Persistence and Justice.

Luke 18:1-14

I.

            After he points out that the Kingdom of God is within us and among us, and after the Lord gives a graphic apocalyptic discourse the point of which is that those who lose their life will keep it, he immediately moves into two little parables about prayer.

            Jesus last speaks explicitly of prayer back in chapter 11.  There he gives his disciples his prototypical way of praying and model for prayer, which of course is the Lord’s Prayer.  He also talks about the need for persistence in prayer.

            Persistence is also the theme in this first parable here.  In Jesus’ day, as in ours, it is a major problem that people give up praying.  Maybe it doesn’t seem like it’s working.  Maybe it feels like a waste of time.  Maybe we’re even embarrassed that we keep offering the same prayer for years apparently in vain.  Maybe we’re just bored.  Maybe we don’t know what to say anymore.  Maybe it has become rote repetition, or just reading without much engagement prayers written by others.

            Maybe in our sophisticated, rationalistic, modern way of thinking, this business of prayer seems irrational, superstitious, or nothing more than a pointless vocalization or bringing to mind something we want or fear, but actually has no effect on the universe or God, if there is a God.  And if there is a God maybe we think that God has way bigger things to be concerned about than our comparatively small problems.

            I wonder if much of what is debilitating the church today is a crisis of prayer.  I mean, I suspect that many Christians don’t quite get prayer.  We do it formally, in church and even at home, perhaps just because it’s what we have always done.  But many of us would have difficulty explaining intelligibly why we do this, and what we think is exactly happening in prayer.

            Jesus counsels persistence, meaning that it is something essential that we have to keep doing even and especially when we don’t see the results.  So many other theologians and spiritual writers of nearly every stripe across the spectrum – liberals and progressives, radicals, conservatives, evangelicals, Catholics, Pentecostals, scholars, traditionalists, emergents, mystics, feminists… almost everyone testifies to the essential need for and central place of prayer in the life of faith.  You have to wander way out into the arid rationalism of some forms of Unitarianism before you find people who will say that prayer is a superstitious waste of time.

            At the same time, outside of faith communities, I suspect that prayer is all but dying out.  One of the challenges we will face, and maybe we are facing it already, is that of explaining to people, especially young people, what it is we are doing when we pray.

II.

            The first of Jesus’ two parables here is about a widow who keeps pestering an unjust judge.  Luke adds unusual explanatory prefaces before both of these parables.  Here he tells us that the parable is about how the disciples’ “need to pray always and not to lose heart.”

            Jesus’ sets up the parable by first describing a bad judge.  Now, there is almost nothing worse than a bad judge.  I testify to that fact from direct experience.  Judges have immense power even in our democracy.  In the Roman Empire this power was exponentially greater, and far worse since judges were sponsored by a conquering, extractive regime that was only concerned with the maximization of profit and maintaining the conditions that allow that to happen.  In that case, judges were by definition unjust.  Fearing God and having respect for human rights or dignity would be detrimental to their main job of glorifying and enriching Rome. 

            On the other side is this widow.  “Widow” is often shorthand for a poor, powerless woman.  Jesus deliberately chooses someone at the opposite end of the social scale from the judge.  He has set up the situation with an extreme power differential.  On the one side is a judge who has practically ultimate power, and on the other is a widow who has practically none.

            The widow wants justice against someone who has treated her unjustly.  Now justice is a difficult word for us.  Too often when we hear the word justice we think of punishment for wrongdoing.  It’s the “criminal justice” system and it’s about punishing offenders. 

            But that’s not what Jesus means and it’s not what this widow in his story is about.  In the Scriptures justice is much more about equality and redistribution of resources. 

            The Hebrew word for justice is mishpat.  It means the restoration of a situation or environment which promoted equity and harmony.  In the prophets and the Psalms especially, but also in parts of the Torah, God’s justice is about restoring the lost rights of the oppressed and eliminating inequalities.  Justice has to do with lifting up the poor and lowly, and bringing down the wealthy and powerful.  Certainly this is the way Jesus understands it.

            So the encounter between the widow and the judge is freighted with all kinds of meaning.  It is a person languishing at the bottom of society, the same people who have been and continue to be victims of casual theft of their meager wealth and hard labor, crying out for a redistribution of resources so she might live in peace, aiming her complaint at the very person charged with maintaining and enforcing an inherently unjust system.  It is not unlikely that whomever the widow is complaining about is a friend or at least a peer of the judge.

III.

            So her persistence becomes all the more significant because of the remarkable hopelessness and futility of it.  Nevertheless, she makes herself obnoxious by her continually getting in his face about what she demands.  He’s not so shameless as to just have her arrested.  So he eventually relents and grants justice to her.  That is, he makes sure she gets back what was stolen, swindled, or otherwise taken from her by someone with wealth and privilege.  Just to get her out of his hair.  Just to see the back of her.

            Now it must be stated that in this parable the unjust judge does not somehow represent or stand for God.  Jesus’ point is just the opposite.  God is not like the unjust judge.  If this widow can be persistent in continually appealing against all odds to this bad judge, if she can somehow hope for a good result even from the least likely figure imaginable, how much more persistence we need to have when praying to God who, unlike the unjust judge, is good and wants to give us justice?

            The Lord says, “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?  Will he delay long in helping them?  I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.  And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

            So.  Persistent prayer brings quick results.  Got it.  But is this true?  Jesus says something in Mark that I think addresses this.  He says, “So I tell you, whatever you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24).  In other words, persistence in prayer means trusting that God is already doing what you ask; indeed, God has already done it.  Prayer is not about getting God to do something.  Prayer is about attuning our minds and hearts to what God has already done.

            Jesus is saying that if this widow can plead for justice to someone very unlikely to provide it, how much more ought we who trust in God pray fervently within that trust.  She was trying to make the judge do something he didn’t want to do. But when we pray, we are only trying to change ourselves so we can perceive a truth all around us that God has already accomplished.

            Other people may not see God’s justice being done.  But the one who prays for justice in trust, will see it already happening.  And seeing it is empowered to participate in it, and the more we participate in it, the more real and visible it becomes to others.

            The persistence is necessary not because God is deaf or unwilling, but because we are so obtuse, sluggish, and blind.  The persistence is not to get our prayer through to God, but to get it through to ourselves that what we pray for is to perceive and participate in what God has already done.

IV.

            The problem with praying this way is that it can veer easily into self-righteous arrogance, especially when it comes out of the mouth of a privileged, powerful, affluent person.  So immediately Jesus adds the second parable.  Because it is very easy to fall from confidence and apparent trust in God, to a complacent self-righteousness that takes one’s own wealth or high status as evidence of God’s blessing.  This person is not praying for justice, but wants only a maintaining of the system he is benefiting from.

            Persistence, confidence, trust, thanksgiving, and joy are essential elements of prayer, but equally essential are humility, confession, mercy, and even sometimes profound sorrow.

            Jesus makes this point by comparing two sinners praying n the Temple.  The tax collector, whose job it is to be an agent of Roman oppression and steal from the people, who knows he is a sinner, and the Pharisee, who does not.  No one would have thought of the Pharisee as a sinner, least of all himself.  Pharisees were famous for their piety, learning, discipline, and living an exemplary, upright, Scripturally correct life.

            But Jesus says the Pharisee is a sinner as well because he trusts not in God but in himself.  The Pharisee’s prayer starts with a checklist of good deeds he has done, and concludes with a checklist of sinful people he thanks God he is not.  In so doing he places himself above others, shattering the equality God demands as a matter of God’s mishpat, or justice.  He invents a hierarchy, a pecking order, with himself near the top, closer to God, and his neighbor the tax collector down near the bottom, far from God.

            Jesus has criticized Pharisees in other places.  He doesn’t argue with their adherence to the written rules of the Torah.  Jesus even urges his disciples to listen to the Pharisees’ teaching; they know their Bible!  But Jesus’ beef with the Pharisees is that they do not do mishpat, or justice, which is what the Torah is all about.  They keep the letter of the Torah, but they break it’s spirit.  And the spirit of the Torah, and of the Bible, and of Jesus’ ministry, is justice.

            Jesus says that it is the tax collector who goes home “justified,” that is, he is brought into conformity with God’s justice, he was made just in God’s sight.  Because he, as a rich tax-collector, humbles himself, negates himself, denies himself, lowers himself in sorrow and conviction before God.  Maybe he even goes home as a new agent of God’s justice and equality, like another tax collector named Zacchaeus, whom we will read about in a few weeks.

V.

            Prayer is about justice.  It is about perceiving, welcoming, living, celebrating, longing for, and enacting God’s justice in our life, in our heart, in our community. 

            You know this is true.  What do we instinctively pray for?  Is it not always for things like healing, comfort for the suffering, strength for the weak, food for the hungry, employment for the jobless, salvation for the lost?  Are we not always praying for a reversal of the world’s order by which some people are victimized and others unjustly rewarded?  Are we not always praying for the fulfillment of Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom of God?

            Prayer is always a revolutionary, subversive, insurrectionary activity.  Prayer is always an act of treason against the powers-that-be and the managers of the-way-things-are.  Prayer always witnesses to the deeper truth of God’s love and justice, and it says this is what we are going to depend on and trust, not ourselves.  We are certainly not going to trust  in the demonic powers that have twisted the world into a theater of death and inequality.

            Persistence and humility.  May our prayer, and our life together, feature these qualities.  Let us pray full of the conviction that the way things seem to be is not the way they have to be.  It isn’t even the way they truly are.  And let our prayer open us to the vision of the truth, of a world shining and alive with God’s mishpat, justice, and God’s shalom, peace.

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