Luke 18:1-8
A good Catholic girl married a man who had no faith. He was a good man in every respect but had no use for religion. They loved each other, built a life together and had several children. One day he decided to look into the Catholic faith and signed up for the Order of Christian Initiation for Adults, only then it was called “The Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults.” I’m not sure why the Church changed the name, but there must have been a good reason. In any event, he went through the process and on Holy Saturday entered the Church, baptism, holy communion and confirmation. Since then he’s been a model Catholic gentleman, and he and his wife had a couple more children.
But to me the more interesting part of the story is that the man’s mother-in-law, his wife’s mother, decided at the time they got married that she wasn’t going to rest, literally, until God answered her prayer for his conversion. So she slept on the floor every night and told God that she wasn’t going to enjoy her bed until he granted her prayer, And on that Holy Saturday after the man had become a Catholic, she muttered to herself and to God, “I can hardly wait to sleep in my own bed tonight!”.
Saint Monica is like the lady I mentioned. She never stopped praying for the conversion of her son, now known as Saint Augustine, who along with Thomas Aquinas, is probably one of the most influential doctors of the Church. Saint Augustine in his autobiography also points out that another of Monica’s prayers were answered: her husband, a pagan up to the moment of death, had a deathbed conversion. Today Jesus seems to endorse the idea that if we pray long enough or hard enough we will get what we pray for -- or conversely, the reason we don’t get our prayers answered is that we don’t pray hard enough.
There is something to be said for persistence in prayer, of course. But if it’s only a matter of how hard we pray or what other things we do to confirm our sincerity, we turn God into a vending machine; if we put in the right coinage, we get what we want. And I don’t think that’s Jesus’ point. After all in the garden of Gethsemane he prayed so hard that he sweated blood, and yet his Father did not answer his prayer, at least the prayer the evangelist recorded -- “If it be possible let this cup pass from me.”
So this story, in my estimation, is not the idea that if we pray hard enough, long enough, we will get our prayers answered.
Picture the situation. The judge is a big man in a small town. He’s supposed to listen to the petitioners and decide who is right. It’s generally agreed upon that his word is law, and will probably be enforced by the local equivalent of a sheriff. And his judging is in public, everyone who wants to listen in can do so. Our widow is in a dispute with someone else. We don’t know the circumstances. We don’t even know if she’s right or wrong. We do know that she’s very much alone, otherwise her son or some male in the family would be helping out. And every day she comes into his presence and demands to be heard. At first she’s ignored, then gradually she becomes a fixture, and the crowd falls into silence as she brings her petition forth. The judge resolves to render a just judgement because he’s losing face -- the original words are that he fears she will give him a black eye -- which is a way of saying she is making him look foolish.
Jesus’ point is of course that if the unjust judge can be made to deliver a just judgement, shouldn’t we expect justice from God, who is justice himself? I think that is the real message here -- not how hard or long we pray, but that we can expect that in due time God will judge justly; all the terrible things in the world that appear seem to say otherwise will be revealed in the end as part of God’s justice -- we just don’t understand how that will be and sometimes we end up thinking God is a tyrant, or God is not all powerful, or God doesn’t even exist; but Jesus is saying to have faith, we will see in due time how, as the Apostle Paul tells us, “in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” And that’s Jesus' challenge to us; do we have faith in what God has promised? Do we live as though we believe God desires the best for his faithful? The martyrs certainly did.
So pray unceasingly; fast, from food, from sleep, from comfort; give to God’s poor what you can; because prayer accompanied by fasting and almsgiving is stronger than prayer alone. But live knowing, having faith, that God is even now working out his plan in the world and in some mysterious way, our faith makes us part of that plan; our faith will make us whole..
