Asking and asking again
Luke 18:1-8
What is your prayer life like? How long can you pray without stopping? I am not talking about standard written or memorized prayers, I am talking about speaking with God concerning what is on your heart and working to remember everything that should be prayed for.
Another way of looking at the same question is, how long have you prayed for any one single thing? Has it been days, weeks, years, decades? Is your faith strong enough to keep asking God for the same thing again and again? Or do you give up on Him?
The meaning of this passage is given to us
Both Jesus at the end and the evangelist Luke at the beginning make sure we do not miss the purpose of this story.
• Always pray and don’t give up
• God will give justice to those who pray persistently
In the imbedded interpretations of this story, we see more than we expect but not as much as we would like.
We see more than we expect because Jesus does not always tell us the meaning of His parables. In fact, He usually doesn’t. This one is an exception to that rule.
We don’t see as much as we would like, because we are given a paradox, an apparent contradiction to reconcile.
If we pray and don’t give up, crying out to God day and night, He will quickly give us justice.
The idea of persistence in order to receive something quickly does not balance well. Persistence suggests that we must endure long delay and, perhaps, hardship. How then does God grant us our justice quickly? Jesus, in His characteristic fashion, even when He is being straightforward, leaves us with important questions.
The story begins with a judge
This is not a religious judge, but a civil judge. He usually oversees financial transactions and such. At first we might think that, even though he is not a believer, he practices judicial impartiality. Luke says, that he does not fear God and he doesn’t care what any person thinks.
In some ways, we might think if we can’t have one, we are doing ok to at least have the other. In some ways, if our judges don’t fear God, at least they don’t favor any people. At least they are impartial.
That may be our first impression of the description given, but it is not correct.
Introduce the second person, a widow who has been treated badly. Jesus doesn’t go into the details, so it doesn’t help to thicken the plot. He is simply introducing us to one of the most vulnerable members of His society. Today He might have said, "a homeless schizophrenic."
In that place and time, women were very dependent on the men in their lives. Their husbands owned the property and earned the living. Their sons took care of them in old age. Women, for the most part, could own no land and they had no opportunity to earn a secure income.
This particular widow has an enemy. Again, the plot remains thin. We are given only the bare bones of the story. We don’t get to judge for ourselves who was right and wrong, only that the widow had an enemy and that she wanted justice. I like the New International Readers Version’s way of wording her problem:
Someone is doing me wrong
There are too many ways a socially vulnerable person can be exploited for us to worry about the details.
Given: somebody was hurting this woman and she had no recourse, except this judge.
Then we are given the action of the story
She keeps coming to him.
This is the point and the primary action of the story. She does not come to him once and then give up when she does not get justice.
She does not say, "I guess that’s that."
She keeps appealing her case: Give me justice. Or as some translations say, "give me vengeance."
The idea that she needed vengeance suggests that something valuable was taken from her: perhaps her home, perhaps her livestock, perhaps even the life of a family member. She was demanding restitution. She was begging for the scales to be balanced.
And her asking was persistent. Jesus says, she pestered the Judge day and night.
The biblical concept of "day and night" has a ring of persistence and a lack of interruption. It is almost obsessive. The idea is one of constant attention and an inability to forget. In other words, that which is most important to us is on our minds day and night. We eat, drink, wake, sleep and dream about it.
• This is the impression the widow gave the judge.
• When the door bell rang, it was her
• When the phone rang, it was her
• When AOL said, "You’ve got mail," it was her
• In the mailbox, the card was from her
• His answering machine was full her messages
Finally, the judge is convinced his life is going to be completely disrupted by this woman if he doesn’t do something about her problem. He is being beaten down. He knows that what she wants is just, he simply must decide to do something about it. For the sake of his own peace, he finally gives in and gives her what she wants and deserves.
The image Jesus is using is of a boxer:
In 1964 when Muhammad Ali made his professional boxing debut, he was still known by his birth name of Cassius Clay. He won his bout against Sonny Liston with a Technical Knockout. Liston sustained injuries during the first 6 rounds of the bout and at the beginning of the 7th round refused to continue the fight. Some thought he threw the fight, but the truth was that he was simply beaten down and hurt. He could keep fighting, but he was going to be permanently worn down eventually. There was no way around it. Clay had pummeled him till he lost.
This is the concept that the unjust judge is concerned about. Like Liston, he could look to the end of the battle and see his own continued decline. The judge was looking to the end of the struggle and seeing himself tired, exasperated, worn out, finally giving in. Why not just give up in the 7th round and let the lady have what she was going to get sooner or later anyway?
Then Jesus makes the big point
If even this unjust, human, limited person would give justice to a persistent person, how much more will God?
• Isn’t God greater than any human Judge?
• Isn’t His drive for righteousness stronger than human resignation?
• If this man who was exasperated with this widow would give her justice, wouldn’t God who loves you also give it?
So in this story we learn two major things
One is about the character of God. He is able and willing to give justice when we are in need.
The other is about ourselves. If we need something from God, we must ask for it, and we must not stop asking till we get an answer.
Keep on Praying
All of us at one time or another sense that we’ve been dealt a bad hand, and the dealer did it on purpose. People out there do things to us that make our lives difficult, sometimes unbearable.
Sometimes it seems like chance. Bad things happen and there is nothing anyone can do to stop them. The repercussions are painful.
• Someone we love, does not return the favor
• Someone we love, dies and leaves us behind
• An expectation is destroyed
• A hope is dashed
• We lose things important to us, job loss, fire, theft
Contrary to what we want to believe, bad things do happen to good people, just ask Job. There is a whole book about the pain godly people experience in loss. What is the answer:
Pray
And this is the crux of the problem. We do pray.
• We ask God in pretty language
• We ask God in sincere language
• We ask God in broken language
• We ask God in bargaining language
We begin wondering what kind of prayer God wants. He begins seeming like a Divine Publisher’s Clearing House. Maybe we didn’t put the sticker in the right place. Maybe we missed the deadline. We start looking for technicalities, and we are at a loss as to what kind of prayer we should use next.
That’s where the crisis point lives. The key is only in how you say it in a minor way. The question isn’t in wording or tone, it is in urgency. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
How important is this to me?
Remember, the persistence of the widow. She was on the judge’s case. He felt like he couldn’t get away from her. She wanted this more than anything.
It should become, with practice, second nature to us to pray first when we have a need. The prayer should keep being lifted as long as we have the need. Only when the prayer is answered do we quit praying. If we are, at some point, willing to give up on it, then that is a measure of one of two things:
• How much it means to us
• Or how much we are trusting God for an answer
Either we gave up on the request or we gave up on God. If we gave up on the request, then it was not that important to us. If we gave up on God, then we don’t trust Him enough.
Who am I trying to impress?
The wording of our prayer is simple. We ask. We continue to ask. God does not need our "thees" and "thous". He does not need finely phrased poetry. To carefully and creatively craft a poem in praise of God is one thing. It is beautiful mode of worship. However, our requests do not depend on our fine language to be answered. They depend upon our sincerity and our faith. Our persistence is more important than our phrasing.
Has my prayer been answered?
If it hasn’t, keep praying. You may get a command to wait or a no. In that case, your prayer is answered, but if you don’t sense that God has decisively dealt with your issue then you must keep praying.
In Aesop’s Fables there is a tale of The Crow And The Pitcher
A Crow, half-dead with thirst, came upon a Pitcher which had once been full of water; but when the Crow put its beak into the mouth of the Pitcher he found that only very little water was left in it, and that he could not reach far enough down to get at it. He tried, and he tried, but at last had to give up in despair. Then a thought came to him,
And he took a pebble and dropped it into the Pitcher.
Then he took another pebble and dropped it into the Pitcher.
Then he took another pebble and dropped it into the Pitcher.
At last, at last, he saw the water mount up near him, and after casting in a few more pebbles he was able to quench his thirst and save his life.
• His thirst is his need
• the pebbles are his prayers
What if, half way through, the crow had decided he had cast in enough pebbles. If the water couldn’t meet him half way, well that would be just fine. He didn’t owe that pitcher anything.
It was in his persistence that the day was won and his thirst was quenched.
In the final analysis, the only important lesson to learn is articulated in Winston Churchill’s famous speech
Never, never, never give in!
It does not matter if you have begged God for years, don’t give up on Him. Don’t lose heart. Keep on praying. Even if you think you sound like a spastic parrot, keep on praying. Even if it sounds monotonous to you.
Phrase your prayer as simply, clearly and sincerely as you can
And pray it till it is answered.
Pray
And never give up.
