Text: Luke 18:1-8
Speaker: Joel Miller
The river is of the earth
and it is free. It is rigorously
embanked and bound,
and yet is free. “To hell
with restraint,” it says.
“I have got to be going.”
It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become pieces.
Wendell Berry, “Give It Time,” in Leavings: Poems
Let’s talk about prayer. That’s what Luke says Jesus is talking about when he tells the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always, and not to lose heart.” Luke 18, verse 1.
If you’re like me, your relationship with prayer has changed over time. Different phases, different stages. Including that point where you step back and question the whole arrangement of making seemingly reasonable requests of the Divine who supposedly has power to affect change in earthly circumstances but has been noticeably non-interventionist during the worst moments of human history. If prayer doesn’t stop the war, end the genocide, prevent the pogrom, arrest the madness of the capitalist fantasy of profit at all costs, burst the dam, what is it for?
These are questions one will face if one chooses to persist with the practice of prayer.
One of the directions this can take is toward what’s called contemplative prayer. This is where I personally have felt most at home in the realm of prayer for many years. Contemplative prayer is less concerned with changing what God does and more focused on changing oneself. Or, more deeply, it’s not primary focused on change at all, but simply being with what is. Contemplative prayer is a way of dwelling with the deepest part of ourselves, which is pure attention and awareness, which is God within us. It sometimes uses words but welcomes silence.
One of the leading 20th century teachers of contemplative prayer, Father Thomas Keating, wrote: “Silence is God’s first language; everything else is just a poor translation” (In Invitation to Love).
The poet Kathleen Norris writes: “Prayer is not doing, but being. It is not words but the beyond-words experience of coming into the presence of something much greater than oneself…I sometimes think of prayer as a certain quality of attention that comes upon me when I’m busy doing something else.” (In Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith)
Mother Teresa, who dedicated her life to serving the “poorest of the poor” as she said, in Calcutta, India, was once interviewed by Dan Rather who asked her what she says when she prays. Her response: “I just listen.” To which Rather, being the fine journalist that he was, asked the obvious follow up question: “And what does God say?” To which Mother Teresa replied “God doesn’t say anything. God just listens.” (Christian Century Jan 15, 2008, p. 8)
This is contemplative prayer.
So let’s try it. Let’s contemplatively pray for 30 seconds. That’s hardly enough time to quiet our rowdy minds. But we’ll do it anyway. It can help to focus on one’s breath as a way we are always in relationship. Breathing in I receive. Breathing out, I give. Prayer as attention. Prayer as quiet listening. And if what he hear, in this setting, is the rustling energy of children, then what a gift.
Let’s begin…
Contemplative prayer can become a home for the spirit, but it’s not easy. I’m still not sure what’s harder in prayer: quieting my mind or stopping a war.
Prayer as being. Prayer as silence, a beyond-words experience. Prayer as a certain quality of attention.
Noticeably, these are not descriptions that come to mind after reading Luke chapter 18.
“Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always, and not to lose heart.”
This parable portrays prayer as an action. It relies on expression, words – passionate and heartfelt: “Grant me justice against my opponent.” And while it might include a certain quality of attention, it could be better described as a certain quality of persistence.
The parable features two characters. A widow, and a horrible, no-good, very bad judge.
A first century audience knew well that widows had low social status. With inheritances passing through the father to the oldest son, widows had little economic power. But widows were what we might call a protected class. Throughout the Torah – Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy – there are clear laws to provide for widows, along with orphans, the poor, and foreign residents. We aren’t told whether this is an especially righteous or poor widow – and it doesn’t matter. Justice demanded they be treated with dignity, and this was the job of judges to enforce.
Unfortunately, this parable contains a judge who cares jack squat about justice. Or, as the NRSV puts it, “In a certain city there lived a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” Good thing there aren’t real judges like that.
Well, in this parable, this widow, in this certain city, with this unjust judge, isn’t waiting around for her Torah-observant neighbor to have mercy on her. She’s taking matters into her own hands. She goes straight to the judge and she says, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” Not once, not twice, but she kept going, and kept going, and kept going. “Grant me justice.” “Grant me justice.”
This, Jesus indicates, is a model prayer and pray-er. Contemplative prayer has its place, but this is Persistent Prayer, with a capital P. Two Ps. And it has to do with the longing, the quest, the life-and-death necessity for justice.
It says this widow kept coming to the judge demanding justice, and I’m going to say this lasted at least a month, which is 30 days. Since we practiced contemplative prayer for 30 seconds, we’re going to practice persistent prayer for a very accelerated 30 days. All we’re going to do is say “Grant me justice” 30 times. This might get a little tiring, or weird. But I know we can do it.
Are you ready? Let us pray: “Grant me justice”…
Well, the persistent prayers of this woman work. They don’t actually change the judge’s heart. In fact, he almost brags about his allergy to justice. But it does really, really annoy him. Here is what he says to himself in the recesses of his judicial mind: “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” He just wants it to stop. “Grant me justice. Grant me justice.” That phrase translated “wear me out” is actually a term used in boxing which roughly translates as “give me black eye.” He’s tired of holding his arms in front of his face, so he throws in the towel.
End of parable. Beginning of short commentary. “And Jesus said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?’” (v.7)
Prayer as action. Prayer as expression of human longing and need. Prayer as persistence toward justice.
It seems like a slam dunk analogy. If a terrible judge is willing to dish out justice out of pure self-interest, then surely God will distribute justice out of God’s eternally abundant overflowing nature of love. Persistent prayer for the win.
There is a PS to this parable. It revolves around one little word, one word in the form of a question. That word and question give a nod toward this not being as simple or clearly defined as who wins a boxing match. It’s the word delay. And it speaks to the elephant in real-world room not just of 1st century Palestine, but every age since. Still the words of Jesus: “Will God delay long in helping them?”
It’s a question that undergirds the entirety of the writings of the New Testament. Because the age of the Messiah, which these folks were convinced they were in, was, by definition, a time when the world would be set right. In other words, it was a time when the just judge would restore creation to a condition of justice. The kingdom of humanity would become the kingdom of God. The Apostle Paul, to his dying day, believed the time was so short he and the churches he was writing to would live to see it. The gospels were written after Paul’s letters and the more history continued undeterred, the more explaining the followers of Jesus the Messiah had to do. Why the delay of the kingdom?
That’s what Luke is talking about in chapter 17 leading into this parable. It’s where Luke has Jesus say something that creates a major tension with other clear signs of the kingdom. Jesus says in Luke 17:20: “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you.” That could also be translated, the kingdom of God is among you.”
The kingdom of God, the holistic justice of right relationship is within you and among you.
Is that enough? Or, if not ultimately enough, is it enough for now?
Prayerful justice as a present enactment of kin-dom of God. Justice-full prayer as silence in “the presence of something much greater than oneself” to borrow the words of Kathleen Norris. The kingdom come as listening to God listening to us in the practice of Mother Teresa.
Prayer as a persistent practice of the freedom that can never be taken away by any injustice. Free like water. In the words of Wendell Berry:
The river is of the earth
and it is free. It is rigorously
embanked and bound,
and yet is free.
It will grind out its dams.
It will go over or around them.
They will become pieces.
Chances are, in light of how history has proceeded, we will become pieces first. Chances are injustice will outlive us. Chances are we will never achieve a sustained sense of contemplative Divine union where we know in our deepest selves that our very prayers themselves are the Divine presence expressing itself through us. Chances are the kin-dom of God will not be fully realized in our lifetime. And yet, Jesus proposes, it is possible “to pray always and not to lose heart.”
Contemplative prayer and Persistent prayer are ultimately one and the same because we are one. And God is one. And we are free and God is free. And so we pray. Persistently. And in doing so we make space within ourselves, and among ourselves, for justice, like a river, to flow.