PERSISTENCE IN PRAYER
Oct. 20th, 2019: Sunday
in Year C. Luke 18:1-11.
AIM: To encourage persistence in prayer.
In 1961 the author, Joseph Heller,
enriched the language with the title of a best-selling novel, later made into a
film: Catch 22. The phrase designates a hopeless situation. An example
would be a worker applying for a job who is told he cannot be hired until he
joins the union. When he seeks membership in the union, however, they tell him
he cannot join until he has a job. Like the widow in today’s gospel, he is
stymied. Both are in a catch-22 situation. The woman’s hopeless situation is
compounded by the judge’s cynicism. “He respected neither God nor man,” Jesus
tells us. The judge, in other words, could not be moved either by
considerations of duty or by threats to his reputation.
We need not think of the widow in the
story as old. Women married in their early teens in Jesus’ day. This widow may
well have been young. Her repeated appearance in court indicates that she was
also vigorous. Young or old, however, widows in Jesus’ day were among society’s
weakest members. It was a man’s world. Women were the property of men: of their
fathers until marriage, thereafter the property of their husbands. In a
subsistence economy without any social safety net, a woman whose husband had
died was destitute.
The widow in Jesus’ story is the
victim of a corrupt system. An “opponent” is withholding her sole means of
support. If she is unable to vindicate her rights, she will starve.
Faithful to the age-old maxim that
the squeaky wheel gets the most grease, she comes to court every day and makes
a scene. At her first appearance the court officials doubtless explained to her
that she could not be heard until she paid the usual fees. Since these went
straight into the pockets of those demanding them, we would call them bribes. When
the widow told them, she was too poor to pay, they ignored her. Yet still she
came. Those hearing Jesus tell the story recognize an impasse. Given the
character of the judge, and the woman’s poverty, they expect no resolution.
Some problems, they realize, are insoluble.
Now comes a surprise. After days,
perhaps many weeks, the widow suddenly achieves the breakthrough she has almost
ceased hoping for. Without realizing it, she has found a chink in the seemingly
impregnable armor of indifference with which the corrupt judge has covered
himself. Consistent to the end, not out of any sense of justice but simply for
his own convenience and to silence this public scold in his courtroom, he gives
in, hears the woman’s case, and quickly grants her what she has so long sought
in vain.
Jesus’ description of the judge’s
thought processes would have caused mirth in the hearers. “This widow is
wearing me out,” he reflects, and resolves to settle in her favor “or she will
end by doing me violence.” This is the language of the boxing ring. The picture
of one of society’s weakest members pummeling with her fists a man of virtually
unlimited power, with others at his beck and call, is laughable.
The story’s impact comes from its
reversal of expectations at the end. A judge who neither fears God nor cares
for what others think of him comes to fear a poor widow. A petitioner without
power, both as a woman and because she has neither husband nor money, turns out
to be anything but powerless. Her power lies in her persistence.
For the story’s original hearers the
use of a corrupt judge to illustrate God’s goodness was so shocking as to
require an explanation. Jesus supplies this with his two rhetorical questions:
“Will not God then do justice to his chosen who cry out to him day and night?
Will he delay long over them, do you suppose?
At once Jesus answers these questions
himself — and then puts a further question to the story’s hearers, ourselves
included: “I tell you he will give them swift justice. But when the Son of Man
comes, will he find any faith on the earth?”
Most of Jesus’ parables involve a
similarity between the central figure and God. In this case the story turns on
the dissimilarity between the corrupt judge and God. It is a “how much
more” story. If even so depraved a judge as this one grants the petitioner her
request in the end, how much more will God grant the prayers of those
who ask him for their needs. God, Jesus is saying, is not like the
corrupt judge. It is not difficult to get his attention. God is always
more ready to hear than we to pray. God is approachable.
What is the point of praying,
however, if God knows our needs before we do, and better than we do? Are
prayers of petition or intercession attempts to change God’s mind? If they
were, God would be like the corrupt judge. And the point of the story, as we have
seen, is that God is not like the corrupt judge. How does prayer work,
then?
To that question there is no fully
satisfying answer. Prayer, like everything to do with God, is a mystery:
not in the sense that we can understand nothing about it, but that what we can
understand is always less than the whole. One thing is certain. Prayer does not
change God. Prayer changes us. It opens us up to the action of God in
our lives, as the sun’s rays open the flowers to their life-giving warmth and
the nourishing moisture of dew and rain.
Prayer also reminds us of our need
for God. How easily we forget that need, especially when the sun shines on us
and things go well. Then we start to think we can make it on our own: by our
cleverness, by luck, by pulling strings, by hard work, even by being so good
that God will have to reward us.
We need to be reminded again and
again that we can never make it on our own. No matter how clever we are; no
matter how much luck we have; no matter how many strings we pull; no matter how
hard we work or how hard we try to be good. Even when we have all these things
going for us (and which of us has?), we still need God. God is the
missing ingredient in life: the one without whom life is meaningless, without
whose help all our striving, conniving, planning, struggling, and praying still
fall pitifully short of the goal.
“Will not God do justice to his
chosen who call out to him day and night?” Jesus asks at the story’s
conclusion. The answer would be obvious, even if Jesus did not supply it. Of
course, he will! First, however, God wants us to “cry out to him day
and night.” He wants us to pray and to keep on praying, even when it appears
useless — because God seems to answer only with silence. Perseverance in prayer
strengthens our desire and deepens our faith, very much as sustained physical
exercise strengthens the muscles, heart, and lungs. St. Augustine expresses
this well: “God wants our desire to be exercised in prayer, thus enabling us to
grasp what he is preparing to give. ... We are small and limited vessels for
the receiving of it. ... We shall have the greater capacity to receive [God’s
gifts], the more trustfully we believe, the more firmly we hope, the more
ardently we desire.”
St. Gregory the Great, Bishop of Rome
from 590 to 604, says the same in a slightly different form: “Holy desires grow
with delay: if they fade through delay they are no desires at all.”
God always answers prayer, though not
always at the time, and in the manner, that we want. In my 92nd year
I am grateful to have lived long enough to be able to thank God for answering
some of my prayers: “Not now”, and others “Not ever.” Nor will God keep us
waiting until we bid high enough for the things we need. All that is certain.
One thing alone is uncertain. Do we truly believe in a God who
hears and answers our prayers? Do really trust him? Or is our real trust
elsewhere? In our own cleverness, in our good luck, in the strings we can pull,
in our hard work, in the bribes we try to offer God in the form of prayers and
sacrifices and good works?
None of those things is certain,
Jesus tells us. There is certainty only in God. He alone can satisfy our deepest needs. Hence
Jesus’ final, insistent question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find any
faith on the earth?
Letter to Proba, 130; Office of Readings for the 29
th Sunday in
Ordinary Time.
Homily 25 on the Gospels; Office of Readings
for St. Mary Magdalene.
