An assistant manager of a large department store saw a
boy standing at the bottom of the escalator one day. The assistant became suspicious.
He watched the boy for a while.
The boy had his eyes glued to the moving hand rail. Finally, the assistant went over to the boy
and questioned him. “Is something
wrong, young man?” he asked. “No sir”,
replied the boy, not taking his eyes off the handrail, “I’m just waiting for my
bubble gum to come back.”
Have you ever watched and waited as eagerly for
something as that little boy watched and waited for his bubble gum to come
back?
When we were children we longed for Christmas to come
and would ask our parents, “How many more days till Christmas?” And when Christmas had come, then we would
start to long for summer vacation. And
I’m sure that you can remember, as I can, riding in the car to the beach or the
amusement park or some other delightful destination and wearing our parents out
by asking, “Are we there yet?”
Jesus told a parable about a woman who longed for
justice as a child longs for Christmas or summer vacation or a trip to the
beach. She had been wronged and the
only person who could right the wrong was an unjust judge. Imagine that you have been the victim of a
hoax or have been cheated out of thousands of dollars in a business deal. Imagine that the judge who will hear your
case is corrupt, a person who takes bribes and sells justice to the highest
bidder. That’s the situation the woman
in Jesus’ parable found herself in.
But she was not easily discouraged. Jesus tells us that she “kept coming to him
and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent’”. Finally, the judge heard her case and granted her request, not
because he had had a change of heart, but simply because he was worn out with
her constant requests.
That is how persistent we are to be with God. “Will not God grant justice to his chosen
ones who cry to him day and night?” Jesus asked.
What an odd parable!
Jesus compares God to a wicked, corrupt, and unjust judge.
Jesus was employing a type of argument common in first
century Judaism. It was called “from the lesser to the greater”. Do you remember the parables of the lost
sheep and lost coin? If a shepherd will
search for one lost lamb out of ninety-nine, how much more will God search for
a lost soul? If a woman will search for
one lost coin out of ten, how much more will God search for you when you are
lost and hurt and alone? If a corrupt
and unjust judge will eventually hear and render judgment for a woman who
beseeches him constantly, how much more will God hear and grant your
prayers? From the lesser to the
greater, a trivial illustration can be made to serve a great truth.
But this parable raises powerful, disturbing questions
for us. Luke introduces the parable by
saying that “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not
to lose heart”. The point of the
parable seems to be that if we pray long enough and sincerely enough, God will
hear and grant our petitions. But you
know and I know many persons who have prayed for healing, or employment, or
money for their rent or food for their children and whose prayers have not been
answered.
I have no easy answers about why God does not hear and
grant all the prayers we pray, but I have a few thoughts to share with
you.
One obvious reason that God does not answer our prayers
is that we can sometimes ask for trivial, foolish, or even harmful things. I guess the words that come out of our
mouths when someone cuts in front of us on the freeway could be called prayers
of a sort, but I hope we don’t really want God to answer THOSE prayers. I had a cartoon on my refrigerator for years
in which a kneeling minister prayed, “Lord, smite my worst enemy with a plague
of locusts”, and in the next frame the minister himself was covered with
locusts.
It’s not difficult to see why God does not answer
trivial, foolish, or vindictive prayers, but what about prayers for
healing? I know of no stronger case
AGAINST the Christian faith than the problem of suffering. The problem is not just why do the innocent
suffer and the wicked prosper, but why is there suffering at all if this world
was created by and is sustained by a good, just, loving, and almighty Creator?
I have no good answer.
In his book The Problem of Pain, C.S. Lewis says that pain is
sometimes God’s megaphone to awaken a sleeping world. Sometimes that’s true.
Sometimes a case of the flu or even a broken limb can slow us down and
open up time and space in our lives in which we can hear what God has to say to
us. But I could never go to someone
with terminal cancer or AIDS and tell that person that their suffering was
God’s way of trying to get their attention.
That would be the worst kind of pastoral misconduct.
So, I do not know why our prayers for healing are not
answered. But I do know this: sometimes our prayers for healing are
answered even when the person for whom we pray dies. There can be a deep kind of healing that can take place only in
death. And I believe that sometimes
there are things we can learn only when we grapple with suffering over a long
period of time.
I want to tell you about my own experience of pleading
with an “unjust judge”. At the
beginning of my next-to-last semester at divinity school in the fall of 1981,
the bishop of Alabama informed me that he would not ordain me. He gave no reason then and has never given
any reason. It was devastating to me to
learn that something I had worked for for three years and had prayed for was not
going to take place. I was angry and
depressed. I was outraged not only at
the bishop but also at God. So, unable
to be ordained, I worked for a couple of years, then I received a small
fellowship to study at Scotland’s University of St. Andrews and began work on
my Ph.D. I lived in Great Britain for
almost three and a half years, and when I finished my Ph.D. I returned to the
States and taught for a few years.
Finally, the bishop who had turned his back on me retired, and the
Diocese of Alabama elected a new bishop.
Suddenly, all the doors that had been closed to me swung wide open; I
was accepted into the ordination process and was ordained first deacon and then
priest. But in the years between
finishing my Master of Divinity and being ordained, I not only acquired a
doctorate and the invaluable experience of teaching in a university, I became a
very different person. I became much
less rigid and dogmatic. I learned to
accept the fact that there are things we cannot understand and cannot change, however
painful and puzzling they are. I think
I became warmer and more accessible.
And I know that I became much more sympathetic and empathetic to others
who struggle with suffering and pain in their lives.
In God’s infinite, mysterious, and often frustrating
wisdom I believe that God knew that I needed to struggle, pray, and come up
against closed and locked doors for ten years before being ordained. I am a better priest for having had to wait
ten years, and God knew that. What I
went through I would not wish on anyone, but it was something I needed to go
through. So, as today’s gospel says, we
“need to pray always and not to lose heart”.
Christ Church has been through a difficult season, a
season of conflict. But I believe that someone, probably many of you have been
praying and not losing heart. They have been praying constantly and fervently
for this parish.
I hope that you are praying daily for Christ Church to
grow. That’s not a selfish prayer. There are thousands of spiritually hungry people
in this community and Christ Church can offer them spiritual nourishment. That’s no more selfish than for someone who
maintains a shelter for the homeless to pray that persons without a home would
find a way to his shelter.
I hope that you are praying daily that Christ
Church will develop and expand its
ministry to the community. Of course,
to pray that prayer implies a commitment to support those ministries with your
time and money.
And I hope that you are praying for our stewardship
campaign and praying about your own pledge to Christ Church.
Does God hear and answer prayer? Of course, but God answers our prayers in
God’s time and on God’s schedule, not ours.
Phillips Brooks once remarked that we “think [our] prayer unanswered
when really God not merely is answering it, but has been answering it for
years, before ever it knew enough of itself to be prayed.” (Philips Brooks, "The Silence of
Christ", p. 131, in The Light of the World (1904).)
And the kind of prayer that we pray makes a difference. Perhaps the most important thing that you
can notice about the parable of the unjust judge is the precise nature of the
petition that the woman brought to the unjust judge. Her plea was this, “Grant me justice.” And Jesus concluded the parable by saying,
“Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?… I
tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.”
God promises us justice. In other words, God promises to give us what we need, not
what we want.
