To Pray and Not to Lose Heart

Luke 18:1-8

What do we know about God? And how do we know it? Two fundamental questions of faith. How we answer them will determine pretty much everything else we say or do in our life as believers.

Let me start with the second question first. How do we know what we say we know about God? In the long history of human interaction with God there have been many diverse and impressive answers given. But in Christian history, one answer has held the stage, front and centre, since the time of the New Testament. We know God because God has spoken to the world—to us—and said with affronting clarity, ‘this is who I am’. Beside this self-declaration of identity, other claims to know God in our tradition enter stage rear, if they make an entrance at all.

And this divine word of self-disclosure is given in Jesus Christ. In the opening paragraph of his Gospel, John puts it with uncompromising brilliance. ‘The word became flesh and dwelt amongst us ... full of grace and truth.’ (Jn 1.8). By ‘word’ here John doesn’t mean letters on a page, or even a word spoken audibly. He means the essential being of God as one who reaches out to the world in self-giving communion. And so we could restate John’s sentence as, ‘God’s own self-giving—or giving of himself—became flesh in Jesus and dwelt amongst us ... full of grace and truth.’

Paul puts the same point his way. ‘God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself,’ he writes. (2 Cor 5.19). Christ is God’s own befriending, peacemaking embrace of the world; God bringing the world—our world, God’s world—to himself by coming into the world, bodily in Christ. Because Jesus Christ is both God and world—God and human—God and the world are brought together in peace, despite our stubborn indifference, even hostility toward God. That’s how we know what we know of God.

This leads back to question one: what do we know of God on this basis? The New Testament is clear on three points. We know first God’s nature. ‘God is love,’ says John time and again. (I Jn 4.8-9; 16). Not God has love, or displays love, but God is love. We know second God’s disposition. God looks on us with a love which desires our well-being at the most basic level. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whoever believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.’ (John again. Jn 3.16). And we know third God’s intentions. God desires to give us good things that we need. This time Paul: ‘God who did not withhold his own Son, but gave him up for all of us, will he not with him also give us everything else?’ (Rom 8.31). Because God was in Christ we know, according to the New Testament: God is love; God looks on us with love; God intends to give us the good things we need.

But now we hit Luke 18 like a freight train. Jesus tells a story about the need to pray and not to lose heart. A poor widow, alone and bereft in a male dominated world, defrauded of or denied what little livelihood she may have had from her former marriage, petitions the court for justice. But the judge she comes up against is a scoundrel. He cares nothing about her plight, or his responsibility under God to do justly. He brushes her off like an insect. Only her remarkable persistence wears him down. At last, not to do the right thing, but simply to get rid of her irritating disruption of his comfortable world, he relents and gives her what she deserves. Jesus finishes by saying, ‘listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?’

How do we cope with this? The thing that strikes me at first reading is how unexpectedly wrong the story seems theologically, and yet how disconcertingly right experientially. At face value, the story seems to ask us to picture ourselves before God as the widow is before the judge; to see our relationship with God in prayer, as the widow’s desperate plea for justice before this unscrupulous power broker.

But the figure of the judge in Jesus’ story has exactly opposite qualities from God, if we understand God to be revealed in Jesus. In the Jesus revelation, God is love. But this judge is self-absorbed, aloof, unmoved. In the Jesus revelation, God is generous. But this judge is completely indifferent to the widow’s plea. In the Jesus revelation, God gives good things to his creatures. But this judge gives nothing until it is dragged out of him by the woman’s dogged persistence.

How can that be a picture of God in any Christian understanding? Most commentators agree. It can’t. And so they say, ‘well it’s a story of contrast’; a ‘how-much-more’ story. If even an unjust judge will relent and hear the petition of a poor widow who persists, how much more will God (who is not like such a judge) give us what we need? Or they turn the story upside down. The God figure in the story is really the widow, not the judge; and we humans are the judge not the widow. God is depicted as coming again and again to us with a plea that we take him seriously. But, like the callous judge, we brush God off again and again. And no doubt there is merit in such readings.

But I want to stick with the line we are on. If the judge can be read as a figure of God, it certainly runs sharply counter to a theology based on a view of Jesus as the word made flesh. But—and this is the significant point—sometimes in our dealings with God it feels as if we are up against a figure exactly like the unjust judge. God has all the power. We feel helpless. We come to God in fervent prayer. But are ignored, shoved to one side.

This circumstance plays out in scripture itself. Job is the classic Hebrew Bible example. Job is a man of God we are told. God blesses him richly. He has money, power, status, and virtue. His family are healthy, full of life and joy. But then everything changes. Job is struck down with a terrible disease that eats away at his body, and even more his soul. His family is devastated. His wealth dissipated. He cries out to God. But it might as well be the unjust judge. Job can hardly recognise God any more. Once God seemed a friend; now he seems an enemy. ‘God has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his enemy,’ he laments. (Job 19.11). And again: ‘The arrows of the Almighty are in me; my spirit drinks their poison.’ (Job 6.4). What an image! It’s the widow and the judge.

In the New Testament, the great example is Jesus. Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, in agony of spirit, and in imminent danger of injustice, torture and death, prays to God repeatedly for deliverance. ‘Let this cup pass from me.’ But heaven is silent. From his lonely station of pain he cries, ‘my God, my God, why have you forsaken me.’ It’s the widow and the judge.

And us. I don’t mean trivial matters—that we don’t always get what we want in this desire or that. But watching someone you love struggle with terrible circumstances, and praying again and again for help, for deliverance, for life. But nothing changes, except for the worse. Or on the broader front: how many people in Rwanda, or Bosnia, or the Sudan have prayed urgently, repeatedly for deliverance in awful circumstances? But they have not been delivered. It’s the widow and the judge.

How can we hold these two together? Libraries have been generated by this issue across the centuries. And there is no way I can resolve it. But I want to draw your attention to one thing. A strange paradox. The fact is the story of the unjust judge is told by Jesus. It’s not my story. It’s not Luke’s story. It’s Jesus’ story. The irony of that strikes you between the eyes. The story teller (Jesus) is the foundation of Christian knowledge of God as love, as loving, and as giving good things to the world. This whole vision of God depends utterly on him. And yet he is the one who tells the story of the unjust judge.

At some level beyond my reach, I find that strangely comforting. It is as if Jesus says to us, ‘I know that there are times in your life when the journey of faith seems to fall into a nightmare, like a widow battling a hostile judge. But remember, I am telling this story. The story is not telling me. The story is contained within my reality. My reality is not contained in the story. My word, which includes the story of the unjust judge and the anguished widow, is bigger than, and holds, that story within itself.

And it is not just his story. It’s his life. Jesus lived the story of the widow before the unjust judge. He lived the Garden of unanswered prayer; he lived the cross of abandonment. But that dark experience wasn’t the full story. The dark story of the Garden was held in a deeper story of light; the painful story of abandonment was held in a greater story of reconciliation. The resurrection of Jesus reveals God as irrepressible life in the face of death; as unbroken unity in the face of abandonment. The unjust judge is cradled in the word made flesh.

Some years ago I faced serious heart problems and had to go for open heart surgery. There was no other way. It was a dark place on that hospital bed the night before the operation. At about 9 pm the doctor came to visit. ‘I have to tell you what you’re facing,’ he said, with a solemn look on his face. I didn’t have much choice, so I nodded. He explained to me the problems with the arteries of my heart; in great detail, including all the things that might go wrong. He then talked about what was involved in the operation he would perform the next day. And finally, he told me how long and tough the recovery process would be, and what might go wrong with that. It looked pretty much like the widow and the judge to me.

But then he paused, and looking me right in the eye, he said, ‘I want you to know something else. We are very good at this stuff. We have done it hundreds of times before. I can tell you, you will come through it. It will be painful and slow, but you will come through; and your life will be much better.’

The doctor held the story of threat within a greater story, the story of his capacity to heal. The healing story didn’t take away the threatening story. I still had the op to face. But the healing story was the one which determined my life in the end.

The crucified and resurrected Jesus tells us the story of the unjust judge. It doesn’t remove the pain that story produces at times. But it does mean it is a story cradled inside a deeper story. And the deeper story is this, ‘God so loved the world that he gave his only Son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have eternal life.’

Graeme Garrett

Canberra Baptist Church

Twenty-First Sunday after Trinity

17/10/2010