Proper 24 (October 16-22)
Texts: Luke 18:1-8;
Genesis 32:22-31
PRAYING FOR GOD'S JUSTICE
Have you ever prayed and prayed for something really important and
either didn't get an answer,
or the answer was the opposite of what you prayed for? A young mother
is struck with cancer,
and so we pray for healing - but death comes anyway. A loved one
struggles with depression or
addiction; we pray fervently, but it only gets worse. Millions pray for
peace in the world, and yet
. . .
Our unanswered prayers seemed mocked when people credit God with
answering prayers like
making a profit on selling a condo, or finding a convenient parking
space. Super Bowl
champions thank God for their victory (though we hear little from the
losers on the subject). A
lottery winner -- unemployed, down to his last eight dollars -- prays,
"Help me, Lord, . . . just
let me win this," and gives God credit for the $150 million jackpot.
Answered vs. unanswered prayer is one of faith's biggest mysteries - it
can leave us questioning
our faith in God. Instead of thinking of God as an Unjust Judge like in
the parable, it's tempting
to think of God as a disinterested watchmaker who wound up the universe
and stands by
watching as it winds down. There are no easy answers to this mystery.
Is Jesus trying to offer us an easy answer in this parable? When you've
been praying fervently for
a long-time, does it really help when someone tells you to keep praying
and don't lose heart? To
be honest, I would feel almost like the person is taunting me. It's
like trying to finish a marathon
going up a hill, losing badly, and someone shouts from the crowd to try
harder. That's not
necessarily helpful.
So what is Jesus trying to do in
this parable? First of all, he makes this about justice - that word
pops up not just a couple times but four -- five if you count the
negation of justice by calling the
judge unjust. It certainly becomes an ironic story about a
widow, someone infamously treated
unjustly in the ancient world, receiving justice from an unjust judge.
And notice the questions
Jesus asks after telling the parable. It's all about God's granting
justice to his people quickly.
What's happened here? The passage begins generally with telling us it's
about praying always
and not losing heart. But by the end of the passage it has become much
more specific. It's not
about just any prayer - it's about THE prayer, the prayer of
God's people for centuries, that God
would grant them justice against their enemies. For going on seven
hundred years, they had been
oppressed by Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Syrians, and
finally Romans. For
generations they had not been in charge of their own land, their own
commerce, or their own
justice. They were subject to someone else's laws and justice - and
they had known plenty of
unjust judges. The current Roman governor Pontius Pilate was simply the
latest in a long line.
So was Jesus saying that God was about to answer THE prayer?
Was God about to hear their
centuries of crying day and night and give them justice in their own
land? And did Jesus say
"quickly"? Was the Messiah about to come and finally grant them the
justice God had promised?
The answer, of course, is "Yes," God was sending the Messiah right at
that very moment - the
Messiah himself was the one telling them the parable. But that creates
a new problem, a new
mystery, because the only thing Jesus was about to do quickly was to
die. And the way he was to
die scandalized faith. He was to die just as powerless as the widow in
the parable - not like the
powerful judge! And that unjust judge, evil Pilate, would execute him!
In just a short time Jesus
would be playing out the parable to perfection -- except he didn't even
get justice - he was
executed! Buried in the ground. How is that justice?
The justice came silently three days later, early in the morning. And
it wasn't the unjust judge
finally relenting -- Pilate had posted guards. This strange and silent
justice came through the Just
Judge, the Creator of the Universe, who really isn't so much a just
judge as he is a Prodigal
Father -- the one several parables earlier who seemingly wasted his
joyful forgiveness on his
good-for-nothing Prodigal Son. That Just Judge raised his faithful Son
to new life as a promise of
unconditional love and forgiveness for all God's children -- even the
Romans, even Pilate.
But God did not use the swift justice of humans backed by the threat or
use of force. This justice
is the much slower moving justice of God's unconditional love for all
creatures - slower precisely
because it is not backed by the threat or use of force. Our
human form of swift justice doesn't
really work, anyway, except to make people dead. It does not raise up
to new life and give second
chances. It does not have the power of repentance, the ability to turn
lives around in new life-giving directions. Only love can do that.
This is why Jesus wraps this parable about justice in the context of
prayer. Jesus tells us to pray
always and not lose heart because the justice of God's power of love
can take a while to give
results. And it doesn't look anything like our human forms of justice.
So what we pray for may
bring an unrecognizable answer, one that seems too slow for our human
timetables.
We started the video "Race: The Power of an Illusion" today during the
Sunday School hour.
(Give quick plug.) One of our greatest champions of racial justice,
Martin Luther King, Jr., led
the civil rights movement based on that power of God's love, with the
hope of liberating not only
People of Color, but white people, too. Forty years after he was
assassinated -- another slow
change when love stands up in the face of force -- Americans elected
their first Person of Color
as president. Many People of Color thought they would never see that
day. And there is still a
long, long way to go in overturning the unjust systems and institutions
of racism. But the election
of a Black president is a sign that the slow persistent power of love
might be working. Prayer in
the cases of such important things as the healing of racism needs to
persist and not lose heart.
When I used the image of running a marathon and having someone in the
crowd tell you not to
lose heart, I said that that's not always helpful. But what if it was a
fellow marathon runner
struggling right next to you, who said it. Gasping for breath,
grimacing with the pain, that fellow
runner offers you both a word of encouragement. Is that more helpful?
Because that's what Jesus
does, offering us hope and encouragement, grace for our journey, not
from the sidelines but from
the middle of the race. Christ came to be with us, to suffer what we
suffer, and to offer us the
promise of God's strong love while we persist in the race.
What does that grace look like? Sometimes it is to pray for us even
when we need to take a break
from praying. Jesus also talks about prayer in Luke 11 where he
concludes with the promise of
the gift of the Holy Spirit. In Romans 8, St. Paul links life in the
Spirit with continued suffering
of creation and the role of prayer. Paul encourages us to keep hoping
for a glorious end to the
suffering, but he also gives us a glimpse of grace for our journey when
he says, "Likewise the
Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we
ought, but that very Spirit
intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the
heart, knows what is the
mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints
according to the will of God"
(Romans 8:26-27). When we grow too weary to pray, God's Spirit will
pray for us. That's grace
for our journey. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Delivered at Prince of Peace Lutheran,
Portage, MI, October 17, 2010