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Year C, 2016
Fr. Robert D. Arnold
Proper 24
St. Luke 18:1-8
In the name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.
St. Luke was writing primarily to a non-Jewish audience, which meant
that he had a special need to teach about prayer from the new perspective of
Christian faith. In the world Luke was addressing, prayer had become a very
complicated, arcane, esoteric process better left to the professionals and
other trained people. It had little to do with relationship (which, of course, is
the primary purpose of prayer) and a great deal to do with manipulation.
The intent of prayer in the pagan world was to get the gods to do what you
wished and to give you what you wanted. To do that, you had to do certain
things or make certain sacrifices, under the advisement of the priestprofessionals, in order to win the god’s favor. In the world of Luke’s
audience, the gods were very much like the despicable judge of today’s
parable: they didn’t want to be bothered and they didn’t really care.
However, if you or your paid representative were eloquent and persistent
enough, you just might get the gods to respond. Praying in that world was
much like going to court: you needed good representation, a trained
professional who knew which god to approach for your needs, which secret
names to use, and which sacrifices to offer. You would need an orator
whose eloquence would be enough to impress the god and move him to
respond. The only times I’ve been in court was to pay a traffic fine, settle an
estate or execute a will. Like any encounter of that type, the process was
expensive and frustrating, and the results were, after all that, unpredictable.
By Luke’s time, prayer in the pagan world was pretty much a joke. Maybe
the same could be said for our time, which makes this a very interesting
parable.
This parable is about prayer—at least that much is uncontested. St.
Luke’s audience had much to learn about prayer. They thought God was
distant and removed, uninterested in the plight of the common person. Luke
tells them that God took on flesh and blood and walked among us. They
wouldn’t have had a problem with that. The gods of Olympus were partly
human. But they were also dispassionate, capricious, and unmoved by their
suffering and pain. Luke tells them that God is among us to share our hurts
and cry our tears—to suffer and die as one of us. They thought that God was
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like this judge—mean, callous—and needing dogged persistence to move
him to justice. Luke tells them that God is nothing like this judge. “He will
see that they get justice quickly.” Prayer is at the heart and center of
religious experience. Prayer is the vehicle of relationship. We pray because
we’re in relationship with God and we pray to stay in relationship with Him
—to build and strengthen that relationship. We know God cares because,
through prayer, we come to know God—not just believe in God … to know
God. And when we pray, sometimes (maybe often) we pray for justice …
and we want God to act...now...today.
We are an impatient people. My new neighbor, who is from India,
was describing to me how far back Indian culture goes—thousands of years
—and how that changes their perspective on things. We are a new nation by
comparison. We have had a bloody Civil War to preserve our Union but
we’ve never been conquered. We have had terrorist attacks that claimed
3,000-plus lives, but we have never been occupied. We have tornadoes that
sweep across the planes and hurricanes that ravage our Eastern shore, but we
have not had the devastation of Haiti or Bangladesh, or Malaysia where
thousands are swept away. The newest nation on the world map is South
Sudan. For the past twenty years—thirty years—we’ve prayed for the
people of The Sudan and Ethiopia because millions were living in refugee
camps under the treat of starvation. Despite their joy of just a few years
ago at winning independence, the civil war never really ended; once again
hundreds of thousands are fleeing to camps for safety with little or no food
available. Do you think they pray for justice? The question Luke raises:
“will God not grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and
night?” is not a small matter. It’s a good question.
When God speaks of justice, it doesn’t necessarily mean giving us
what we want, or even what we think we’re due. God’s justice is about what
we need. It’s about to whom we turn for strength in the midst of whatever
we’re going through. I’ve cried to God for justice, and God didn’t seem to
respond. I didn’t get what I wanted; I didn’t even get what was due me. But
as I look back over the years, I always got what I needed. Sometimes that
was the strength to endure, or the courage to face the unknown and the
difficult. Sometimes it was simply the faith to believe in the future, or the
discipline to persevere. And always what I needed most was relationship, to
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stay in touch with the God who is more powerful than all, who grieves more
than all, who is more merciful than all … and know that I was not alone,
even though that’s when you feel most alone. It’s the justice of a God who
doesn’t deal in magic but who walks with us every step of our journey, who
hurts with our hurts, suffers with our pain, and is faithful to us even when we
are not faithful to Him.
“Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and
not to lose heart.” Reading the parable, you’d think that this parable is about
persistence—about badgering God to get the justice we deserve. I don’t
think that’s quite right. Jesus’ point is that if even this despicable judge will
finally respond and grant justice, then how much more can we trust our
loving God to do the same. In that sense Luke is right: God will give us
justice and give it quickly—the justice of a relationship with the Judge of all,
which nothing outside ourselves can break or destroy. Two thousand years
of Christian experience bear witness to that truth. Constant prayer is the
way to relationship. When the relationship is solid, there is nothing God and
we can’t face together. When the relationship is consistently practiced and
strengthened, justice is the result.
In our Eucharistic Prayer C, which we use occasionally at our
Wednesday Eucharists, we pray God “deliver us from the presumption of
coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only,
and not for renewal. Let the grace of this Holy Communion make us one
body, one spirit in Christ, that we may worthily serve the world in his
name.”
In that way we will never lose heart. Amen.