Genesis 32:3-8,22-30
2 Timothy 3:14-4:5
Luke 18:1-8a
Psalm 121
The gospel today is about asking-asking and asking and in fact demanding, until we get what we want-or rather, what is justly ours. About the need to pray always and not lose heart, Luke says. But there is something a little unsettling about this story. For one thing, the judge is a bad person, and not a very nice image for God, if the judge in the story is supposed to represent God. Whatever or whoever God is, God is not unjust. And then, as good Minnesotans who have to be asked three times before we'll accept a cup of coffee at a neighbor's house, we find this business of persistently demanding one's rights sort of embarrassing.
The gospel writer is looking at Jesus' parable as an example of a Jewish style of illustration called "how much more." So: if a child loves her teddy bear, how much more will she love her mother. If an unjust judge finally gives up and does justice, how much easier will it be to get God to hear our prayers.
Only a lot of the time we have to wonder if God is listening. We pray and pray and pray for justice and peace in the world, not just for ourselves, and things seem to just get worse. Is this getting us anywhere, after all?
Let's have another look, and see if we're missing something here.
I imagine most of us have pets-I know Pat has more than she can count. Me, I have two cats, Daphne and Chloe. Although they've grown up together, they have very different personalities. Chloe is very well-behaved, mostly. But she's very demanding. She has a right-in her opinion-to the milk from my breakfast cereal, and first crack at my empty ice cream bowl, and she can be awfully pushy about getting them. She yells until I hurry and finish eating so she can have her share.
Daphne, on the other hand, is a rule-breaker. She's hard on the carpets, she runs out as soon as the door opens a crack and fights with the neighbors' cat, she prowls around the bed at night until I make a pre-warmed spot available. Since there's no point in punishing a cat for bad behavior, I find myself pleading with her: "Look," I say, "the rules around here aren't so terrible; could you just keep some of them and we'll all be happier?"
Not that I get any response. And yet Daphne is very affectionate and sweet-she just misbehaves. It apparently hasn't occurred to her that she owes me anything for rescuing her from the Humane Society: she's so pretty and sweet, why wouldn't I? It was the right thing to do, according to Daphne, and she owes nothing in return except to be pretty and sweet.
So when I think about the parable of the widow and the unjust judge, I think about Daphne and Chloe, because I'm not at all sure that God can be nailed down to one role in this scene. Sometimes we are the ones doing the asking, as Luke says: we call on God to do justice-justice as we see it-and sometimes it seems as if we get an answer, and sometimes not. God's idea of what is just and right and good for us doesn't always match ours, and if we've been getting a lick at the ice-cream bowl every day for years and today we don't, it could be that our needs have changed without our knowing it-but God knows. It may be time that we get something stronger in our diet.
And then there are days-probably more and more of them as we grow older-when God is the person doing the asking, the demanding, battering at the doors of our hearts and crying: "Grant me justice against my opponent!" That's a really uncomfortable thought: God poor and helpless, we powerful and unfeeling. But isn't that the kind of God we have: a God who became a poor man, handed over to human beings, stripped, in the end, of every human right, even to life?-and yet risen and still one of us, still patiently with us, still waiting for us to do justice to God and, in Jesus Christ, to the people around us?
"Listen," God says to us, "I'm not asking a lot. The rules are pretty simple: Don't mess up the carpets-that is, don't pollute the environment, the world I've made especially for you-don't fight with the neighbors and kill each other, don't put yourself first more than ninety per cent of the time. If you'd just do that much, everyone would be happier."
We're not really terrible people, most of us. We do fear God some, and we respect other people most of the time. But the thought of God's asking us, demanding of us that we do justice toward God, against God's opponents-all those things that we tend to put in the place of God, the things we think will keep us safe and make us happy-that thought is pretty scary. Unlike Daphne, if we think about it we can understand how much we owe to God, who has rescued us from a worse fate than the Humane Society.
I had to take Daphne to Bea Winkler a few weeks ago for an infection, and after that I had a daydream. What if Bea were to say to me: "Daphne has a terrible heart condition and will die unless she gets a transplant. Would you be willing to become a cat and let us cut your heart out and give it to her? Of course, then you'd die a cat, so you'd have to go on being a cat forever."
I wouldn't do it. I'd do a lot for Daphne, in spite of her faults, but not that. But if you think about it, that's pretty much-and yet "how much more"-God has done for us-become a human being, one of us, and died so that we can live forever. And it wasn't just a temporary thing: dying in human flesh, Christ is raised in his glorified human body to remain forever one of us.
Now, the distance between us and God infinitely greater than the distance between us and our pets. So God changed that, too; God did "how much more": in becoming one of us, God raised us from being mere creatures, mere servants of God, and made us daughters and sons, brothers and sisters. The English mystic Julian of Norwich learned from her visions, in fact, that God made human nature for Jesus, and then gave all the rest of us a share in it.
To do God justice, then, means to live our lives as what we truly are: daughters and sons of God, brothers and sisters to each other in Jesus. That is what God asks of us, demands of us. Like the widow in the story, God is patient, but persistent. God never gives up, and never gives in. Sooner or later, that loving knock at the door of our hearts will wear down our resistance, wear through the door, no matter how hard it is. Sooner or later we will have to open up. And when we do, we are sure to find a warm place prepared for us, in the heart of God, and milk in the bowl. Amen.