St
Luke’s,
“Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not
to lose heart.”
From the very beginning of our gospel reading
this morning we know we’re facing something a little different, a bit unusual.
Because, for the first and only time, Luke introduces a parable of Jesus by
telling us what it’s about.
You might want to think about that for a moment.
In every other case the parables are simply told, and while sometimes, very
occasionally, Jesus explains them afterwards, in most cases it’s left up to the
audience, and us, to work out what the story really means. But not here, it’s
almost as though Luke sees this parable as so important, so crucial, that he has
to explain the point just in case someone misses it. So right up front Luke
makes it clear, this is a parable about prayer, then
he tells the story.
There was once a judge
who neither feared God nor had respect for people – now that’s a loaded sort of
introduction which I want to come back to soon. And there was also a widow who
kept coming to the judge over and over again demanding that he grant her
justice against her opponent – again, I want to come back to that soon too. And
the judge kept refusing her and refusing her until finally he realised she
wasn’t going to stop coming back and back until she got what she wanted, so he
gave it to her. End of story.
There are some obvious similarities here to
another parable Jesus tells, back in Luke 11, about the man who got an
unexpected visitor late at night when he had no food in the house, so he rushed
next door to borrow some supplies and had to keep knocking and knocking at his
neighbour’s door before finally getting a reply. In both cases these are
stories about persistence paying off and in both cases if we look at the wider
context the parables are set in there’s a sense that the moral of the story is
but God’s not like that, God won’t make you wait, God won’t refuse you justice,
and that’s a moral I was quite happy with until I read these words:
A black preacher was asked to explain these two
parables to his congregation and in once sentence he sums them up; ‘Until
you’ve stood for years knocking at a locked door, your knuckles bleeding, you
don’t really know what prayer is.’ Until you’ve stood for years.
That one sentence made me think. Let’s accept
for a moment that this parable in today’s reading is about prayer, what do we
know about prayer? I could spout off all kinds of learned sounding ideas and throw
in a few meaningfully worded sentiments, but let’s be honest, who among us
hasn’t had the experience of praying and wondering if we’re just talking into
empty space? Which of us hasn’t desperately called out to God for something and
been left feeling like we’ve been ignored?
I meet people who feel like that all the time.
‘I pray and I pray,’ they tell me, ‘but God never answers.’ I’ve felt like that
myself on more than a few occasions, we all have I’m sure. But for some people
it goes even deeper. For some people it’s not just as if God doesn’t answer,
it’s as if God has vanished and been replaced by a sense of utter hopelessness
and despair, and yet they keep praying and praying. They’re the people I think
of when I hear that preacher’s words, ‘until you’ve stood for years knocking on
a locked door.’
This is about a very different sort of prayer to
the kind we’re used to in most of our services. This isn’t about a ‘thank you
God’ sort of prayer or a half-unthinking recitation of something like the Lord’s
Prayer which we say so often but seldom put much effort into. This about the
sort of prayer that rages in the face of despair and battles to maintain hope
when all else has failed. This is about crying out to God not mumbling into our
prayer books. This is about having to recognise the emotions behind the words
in the stories Jesus tells.
A widow comes to a judge, desperate to have him
take her side against her opponent. She’s not just looking for a judgement – she’s
looking for a judgement in her favour. The judge neither fears God nor respects
people – we hear that as a criticism, and Luke probably intended us to, but
listen again; a judge who neither fears God nor respects people is a judge who
won’t be swayed by religious arguments or play favourites with people because
of who they are or what their name is. This judge, in other words, is
completely impartial, which is what we normally say our judges should be,
unless we want them on our side.
That’s not what the widow wants. She’s not
interested in impartiality or justice being blind, she wants the judge to come
down firmly and frankly on her side of the case, for her and against her
opponent, no ifs nor buts involved, and eventually,
after lots of persistence, after years of knocking at that locked door, he
does. And we can hear all that and we can read Luke 11 as well and we can still
say, ‘but of course God’s not like that.’ We can still say, well surely if an
unjust judge – as Luke calls him – will eventually give justice, surely God,
who is very just, will give it even better. We can still say,
God won’t make you wait. But the fact remains that it’s very easy to say ‘God
won’t make you wait’ when you’re not the one doing the waiting.
This isn’t a parable for those who aren’t waiting.
Put yourself in the place of those originally
hearing this story for a moment. It’s the community of Luke the Evangelist. The
year is somewhere around 75 to 80 C.E., about 40 or 50 years after the times of
Christ. The Church is still young and things have become a bit tough as the
Christians have been kicked out of the synagogues and some persecution has
begun. Most importantly, the Christians have been told from the very beginning
that Jesus is coming back, soon. They expected him to only be gone a very short
time, but the years have gone by and turned into decades and the people are
left waiting and wondering and they’re beginning to lose heart that what they
were promised is every going to happen.
That’s who this parable was written for. This is
a parable for those who are waiting and wondering, ‘where is God?’ This is a
parable for those who have spent years knocking at locked doors, who have
strived and struggled for decades waiting for change that never seems to come.
This is a parable for those who have worked hard day after day and now find
themselves asking ‘how long?’
There are plenty of people who know what that
feels like, and for those people at those times prayer isn’t about having a
cosy chat with God. When the road is long and the days are hard and every door
is locked and every judge is ruling for someone else not you, prayer isn’t
about saying thanks for the sunrise. On days like that prayer is about crying
out in desperation, prayer on those days is about hope.
That, I believe, is the real point of this
parable – hope. Hope, that things will change, hope that tomorrow will be
different than today, hope that through it all, despite it all, God isn’t an
impartial judge. God doesn’t take the middle ground and avoid all fear and
favour. What this parable says is that God does take sides.
Let’s be clear though, this isn’t a parable for
the comfortable and the content. This isn’t a parable for someone who wakes up
and discovers they’re out of coffee that morning. This is a parable for the
weary and the oppressed, for those who cry out in frustration and anger. This
is a parable for those who feel their faith fading and desperation moving in,
and to those people this parable says, hang on in there, don’t give up, don’t lose heart, because God is on
your side and one day things will change.
Don’t lose hope. That’s the message of this gospel to those who despair,
to those who lose heart, but I want to add a footnote as well.
All of us, I know, are the widow in this story
sometimes. We all have times when we feel desperate, like no one’s listening,
like justice is not being done. But most of us much of the time, I believe, are
also in a position to be the judge.
All around us there are people knocking on
locked doors. Thanks to modern communications none of us can say we’re not
aware of places throughout our world and our own nation where people are
desperate. They’re the widows in this story, asking, begging for justice to be
done. We can watch and wait and wonder why God lets such awful things happen,
or we can realise that all of us, in small and not so small ways, can make a
difference in those situations.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu tells the story of being
asked by a man in a small South African township why God didn’t do something
about the evils of apartheid and the suffering of his people, and Tutu’s
response was, ‘God did do something, he put you here.’
Do we do justice where we can? Do we open doors
we have the keys for? Are we being a part of God’s answer to the prayers of the
poor and the desperate? And most all, in this world where it’s so easy to lose
heart sometimes, are we bringing hope? May God help us all make our answers
yes.