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Luke 18:1-8
The Parable of the Persistent Widow
1Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that her coming doesn’t utterly shame me!’ ”
6And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
There are certain Christians who identify themselves as “prayer warriors.” These folks present themselves as people whose prayers have special power — with the implication being that they just have an ability to do it better than most others. When they pray for something, we’re meant to believe, God sits up and takes special notice.
I suspect that these self-identified prayer warriors are some of the few Christians who really like this passage from Luke. It seems to support the idea that if your prayers have not been granted, then you’ve somehow “done it wrong” — either you haven’t been fervent enough, or you haven’t been persistent enough, or something. Because if you do it right, God’s going to give you what you pray for.
But aside from the prayer warriors, it seems to me that most people who read this parable find it confusing and a little disturbing. That’s probably especially true for people who have prayed fervently for the healing of a loved one who was not cured of an ailment that eventually killed them. On top of the disappointment and grief of losing someone who mattered to them, these people might feel that the parable tells them it’s somehow their fault that their loved one passed away, because their prayers were judged inadequate by God.
So it’s tempting to just skip this parable and go on to the next reading. But since it’s a parable of Jesus, we need to do the work of figuring out what he was saying, because anything Jesus said must hold great value to our lives as his disciples.
And before we get to the bottom line of this parable, we need to deal with an aspect of its structure that many readers find especially confusing and off-putting. Luke tells us up front that it’s a parable about prayer, so it seems logical to conclude that the judge in the parable represents God. That creates an uncomfortable feeling, because the judge in the story is said not to care about God or what people thought. And if the judge represents God, that doesn’t paint a very encouraging picture of what God is really like.
But there’s good news, which is that Jesus is not saying God is like an uncaring judge. Actually, Jesus is using a teaching method he uses in other parts of the gospels. He is actually contrasting hard-hearted human beings with our holy and loving God. Jesus is making the point that if even sinful and corrupt humans will sometimes wind up doing the right thing, we can count on our Holy God to do the right thing all the time. Once you see that Jesus is contrasting God and human authorities instead of likening God to a corrupt judge, this parable makes a lot more sense. And it becomes a lot less disturbing.
Of course there’s one other thing about this parable that makes us a little uncomfortable. That’s what the judge says about the widow woman ‘bothering’ him. We don’t like the idea that when we pray, God is bothered by our prayers. But the Bible scholars say that the word that’s translated “bother” in this passage is probably a translation of a Hebrew word from the Old Testament that referred to the way the covenant people drove God crazy with their unfaithfulness. So it seems that Jesus was making a reference to the Hebrew scriptures, not a suggesting that our prayers bother God.
It seems to me that Jesus almost certainly didn’t mean to say that if you keep praying long enough, then all your prayers will eventually be granted. The New Testament scholars say that Jesus was more likely promising that the specific prayers of his followers would be granted — those were prayers for the fulfillment of God’s peaceful kingdom. It seems that Jesus was promising that the collective voice of the church when it cries out for justice will be heard. He wasn’t promising that each of our individual prayer requests will be granted.
That’s not to say that we can’t pray for whatever is on our heart. The Bible seems consistently to make the point that God invites us to lift up before him all of our joys and concerns and troubles. But Jesus doesn’t seem to promise that all of those prayers will be granted – in spite of what some of our brothers and sisters who claim to be prayer warriors might say. After all, both Jesus and the apostle Paul prayed for things that were not granted. Paul prayed for the removal of the “thorn in his flesh.” Jesus prayed that the cup of suffering might be taken from him. And it seems silly to claim that those prayers weren’t granted because Jesus and Paul weren’t “prayer warriors,” or that they somehow did it wrong.
It seems to me that the overall teaching on prayer in the New Testament is that its primary purpose is to get our hearts aligned with God’s heart, not to change God’s heart to align it with our desires. It seems foolish — and maybe even irresponsible — to tell people that anything they pray for will be granted if they do it persistently enough or earnestly enough.
But if we pray for things that we knew to be in keeping with God’s own desires, we can pray those things with great confidence. In today’s reading, Jesus seems to say that when we pray for God’s justice and peace to be fulfilled “on earth, as it is in heaven,” we can be confident that those prayers are asking for something that’s already near and dear to the heart of the God we love and serve.
Let’s pray. Lord, we are thankful that you receive our prayers as a loving Father, not as a corrupt and sinful human judge. We trust that you will care for us and provide for us, and we pray that your kingdom of peace and justice will come to fulfillment. Move us to join eagerly in the work of bringing about that kingdom, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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