(Luke 18.1-14) ( Pentecost 19)
20 October 2019 – © Neil Millar
So, what is it that hinders your praying? If we had a congregational discussion about this, I imagine there’d be various issues raised: busyness; distraction; disappointment; frustration; not sure how or what to pray; not sure if God hears my prayers; or if I want to pray, or if I’m worthy to pray – feelings of guilt, shame and so on. ‘Rejoice always, pray without ceasing…’, Paul writes in Thessalonians, for this is God’s will for you…. How are you going with that? Would you call yourself a prayerful person? Most of us feel the need for prayer (at least sometimes) and many of us also struggle. And clearly, this has been an issue for a long time, for as we just heard in the gospel reading, Jesus was addressing it in his earthly ministry. Luke 18.1: ‘Then he told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart’ (1).
And, what a striking story it is – all to do with a defenceless widow seeking justice from a callous and disinterested judge. It’s like a first-century reworking of David and Goliath. The woman’s cause looks hopeless, she’s got no leverage, the judge holds all the power and he’s holding out. And yet, because of her insistence, he eventually capitulates. He’s worked out that she ain’t gonna give up and that he’ll go nuts if he doesn’t hear her case… and so he does. And the inference of the story – if a bloke as selfish as this will grant a plea for justice in the end, will not God, whose ear is ever inclined towards us, hear our cry?? ‘I tell you, God will quickly grant justice’, Jesus says. And, then the sting in the tail. BUT, ‘will he find faith on earth?’ – this kind of plucky trust and commitment. Will he find people who, like this widow, are persisting in prayer?
As with so many of the parables, there seems to be something important going on here, but also something troubling. In this story, Jesus speaks of God quickly granting the justice of the widow’s cause, but what about the person who prays for years for a sick grandchild and they don’t get better? I’ve been praying for my son for thirty years … and we’re still struggling. Not all prayers, no matter how persistent, are answered – at least that’s how it seems. We don’t always get the outcome we want. And Jesus must have known that – he experienced it himself, in Gethsemane. So what really is he trying to teach us about prayer in these two stories? Well – it seems to me that the thread linking them is to do with vulnerability.
In the first instance, Jesus is saying that we need to pray because we’re vulnerable. As Scott Peck reminds us in the opening line of his famous book, The Road Less Travelled, ‘life is difficult’. You might have noticed that!! Relationships are messy, things go wrong, people hurt us and we hurt them. In the story, Jesus speaks of a widow. To be a widow in that time meant a loss of protection and economic support. Widows had limited means and power, and that meant they were usually poor, easily exploited and dismissed. The Torah insisted that justice be extended to widows (e.g. Exod. 22.22-4; Deut. 24.17), but as this story shows, this didn’t always happen. And nor does it for us – life is difficult. In this widow, Jesus presents us with a basic truth of existence, namely, our vulnerability. We pray because we’re vulnerable and need help.
Second, we pray because God’s desired way of working in the world is collaborative, co-operative. People can think of and treat God like a cosmic dispensing machine, and prayer like pulling a lever to get your wishes granted. But I think Jesus’ emphasis in this story is more to do with the importance of our engagement, our participation. Christian prayer is self-involving, God works with and in us, not for us. The ten lepers in last week’s story stepped into their healing – ‘as they went, they were cleansed’.In like manner, this widow pressed for justice. She didn’t throw out the request and sit back waiting, she ‘kept coming’ and asking (3). In the face of obstruction and rejection, she persisted. She didn’t betray her deepest need and truth, and there’s something that matters about that (and makes a difference … at some profound level), whatever the surface outcome. True prayer is participatory, partnering with God – not just handing over a shopping list. ‘When we pray, we participate in the most dramatic partnership of creation and recreation’, Archbishop Justin Welby, writes. The Apostle Paul was alluding to this when he described the Corinthians as being ‘laborers together with God’ (1 Cor. 3.9). The Greek word for ‘laborers together’ is synergos. It means ‘a companion in work’ and gives us our word ‘synergy’.
So, prayer, the kind of prayer Jesus is affirming here is participation with God, and this touches on a further dimension of vulnerability. We pray because we’re vulnerable, and to pray in this self-involving way makes us vulnerable – putting our need out there; putting ourselves out there!! The temptation in prayer is to hold back. We can hold back because of discouragement, losing heart, despairing of ever receiving justice; and we can hold back defensively, being proud and self-sufficient. Jesus alerts us to this temptation in the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. It’s a parable, we’re told, for those who ‘trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt’. Jesus may’ve been targeting the Pharisees in this story, but in truth, there’s ‘Pharisee’ in all of us. Any of us can be arrogant and self-righteous, judgmental and superior (if not out loud, then in our own thoughts). ‘God, I thank you that I’m not like other people’ – naughty people, the riff raff… like him – that compromising, money grabbing tax collector!!! I mean, I’m disciplined and generous and, well, thoroughly impressive really… Our inner ‘Pharisee’ full of self-importance, and there’s no real opening to God, no humility, no vulnerability. It’s an ego story and it’s alienating.
In contrast, the tax collector bares his soul. He stands far off, looks down and beats his breast: ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner’, he prays, earnestly, and ‘this man rather than the other’ went home justified, Jesus says. The ego has an aversion to being vulnerable; it likes to protect its image and vulnerability is a crack in its armour. But to pray faithfully, we must take off the armour and lean into our vulnerability, becoming like little children (as Jesus says, immediately after this parable – 18.15-7).
True prayer happens when we show up and allow ourselves – the whole of us – to participate. This takes courage. It means dismantling our defences, getting real, and practising trust. It feels like a risk because ‘everything is on the table’, but in reality, as Archbishop Welby points out, ‘to cast yourself into the hands of one who loves you immeasurably and perfectly is fairly obviously not much of a risk’. In fact, ‘not to do so is really the risk’, for as poet David Whyte notes, ‘in refusing our vulnerability we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence’.
So Jesus speaks of the need to pray always and not to lose heart. And asks, ‘when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?’ In this context, he shares two stories about faith and faithful prayer – two parables calling us to be real about our need, whole-hearted and open-hearted in our involvement. For it is in our vulnerability, in our openness and our brokenness that God’s love may touch and transform us. And in the end, this is the essence and point of prayer – that we encounter the One who listens and longs for us, who calls and accompanies the whole world home.
References
Peck, M Scott (1983) The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth, Arrow Books, London.
Welby, J ‘Prayer is a partnership with God’, based on the 2015 Holy Week lecture, ‘The Risk of Prayer’, https://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/prayer-partnership-god