Pentecost 19 Year C

Jeremiah 31.27-34; 2 Timothy 3.14 - 4.5; Luke 18.1-8

The parable that we just heard from St Luke’s Gospel, the parable of the Unjust Judge as its often known, or perhaps better, the parable of the Persistent Widow, is in one way a very straightforward tale. The figure of the persistent widow is one that we may well recognise, and admire. We all know people – both from personal experience and wider afield – people whose persistence, and refusal to give up, in the face of injustice and seeming hopelessness, is inspiring. We might think of Nelson Mandela imprisoned on Robben Island for so many years and yet refusing to be broken by that experience of confinement and of the brutal apartheid regime; instead turning that prison community into a school for education even in the midst of hard labour; a community that eventually even included his prison warders. Or we might think of Alan Bates, the sub postmaster who refused to accept the widespread assumption that the Post Office technology must be right, and battled to clear the names of those wrongly accused and hounded by the failings of that technology and the courts. There will be many others who come to mind. And the figure of the unjust judge is also familiar from life and the stories we tell. I won’t try and name any here, but we recognise, even from the brief sketch given by Jesus, the figure of someone no longer interested in doing their job properly; whose privilege and power is not there as an expression of their authority and responsibilities, but used as a cloak to evade them. The persistent widow and the unjust judge: we recognise these two archetypes, and in the telling of the parable we cheer when the persistent widow, through her refusal to give up, eventually wrings the decision out of the judge to overturn the injustice she protests about – even if his motives for doing so leave a lot to be desired. In one sense it is a straightforward, recognisable tale.

But it is also puzzling. Jesus has told this parable to encourage his disciples in the need to pray always and not to lose heart. It is a parable about persistence in prayer. But our puzzlement comes from wondering in what sense persistence in prayer is like the task facing the widow. Is God like the unjust Judge, from whom concessions need to be wrung through sheer bloody-mindedness alone, and for no good reason that can be seen? Is that what prayer is about – persisting in the hope that a capricious deity will deign to grant us something of what we want?

Well of course not. We know that God is not like that, and so does Jesus. If the unjust Judge can grant justice, says Jesus, as he turns the parable on its head, how much more will God. God is that ‘how much more’; the beyond our imagining. That still leaves the question, however: if God is not like an Unjust Judge, not capricious, and waiting on us to ask and ask before our heartfelt longing and desire for justice is granted; if God is so much more than that; is goodness and truth; then what does it mean to persist in prayer? Why is persistence needed in the life of faith?

This is a parable that takes us to the heart of what prayer is about; what prayer might demand of us in a world not short of injustice and reasons to pray. Our Gospel passage ends with Jesus’ haunting question: will the Son of Man, when he comes, find faith on earth? Will we keep hoping and praying through the tough times. What is that persistence about; is that persistence working on God, or on us? What is the transformation that we long for in prayer; is that persistence wearing us down, or God? Whose heart and mind is being changed? The answer is ours, clearly. And that requires persistence. We pray, we pray persistently, in order that we might be changed, transformed. Not just others, not just the world out there, but us.

In our reading from the second letter to Timothy this morning we heard the famous sentence: 'All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness.'

Prayer is many things, but to be persistent in it requires that engagement with scripture that is a training in righteousness. That means engaging with scripture as it is, in its perplexity and wonder. To read and spend time with scripture is to discover that it is not a straightforward manual for living or a code of ethics, or a self-help book. It’s far more complicated and messy and joyous than that. It is a book that witnesses to the ‘something more’ of God; that which lies beyond our imagining. It is a book – a series of books – that requires wrestling with, as we are doing with that small vignette of a parable from Luke today.

What we do here on a Sunday, as we gather around scripture to pray and be transformed, is not form of entertainment. It is an expression of our human need for meaning, our search for justice and healing in a fractured world. Through worship, through open, engaged hearts and minds, what we do here on a Sunday is not to be entertained but is to dare to listen and to receive and be transformed. Our scriptural texts have been, and continue to be, at the heart of living communities of faith. Our reading and wrestling occurs in the context of that community of faith – both past and present. Our persistence in prayer is found in listening to each other, and to our forebears in faith, as we listen to the bible. It is that listening, to each other, to the tradition, to the bible, that is at the heart of the persistent call of faith, and the process of transformation. That is how scripture, in the words of 2 Timothy, is inspired; by the work of the Holy Spirit in the process of reading, learning, marking and inwardly digesting scripture, the process by which we are nourished, and questioned, and changed.

When Jesus turns the parable on its head, and invites us into recognising God as the ‘how much more’ than a capricious Judge, we know something of that ‘how much more’ because of the whole testimony of scripture. We are encouraged in our persistence by the testimony of scripture to a God who establishes a covenant relationship in love with God’s people; who promises healing and wholeness to the world God creates; and who, in Christ, embodies the fulfilment of that promise. To persist in prayer is to allow that fundamental witness of faith to shape our faith, our praying, our living. Amen.