Proper 24, Year C
Luke 18:1-8
Episcopal Church of the Holy Cross
October 20, 2019
Jonathan Hanneman
“…will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?’” – Luke 18:7
I need to make a confession this morning: I’m not very good at praying. I know how to pray, but consistency has never been my strong point. I want to be good at praying. I ought to be good at praying. I mean, good grief: I’m a priest—it’s kind of my job! But a lot of the time, and maybe it’s the same for you, prayer just seems pointless.
If you look at things from a strict Reformed Christian view, which had a strong influence on my thinking for years, the unchanging God is in absolute control of everything, so nothing I say is going to alter God’s plans. The only prayer God answers is one that’s already in line with what’s fated. Everything else is wishful thinking. In that case, there’s no real reason to pray other than to let off steam.
Some people look at things from the opposite extreme. In their understanding, even if God wants to help, Deity has its hands tied at some points (or has tied its own hands) and may not be able to do anything regarding a particular situation. It’s like when Shannon tells me to “fix the internet.” I can reboot our router, but when there’s an area-wide outage, nothing I do matters. The internet will still won’t work no matter how hard she continues to press me. All that happens is my anxiety ramps up—which doesn’t help either of us—and she remains frustrated.
While there are many differing viewpoints along that continuum, when it comes down to it, prayer often just doesn’t make sense. And at first glance, Jesus’ parable today confuses things even more. Are we really supposed to understand God as a petty being who responds only once they get annoyed by all the nagging? That’s not a particularly comforting idea. And frankly, that’s not a God I can trust or respect.
Our passage today is known as the Parable of the Unjust Judge, and there are several unusual things about it. First off, the narrator gives us the interpretation of the story before Jesus even has a chance to speak. In every other instance I can think of, interpretation of a parable is provided afterwards, if at all. So Luke definitely wants to guide our thought patterns even before we have the core material in front of us. Secondly, in our culture, the judge—who Jesus clearly holds up as a bad example—doesn’t sound so bad. As a secularly governed society, we don’t want our judges to be influenced by their religious or political views. We want judges who interpret and apply the actual laws as they stand, so not fearing God or respecting people sounds like a pretty good thing. For us, an unjust judge is one who does allow their personal opinions to sway their rulings.
A few weeks ago, we discussed the Parable of the Dishonest Manager. In that story, we had another person Jesus labeled as “unjust,” and we saw that the word he used can lean into meaning “unreliable” in our vernacular. That’s an applicable description of the judge in this passage, too, but I want to push our understanding a little farther.
We normally think of “justice” and “justification” in argumentative or legal terms. Is an action in accordance with the law? Then it’s considered “just.” Is your explanation of what happed adequate to explain why you acted outside the rules? If so, we say you’ve “justified” yourself. In religious circles, especially Protestant ones like ours, people say that when God “justifies” someone that person has been “declared righteous.” But there’s another usage of the word “just” that I think applies here.
If you’ve ever worked as a printer or even simply used a word processor, you’ve probably run into the concept of “justified” text. Do you want the side of the paragraph to line up along the left margin, like we do with most Western languages? Then you make them “left-justified.” However, if you’re working with some other languages, like Hebrew or Arabic, you read from right to left, so it’s helpful to have your text right-justified. Centered text is aligned—“justified”—according to a point evenly matched between the page’s margins. I think this “alignment” aspect of justice is important to understand what the Bible is saying, both in our parable and throughout the New Testament.
In Jesus’ story, the judge is, more literally translated, “not afraid of God,” and, basically, has no sense of shame regarding people. He exclusively acts according to his own internal compass. Unaligned with God or the laws and customs of the society around him, his rulings simply reflect his own opinion in the very moment that he gives them. If he likes something, most likely because it works in his favor, he rules for it, but if that same thing gets in the way of his desires—even a few seconds later—he rules against it. His reality is only lined up (or “justified”) around his passing whims and self-interest. He isn’t simply unreliable, he’s utterly misaligned with any measurable standard of right and wrong. Even in our severely individualistic American culture, one that celebrates independence above all other virtues, no one wants someone like that as an authority. They’re simply untrustworthy, the living embodiment of corruption and anarchy. An ordered society can’t endure those kinds of people for very long without serious risk of self-destruction.
The next character we meet is a widow. If you’re like me, you’ve probably always assumed that the widow is the hero of the story. But that isn’t necessarily the case—in fact, there might not be hero in this parable! English translators in general soften several points in the passage. We read that the widow is seeking justice against an opponent. That sounds perfectly honorable. But the text actually says she’s demanding the judge “avenge” her against her “enemy.” We have no idea if what she’s asking for is legitimate. To me, the language and broader situation suggest that it isn’t—no one here appears to be aligned (or justified) with anything but their own desires. She is, however, persistent—more than persistent, to tell the truth. The judge may not fear God or have any sense of shame, but he is clearly afraid of the widow. He doesn’t say that she’ll “wear me out” because of her nagging, as it’s easy for us to read into the story. He’s using boxing terminology. What’s really going on is that she’s either threatening or has already begun to get physically violent, and he “doesn’t want a black eye”!
So what do we do with that? How do we apply a parable about an anarchist judge and a possibly unhinged widow to our prayer relationship with God, as the Gospel writer clearly wants us to? After all, if God is really like the judge, just flipping according to whatever’s convenient in the moment, then I would have to assume the laws of time and nature would break down on a constant basis, making life—much less math or logic—impossible to sustain. And unlike the widow, we can’t effectively threaten to attack an infinitely superior spiritual being—our reality simply doesn’t allow for it. Even if you understand Creation to be a physical expression of the eternal God, harming one planet’s environment as an act of revenge ultimately ends up destroying only yourself and the life around you, not really affecting the wholeness of the trans-universal God in any substantive way.
So what is the point? Why does Luke want us to always pray without becoming discouraged?
What I really think this all comes down to today is that Jesus is trying to alter our perception of prayer. We generally come to God rather like the widow, asking (or demanding) that God line up everything according to our desires. If God were like the misaligned judge, responding only to persistence and threats, that might work, but it would also lead to chaos, just as if people really could make trees or mountains move into the sea at will, as Jesus talked about only a short time before our passage. But God, as the ultimately Just One, has set certain standards according to which the entire universe must align.
What if prayer is less about us aligning reality to our desires—our common, practical-in-the-moment, self-focused idea of “justice” (or vengeance)—and more about aligning ourselves with God’s standard? What if the way that “prayer changes things” isn’t so much about external reality complying with a personal request but internal realignment instead, about conforming our desires and being to the standard of a loving God? Prayer then becomes less about getting our way, about altering the world to match our hopes and wishes—the very thing which leads to the seemingly pointless aspect of prayer that so stifles my own consistency in time with God—and more about placing ourselves as directly into the flow of God’s will and desires as we can. To borrow from Eastern teachings (and from our cultural perspective, Jesus was indeed an Eastern teacher), prayer becomes a way of aligning with “the Way,” also called the Dao, the force and flow of reality according to which all must ultimately submit. Prayer then transforms into a pathway, not to passivity—just as the physical universe is always moving, the Dao and all within it is always active, always flowing—but a pathway to gratitude and contentment, to justification with God. If that’s the case, if aligning ourselves with the Ultimately Real is the true purpose of prayer, then I finally begin to see how we can answer Jesus’s question in the affirmative:
“will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them?”