Abstract
Looking back and looking forward- it is hardly surprising that Jesus’ words, while on the road with his disciples, have so much significance after his death, when the disciples are gathering all their collective memories of the Risen Lord.
Here we have a parable which Jesus told, a wonderful, vivid story, told in the manner of a practised story-teller. The plot outline is brief, the details not elaborate, just enough to catch your interest. The Judge is corrupt, he is an unrighteous judge. The expression used of him is ‘God not fearing, man not regarding’ and later in the tale he repeats this description of himself, ‘If indeed I don’t fear God nor regard man’—.
What then is his motive for giving the woman justice? She is without influence. She has no male protector and that probably means as well that she is scrapingly poor, too poor to pay him any extra inducement to listen to her and judge in her favour. There is no incentive for him to take up her case. He fobs her off.
What the widow does have is persistence. She keeps coming back. And the judge finally realises that she will do so until he hears her case. She is going to be troublesome and will wear him out with her perseverance. He uses a word which refers to the part of the face below the eyes. He will have dark circles under his eyes from lack of sleep because she just doesn’t give up and, in the end, he vindicates her claim, whatever it was, just to get rid of her.
The idea that even corrupt people can do good things, albeit for their own motives, is not new in the bible- think of the dishonest steward, about to lose his position, who says, ‘I am not strong enough to dig and I am ashamed to beg’ and he makes a pact with his master’s debtors that they pay up around half of their outstanding bills and he will waive the rest. And he is commended for being shrewd (Luke 15. 1-9). Just as we often do something for a complete rogue, because of the sheer brass neck the person has displayed in requesting it.
I once remember a man stopping me in the city centre. He was looking for money. He said, ‘some of them will tell you it is for food and some for the electric bill. If you give me money, I am just going to go straight into that pub over there and have a wee pint or two.’
One of the rabbis, teaching in the second century, said,
‘The impudent (person) conquers the wicked one – how much more (will he conquer) the Good One of the world?’
This is the same context in which Jesus is speaking – if those who have bad motives can be brought to do what is needed or requested, then how much more will God do, who has our total well-being at heart.
Yet, even knowing this, we are the ones who give up. If the temptations of the young stem from their ardency, from being too zealous, the principal temptation of those who have been long on the road is giving up. Not church, we still go to church as we have always done, but we don’t respond as we have always done. We have heard it all before. We’re not, at this stage of our lives, going to take on board whatever it is. It is someone else’s grand cause – not for us.
Well, here Jesus is saying that we shouldn’t give up, that God does hear us and will give us what we ask. We have to keep praying, and hoping and trusting, because this God is known to us, and so we believe in a creation that has love and goodness at its heart. But we get weary of waiting, and problems which seem to have no resolution. We grow battle-weary when there is no end in sight.
When they were small, my children used to have a book called ‘The Twenty Elephant Restaurant’. It was about an old couple who had begun to give up. Their table had become rickety, and the man dealt with it by putting a folded piece of paper under one of the legs. Every so often, the piece of paper worked its way out, and he would have to find another. One day he said that he was worn out by the table. His wife said that it was alright for a man to wear out a table, but not right for a table to wear out a man, so they decided to build a new table, which was a big endeavour at their stage of life. In their new-found enthusiasm, they bought enough wood for twenty tables, and decided to open a restaurant. Its unique selling point was that they would have elephants serving and then the elephants would dance on the tables.
Of course, you can see where this is going, the dancing elephants damaged the tables and then the restaurant would have to close while the man made some more, alone in his shed. The book finishes with the observation that sometimes life is a one-man circus and sometimes a twenty elephant restaurant, meaning that some things we battle out alone, and some things we do with others, making something richer than was expected, life leading to life - and on to more life.
We can’t afford to let our desire for God’s kingdom slip away in weariness, or because it is too daunting to take on such a task. We have to believe this is going to happen, one day, looking to God to make it happen and, until then, persisting in prayer to bring it about.
Giles Fraser, former Canon Chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, wrote a piece in the Guardian newspaper recently, in which he was commenting on euthanasia. He said that his problem with euthanasia was not that it was an immoral way to die, but that it had its roots in a fearful way to live.
We are the last people, we who are believers in a resurrected Lord, we are the last people, who should be living fearfully, guarding ourselves protectively and believing, because the world tells us, that we are too old to make a table -or to witness the dawning of new worlds.
Heavenly Father,
We are so much the children of the wisdom of our age. We believe what we are told in repeated messages, that we have reached a time when we have done our bit - though the kingdom is still ahead of us - that we gave of our best -when we have had that privilege longer than our contemporaries.
Forgive us for believing the message that tells us to stop, when others still need our prayers. Teach us to persist in hope, and not give up, until the kingdom comes to us. Amen.