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Grace, mercy and peace be to you from
God our Father, and from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Will not God give justice to his elect,
who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will
give justice to them speedily.
Prayer:
Lord God, heavenly Father, send down your Holy Spirit to all of us, to me that
I may preach well, and to all of us that we may hear well. Amen.
In our reading today, Jesus gives us a wonderful parable to
teach us about prayer. Prayer is a very important topic, because it is right at
the heart of our life together as Christians. And yet, not one person in the
church can claim to be an expert on prayer, except Jesus himself.
Isn’t it an incredible thing that we often read in the
Gospels how Jesus went away by himself at various times – to do what? To pray!
When Jesus was baptised, he was praying. Before he chose his twelve apostles,
he spent the night in prayer. And if Jesus is the Son of God, true man and true
God in one person, and he needs to pray, then how much more do you think that
we need to pray too, we who are so much weaker and needier than him? If Jesus
himself in his time of great need, on the night before he died in the Garden of
Gethsemane, asked his disciples to keep watch with him and pray, how much more
do you think when we are in a time of great suffering that we should also ask a
couple of Christian friends to be with us and to pray with us?
You see, prayer is so important for us. And yet, we don’t
pray as we should. And in this life, we weak sinners are never going to pray
like we should. Only Jesus ever prays like he should—he is the perfect man of
prayer. He is our true high priest, who is constantly praying for us night and
day. He enters right into our lives, and takes notice of everything, every
little burden, every big burden, and he commends it to his Father. Not only
that, but he commends it to his Father with exactly the right words and in the
right way. Sometimes when we pray, we might think about just how much we
stammer and stumble about and make a bit of a mess of things when we pray.
Never mind – Jesus knows what we need, and he covers over all our messy prayers
with his blood, polishes them all up and perfects them by joining in with us
and praying with us.
In fact, when Jesus is teaching us about prayer, all he
doing is teaching us how to join in with him. He is simply teaching us how to
stand for a while in his shoes, just as he stands in ours. Jesus enters into
our life and takes an interest in us, and then by teaching us to pray, Jesus
lets us enter into his own life in heaven.
And how does Jesus do this? He forgives us our sins. He
covers over our failures. And if he didn’t do this, we wouldn’t be able to
utter a single word of prayer at all. If Jesus didn’t forgive us our sins, then
we wouldn’t be worthy to speak a single word in his presence. But in fact,
Jesus has died and risen again for us, and now he comes to open our lips, and
lets us join in with him in the privilege of prayer.
So in our reading today we read: Jesus told them a
parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.
There are two reasons why Jesus tells this parable: firstly,
that we should always pray. And secondly, that we should not lose heart. With
this little verse, we learn something about ourselves: we don’t always pray,
and we often lose heart. But we learn something else about Jesus: he always
prays, he continually and regularly prays, and he never loses heart.
I don’t know about you, but I often find myself losing heart
about all kinds of things. Things don’t work out the way I hoped for them to
work out. I think that there’s a whole lot of things going on in the world that
just won’t change and that there’s nothing I can do about. What kinds of things
do you lose heart about?
It’s easy to lose heart, especially when our Christian
churches don’t seem to be as full as they once were. We Christians start to
feel like we’re just one little grain of sand on the beach, and there’s nothing
we can do to fix things. We’d like to influence things around us.
It’s precisely when we think like this, that Jesus comes
along and he wants to tell us a parable so that we should pray always and not
lose heart. He says to you: I haven’t lost heart, why should you? I haven’t
given up, why should you?
Actually, I think the Holy Spirit lets us lose heart a
little bit sometimes. This is how we learn how to pray. I’m not saying that the
Holy Spirit causes us to despair, or makes us feel hopeless, but when we do
lose heart as Christians, when we do feel close to giving up, it’s exactly
those times when Jesus wants to give us his greatest encouragement. He wants to
say to you just like he said to St Paul: My grace is sufficient for you. For
my power is made perfect in weakness.
Do you hear that? God’s power is now perfect when you feel
perfect, or when you feel strong, but in your weakness. And so the best prayer
is simply telling Jesus all those areas in our life where we are weak, where we
are helpless, where we feel like there’s nothing we can do. Jesus wants to tell
him, and to tell his Father, exactly what sorts of things we lose heart over.
And once we have done that, we take the burden off of our own heart and we
place on his heart. When we lose heart, we can give the matter to his heart—and
he never loses heart. When we want to give up, then give the matter up to
him—and he never gives up. When we want to chuck in the towel, give to towel to
him—and he will never take it, he will carry it, he will bear the burden of it.
We often think that prayer is some convoluted exercise where
we’ve got to put on our best behaviour and put on our best speech and somehow
twist God’s arm into giving us what we want. No—Jesus already knows what we
need before we ask. But he wants us to tell him about it, and he wants us to
invite him into our need, even though he doesn’t us to. It’s just a joy for him
to be with us, so that he can share his joy with us. In prayer, we’re not
really doing anything, we’re not so much doing a great work – it’s just like
hanging out the washing or something. We’re just putting our laundry out in the
sun, and then leaving it there. We just put our problems and our needs and our
anxieties out in God’s sunshine, out in the sunshine of his face, and we then
we walk away and leave them with him.
So what is this parable that Jesus tells in our reading
today? What is this parable that he tells to the effect that we ought always to
pray and not lose heart?
Jesus says: In a certain city there was a judge who
neither feared God nor respected man. And there was a widow in that city who
kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against my adversary.’ For a
while he refused, but afterward he said to himself, ‘Though I neither fear God
nor respect man, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her
justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.’
So let’s work through this. There is a judge and a widow.
And the judge, we are told neither feared God nor respected man. What
does this mean? It means that the judge had no conscience. He only really
thought of himself. He didn’t seek to do things that were pleasing to God, and
he didn’t seek to avoid things that would make God angry. Also, he wasn’t the
kind of person who cared about people, and wanted to help people. He wasn’t
charitable or friendly. He only really thought about himself.
But then there was a widow. And widows in those days were in
a particular bad situation, and were really exposed to becoming quite poor.
When a person’s husband or wife dies, of course, they can become quite lonely.
But in those days as well, a widow would have been alone in a whole lot of
other ways: she would have had no one to provide an income for her, no one to
defend her interests in court, and all kinds of things like that. In some of
the epistles in the New Testament, St Paul and others often mention caring for
widows and orphans. Orphans were vulnerable because they had no parents looking
after them, but then widows were also exposed and vulnerable too, and
Christians were encouraged to make sure that they didn’t fall between the
cracks and slip into poverty.
Now this widow had someone on her back. He had an adversary,
she says. Someone had wronged her, and so she was in a particularly bad way.
She needed the judge to put things right. She needed him to do this for her
survival.
Imagine an elderly lady who had fallen victim to some kind
of phone scam. Someone completely ripped her off, and it has left her in a
complete mess. That would be a bit like this woman in our reading. She has been
ripped off. And she goes to the judge and says: I need to you to put things
right. I need my money back, and I need things fixed. Otherwise, I’m going to
end up living on the street. She says: Give me justice against my adversary.
We read: For a while he refused, but afterward he said to
himself, ‘Though I neither fear God nor respect man, yet because this widow
keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down
by her continual coming.’ Do you see what the judge does? He doesn’t care
much for God. He is not interested in simply doing the right thing by the 10
commandments. He doesn’t care much for people. He doesn’t want to help people
out. But he does care about himself. And so he says: “Boy, I’m getting sick of
this lady… Maybe I’ll just give her what she wants just to get her off my back.
Maybe she’ll buzz off if I just do what she says. If I give her what she wants,
then I can live in peace, and won’t have to listen to her bla-bla-bla-ing, and
her naggy, naggy, whiny, whiny voice!”
Now, what does this have to do with prayer? What does this
little parable teach us about how we pray to God? This is a parable that Jesus
told to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart. So
how does this parable teach us that?
We read that Jesus says: Hear what the unrighteous judge
says. And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night?
Will he delay long over them? I tell you, he will give justice to them
speedily.
Jesus says: That judge did what the widow wanted just to
shut her up! Do you think God gets sick of listening to us? Of course not—he
loves to talk to his beloved children. And if the judge gave to the widow what
she needed, don’t you think God will listen to us?
Do you think God will give us what we want just to shut us
up, or just to get us off his back? No—of course not—God wants us to talk to
him, he wants us to be on his back continually. And if the stingy, selfish
judge gave the widow what she needed, don’t you think God, who is abundantly
generous and is overflowing with love for every creature that he has made, will
give to you what you need?
But let’s go back to what the widow actually said. She said
to the judge: Give me justice against my adversary. Who is your
adversary? Who is your enemy? Who is our enemy as Christians? It’s Satan
himself. He’s always trying to rip us off. He even cheated Adam and Eve out of
the Garden of Eden. Jesus says about him in John 10: The thief comes only to
steal and to kill and to destroy.
And so, Jesus shows us here that there is a particular bite
to our prayers. Jesus teaches us this in the Lord’s Prayer: Deliver us from
evil. Even in the Greek, this prayer can also be said: Deliver us from
the evil one. Deliver us from the devil, who is always trying to mess
things up. Deliver us from Satan himself. Give us justice! Repay him, we pray
to God. We say to God: the devil has been donging me on the head for far too
long. God, dong him on the head instead. Repay to him what he gave to me. Make
him suffer what he made me suffer. Just as the widow prayed, we say: Give me
justice against my adversary.
But here’s the wonderful good news… When Jesus died on the
cross, and when he rose from the dead, he has already defeated the devil in
advance. We know ahead of time that the devil won’t win. We know that he can’t
win, because Jesus has already paid the price with his own blood and cancelled
the account of our sins, so that the devil can’t accuse us. He has no right to
us. He is always in the wrong. And so when we go to God in prayer, and we ask
him for justice, we know that the justice has already been brought about.
We might look at our lives and think—why am I in this mess?
Why am I at this crossroads? Why am I suffering like this or like that? Justice
has already been settled. And the moment we cry out to God and say: How
long, O Lord? is the moment our prayer is answered. Psalm 18 says: In my
distress I called upon the Lord, and from his temple he heard my voice. Psalm
46 says: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. The
moment our lips are opened, the moment our eyes look up, the moment a little
sigh from the Holy Spirit is breathed out, the prayer is already answered.
Justice is repaid upon the devil’s head. The foot of Jesus has already come
down upon Satan’s head.
We sometimes think that God shines his glory when thing we
ask for is granted. But God shines his glory long before that—he wants to shine
his glory right in the middle of our struggle. He wants to show us not simply
an end of our suffering, but he wants to show us his grace in midst of our
suffering—he wants to show us his power made perfect in our weakness.
We are saved by grace through faith. This means, even when
we can’t see anything going right in our life, we still have the forgiveness of
sins, we still have heaven on the horizon, and we still have Jesus. And when we
have Jesus we have everything.
And so Jesus says: I tell you, God will give justice to
them speedily. Nevertheless, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on
earth?
And so, when Jesus teaches you about prayer, he is teaching
you about something that comes from faith. Without faith, there is no prayer.
Without the forgiveness of sins, we can’t utter a word.
The devil wants you to lose heart…But when you do, Jesus
simply wants you to tell him, and he never loses heart, he never gives up.
Jesus hasn’t given up on you—he forgives all of your sins, he has baptised you
and made you his child, he feeds you his own body and blood in the Lord’s
Supper. Don’t lose heart! The battle has been won! Your enemy has been
defeated. One little word can fell him, as Luther wrote in his hymn. God will
not delay long you. I tell you, he will give you justice, and he will give it you
speedily. Amen.
Lord God, heavenly Father, you know that we don’t pray to
you like we should, and that we often lose heart, and we neglect and forget to
pray. Send us your Holy Spirit to increase our faith, encourage us, and draw us
closer to you in prayer. Let us share in the joy of your Son, knowing that he
has defeated Satan once and for all, and will give us justice against our
enemy. Teach us to pray, so that we don’t give up and lose heart. In Jesus’
name we pray. Amen.
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