Proper 24C - Pray always and do not lose heart!

When I was born my parents made the decision that they would not have me baptized, much to the surprise of my grandparents. My father had stopped going to church years before I was born, but my mother was still attending on the big Holidays. My parents decided they didn’t want to force a religion they were not sure about on me.
My grandmother, being the concerned Christian that she is, was worried about me. She went and spoke to her priest, and she was instructed to baptize me herself when my parents were not looking. Now my mother had an idea that my grandmother might be up to something, but because she was unsure about this whole Christianity thing, she didn’t do anything to stop her. So when my grandmother had the opportunity to babysit me, she took me over to the kitchen sink and baptized me!
Now baptizing someone is good first step, but as we know from our Baptismal liturgies, a child needs to be instructed in the Christian life. My grandmother knew that my parents were not going to teach me about Christianity any further than letting me know that my father didn’t believe in it. So my grandmother did the best thing she could – she enlisted people to pray for me constantly. My grandmother’s sister had been a Roman Catholic Carmelite nun, so my grandmother has ties to a convent. These where serious nuns: full habit, separated from the world so they could constantly pray for the world. My grandmother asked them to pray for God’s Grace to pour upon me and for me to become a Christian despite the lack of help for my parents. So week after week, year after year, they prayed for me. Well eventually something happened. As a teenager I became intensely interested in Christianity, but not in the way that my Grandmother had hoped. I became intensely interested in it because I thought I wanted to tear it down.
I can only imagine my grandmother talking to the nuns after hearing me tear into the Church and tell them: “Sisters – you are doing it wrong! The prayer got messed up somehow. Oh, he knows about God now, but he seems to hate Him!”
Yet despite all this, my grandmother never gave up hope. She kept on praying for my conversion, and the sisters kept on praying. After twenty one years of prayer what they asked for finally happed and here I am.
The Gospel passage today deals directly with all of this – what are we to do in prayer? Few Gospel passages are as direct as this one is. Most of them make you read the surrounding text and look for context in order to really get what Jesus was trying to get us to focus on. In today’s Gospel, St Luke tells us “Jesus told the disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.”
Now even with this direct description about the parable, a little context will help. There is a whole section in St Luke’s Gospel in between last week’s Gospel and this week’s that the lectionary skipped. In this section Jesus tells the disciples about the end times. He assures them it will happen and that the disciples will be vindicated in their faith, but those times are not going to happen right away. So I can imagine the disciples asking Jesus: “Well, what do we do in the meantime? How do we live through this in-between period when we are uncertain as to what will happen and how we will make it through these times?”
To this question, Jesus answers them with a parable about prayer. On a first reading it seems that Jesus might be saying you can annoy God into doing things.
We hear about a widow who keeps asking for justice from an unrighteous judge who does not fear God. She keeps coming back, asking for justice and he eventually gives in.
It seems it’s just like when a child asks for a cookie 30 minutes before dinner. He keeps asking for a cookie and you keep telling him no. Then after he has asked you a thousand times you give in and give it to him, just so he will leave you alone. Is this what Jesus meant? You can wear God down into doing what you want Him to do for you?
The Church has been pretty universal that this is not what the parable meant. St. Augustine says of this parable “By no means does that unjust judge furnish an allegorical representation of God.” (Ancient Christian Commentaries III:277)
The contemporary scholar Luke Timothy Johnson thinks that if we all had a better understanding of ancient Greek it would be abundantly clear that the judge is not an allegory for God. Our version translates the unrighteous Judge’s thoughts this way: “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” (Luke 8:5 NRSV) Sounds a lot like that parent giving in, doesn’t it? Johnson, in his own translation of the Greek puts the unrighteous judge’s thoughts this way: “…this widow gives me so much trouble that I will give her justice! Otherwise, she will keep coming and end up giving me a black eye!” It turns out that St. Luke was using the language of a Greek boxing match and applying to the widow in this story. Johnson writes in his commentary “The parable makes its point so forcefully and humorously that little comment is required. Contemporary readers can imagine an enraged bag lady hitting the negligent magistrate over the head and literally “giving him a black eye.” We are meant, I think, to laugh.” (Luke, 273)
Obviously the translators of our lectionary text thought we, the frozen chosen, couldn’t take a joke and translated the humor right out of this parable, and I think it was a disservice to us to do so. When we hear that joke, it becomes abundantly clear that the unrighteous judge is not meant to be a stand in for God.
Now Luke Timothy Johnson tells us that once the translation issues have been cleared up, this message of the parable is abundantly clear. Well other than the clear comic relief, I am not so sure that the message is clear from a first reading.
When we look at who this parable really focuses on, it becomes clearer what Jesus was telling us. While we tend to focus on the unrighteous judge because either we think he might be a stand in for God or we think he is funny when we read the right translation, this parable is really about the widow. In Jesus’ time and community, a widow was a powerless person. A woman’s voice in the community was tied to her husband. As widow, with her husband dead, no longer has anybody to speak for her. She would have been seen as a voiceless burden to the community. Yet this woman does not accept this – she dares to speak to the judge. She seems even braver when we remember the context of the judicial system of the time. The judge would have heard grievances publicly in front of a large group of people who had all come for their turn in front of him. Into this situation comes the widow. She dares to speak when she has no right in this society to speak. And she doesn’t plead her case in some sort of meek, soft voice. She berates the judge and demands over and over “Give me justice!”
This has many implications towards our prayer life. In my own life there have been times I have been afraid to say to God some of things I wanted to say, afraid I didn’t have permission to say them before God. It wasn’t until someone told me that I had biblically sanctioned permission to bring my questions and frustrations to God that I was able to do so, and doing so allowed me to have some very deep and clear conversation with God.
This parable is one of those sanctions for saying to God things you think you may not have permission to say. Through this parable, Jesus is telling us, that those of us who have either been restricted in our prayer because of what the world has told us, or restricted in our prayer by what we have told ourselves, we can be like the widow. We can bring before God the things that are pressing on our souls, and not only can God take it, he will listen, and it will sustain us.
I don’t think that we are meant to come away from this parable thinking that if we ask God enough times in prayer we will get what we want, even though the widow did indeed get what she wanted. Instead, we can learn that what sustained the widow was her ability to continually come before the judge, always living in hope.
My grandmother was in that situation once. She and the sisters prayed over and over again that I might become a Christian, but for so long it didn’t happen. Yet, my grandmother and the sisters held out hope. Even when I cursed at God, they persevered n their prayers, and it sustained my grandmother. Even when it looked like her prayer would never be answered she never gave up and stopped praying.
What my grandmother taught me is her lived experience of this Gospel passage. Yes, I became a Christian, so eventually she did get what she wanted. However, that is not the lesson in this. The lesson for me was that she was able to still love me when I was an angry atheist and never gave up on me because she knew she could keep putting the matter before God in prayer. Her knowledge that she could keep asking God for a miracle even when it seemed impossible is what sustained her. It sustains her still as she prays for the conversion of the rest of my family.
The widow knew that it was unlikely that she would ever get justice from unrighteous judge, and was probably shocked when she did get it. But she only made it through her dark days by perseverance.
So when the disciples ask “How do we make it through these uncertain times?” Jesus gives his answer. “Keep praying, it will carry you through those times. Pray always and do not lose heart!”