiest way out of the whole situation.
Okay, so now, before we jump to conclusions, we need to realize that these parables Jesus told where funny stories, in the same way that some of his parables were scary stories on purpose. By appealing to people’s feelings, he could easily bring them in. We all have grumpy neighbors who cannot be bothered, we all have an idea that there are corrupted people in authority, and we all know that sometimes, if unsympathetic people won’t give anything out of their good heart, we can wear them out by pestering them, because they’re lazy as well. Now behind this comical aspect, what may discover and that can be a little more disturbing to us is that Jesus seems to be comparing God to these difficult people. In essence it seems to say: “Ask what you need in prayer and keep insisting, you may wear God out and he may end up answering you just because he gets tired with your constant nagging”. Now as you can imagine, we cannot say that in the Temple, and we cannot say that at church where God needs to always be the good guy, correct? For this reason, some theologians worked around the problem by concluding that Jesus actually says: If even bad people end up answering, how much more God, who is good, will respond to you? So it’s a comparison not from two equivalent but from the lesser to the greater, like when Jesus says in Matthew 6:30: If (…) God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you? And I think it’s true, that’s probably what Jesus is doing, contrasting human (bad) behavior to God’s (holy) response to us. And yet, I think there is another reason he chose these images, he chooses them for a good reason that is often hard for us to acknowledge whether in the Temple or at church: This is the way prayer can feel like. When we pray, it sometimes feel like we ask a small favor to a grumpy neighbor who cannot be bothered, and even sometimes it feels like we make a request for something that totally makes sense, that is totally deserved and yet God feels like an unjust judge who won’t listen to us because he does not really care. I am not saying this, Jesus is saying this. When Jesus teaches about prayer, when to pray, how to pray, he also tells us how prayer is going to feel like if we start taking it seriously. He actually tells his disciples there is actually a good chance that they are going to lose heart. Losing heart is not a side effect of prayer for those who don’t really know how to pray and have failed at praying, losing heart at some point will be part of the experience.
I talked about that with one of you when we were doing centering prayer, and it felt impossible for us to shut down our minds to be able to experience God’s presence. I said: It’s a cloud we have to get through. You know, when a plane takes off, it’s not always pretty. All that is familiar is left behind and become really small until you cannot see anything, and you find yourself surrounded by this thick cloud and that’s the moment you feel the plane is really pushing, the reactors are really loud and you can tell a lot of fuel is being consumed and yet it feels like nothing happens, quickly it gets worse though because the aircraft starts shaking, and you may even feel the pressure on your chest and you ears start popping, and then, suddenly, it’s over: You’re in this deep sea of blue and it’s all so quiet and beautiful and the sun in shinning, and there a nice steward bringing you a drink. Well, I think this is how prayer is like: to get to God, you have to keep pushing through. My theory is that if the had had planes at Jesus’s time, that’s an image he would have chosen! Now you may stay on the ground and never experience the cloud and the scary turbulence, but you may never come close to the sun, or get on your own where you need to go.
I think that’s also why Luke introduces the story by saying that we need to pray. God does not need us to pray, to surrender to our whims eventually, we need to pray for our own sake, because that’s the only means to get somewhere. Now notice it’s not about getting everything we want, Jesus talks about the bread, which is often used to speak about basic needs but also, mainly, in Jewish religion, to signify God’s presence, and, in our story today, it’s about justice, which can be getting what we think we deserve, but which is also the very definition of God’s kingdom. Prayer is a search for God, and it’s not going to be easy, well at times it is, thankfully, but it may often feel like a wrestling and a struggle (See the story we have in the Old Testament today), and prayer can be exhausting, and it can be frustrating. When we pray, God is in the process of lifting us up towards him and it may feel not so good to leave the ground. Prayer is a process of sanctification, and as long as we don’t understand that, we don’t see what prayer is all about.
But will you have faith? asks Jesus. Will you have faith until the end, when all those things come into place, when the bread of God’s presence is consumed, when the Kingdom of justice is established. One theologian I like, Robert Capon, says we should count ourselves lucky to have a God who is willing to cast himself as the anti-hero, or even as the villain until we finally understand that what need to happen for us is a complete change of perspective, of values, a real conversion. Talking about our parable today, he says (I paraphrase): Yes, we may think that God is an unjust judge, until we finally understand that his justice surpasses our ideas about justice. It makes me think of this question God asks God’s people:
“You say, ‘The way of the Lord is unfair.’ Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” (Ezekiel 18:25)
Robert Capon says God’s justice isn’t about bookkeeping, or even about rewarding the good and punishing the bad, God’s justice is about giving up entirely the process of bookkeeping and offering mercy and grace to everyone. And that’s what God is doing. Like a judge who cannot be bothered, he is so done with finding a system of reward and punishment, he has just decided a clean slate for everyone and starting all over again in offering to all who are willing his forgiveness. And so I think that maybe what we need to see in this parable is that we live in this in between time where we are given an opportunity for repentance, as we continue to endure the consequences of sin. Yes, Jesus says at the end of today’s story the time may seem long, but compared to eternity, it will be very short. God’s justice will surely come. And it’s prayer that will get us there.