How Long, Lord? (Jeremiah 31:31-34; Luke 18:1-8)
How long, Lord? I suspect we have all
asked that question haven’t we? We may have asked that question after weeks or
perhaps months or maybe even years of our own struggle or a loved one’s
struggle with a serious illness or debilitating pain. We may have asked out of
the despair of a deep betrayal by a spouse or a friend. Or it may have been
after months of trying to find work related to our skills and training. How long,
Lord? The widow in our story who was a victim of injustice must have felt that
way? She keeps crying out to the unjust judge, “Grant me justice!”
It’s interesting that Luke introduces this
parable as a call to pray always and not lose heart. I very much doubt that in
its original setting Jesus intended this story to be about prayer. Luke’s application
of the parable as a call to persistent prayer is an example of how these
stories can connect with us and impact us on different levels. How we understand
and apply these stories depends a lot on our own context and what we are
thinking and dealing with at the time we read them. I can read a parable, or
some other passage of scripture and feel that I have encountered God through that
scripture in some way. A year later, I can read the same parable or scripture
text, and it speaks to me in a very different way. I’m sure many of you have
had that same experience. Such is the nature of sacred texts and the way God can
speak to us through them.
What Luke says about the need to pray
always and not lose heart reminds us of Jesus’ earlier teaching on prayer in
Luke 11 where Jesus says, “Ask, and it
will be given to you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be
opened.” Asking is an important part of any relationship and it’s an
important part of our relationship with God. And just as we ask of God, God
asks things of us. All healthy relationships are mutual relationships. It’s a
dance. It’s a two-way street.
Now, if we follow Luke’s leading here
and see this as a story about prayer, it is not just any prayer is it? When
Luke says that we need to pray always and not lose heart it is a particular kind of prayer that is in view
in this story. Luke is talking about
prayer for justice. “Grant me
justice,” cries the widow. The reason it is a widow in our story who is
being treated unjustly is because in that culture widows were extremely
vulnerable. The “widow” is simply representative of the most vulnerable people in
any society. A widow in the patriarchal culture of that day and time could not
inherit her husband’s property, and there were certainly no social welfare
programs in place. For the most part there were no opportunities for
independent employment. This is why some widows, without family support, turned
to prostitution – simply to survive. This is a story about justice.
By justice, I do not mean, “Getting what one deserves.” Rarely, is
the word “justice” used that way in the scriptures. I didn’t realize this
during the early stages of my Christian pilgrimage. I thought justice meant
retribution. If justice means getting what we deserve, then none of us should
pray for justice; we should pray for grace. But that is not what is meant when
the prophets and when Jesus talk about justice. The biblical term “justice” is
equivalent to the biblical word “righteousness.” To pursue justice or
righteousness is to pursue that which makes for right relations and good will
between human beings and communities, between God and human beings, and between
human beings and all creation. It basically means doing right so that we will
be in right relationship – with God, each other, and everything else. Justice is about that which makes
everything right, whole, just, and good.
The key elements in the kind of
restorative justice that Jesus and the prophets talk about are compassion,
forgiveness, and restitution, in contrast to retribution and vengeance.
Restorative justice is about healing and restoring relationships that are broken
and severed. At the center of
restorative justice is love of neighbor and the golden rule – doing unto others
as we would want them to do unto us. Justice involves defending and
uplifting the poor and downtrodden, which is a theme repeated over and over
again in the classic Hebrew prophets and in the teachings and actions of Jesus.
It involves the pursuit of equality, inclusion, and the well-being of all
people. It includes the minority as well as the majority. It involves basic
human rights and freedoms. It also includes creation care. All that is central to the healing and wholeness of humankind and
creation is included in the justice or righteousness of God.
This is why, sisters and brothers, we have
no choice as followers of Jesus but to care about such things as: how we treat
immigrants, what we do about climate change, fairness laws, equality in the
work place, unjust social and economic systems that produce poverty and the
huge disparity between rich and poor, and other justice issues related to how
we treat one another and how we care for our planet. All of these issues have
to do with God’s justice or righteousness.
The logic in the story moves from the
lesser to the greater. The logic is that if an unjust judge, who, in the words
of Jesus “neither feared God nor had
respect for people” was compelled to act justly on behalf of the widow who
pestered him day and night, how much
more will God, who is compassionate and good, act justly on behalf of the
oppressed? The point here is that God is so “unlike” the unjust judge that
if an unjust judge can be persuaded to act justly, how much more will our
compassionate and just God act justly toward those who suffer injustice.
In one sense the story is future
oriented. The story teller asks: “Will not
God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? The
“chosen ones” are equivalent to the “little
ones” Jesus talks about in 17:2. There Jesus issues a severe warning to
anyone who causes offense to one of these “little ones” or “chosen ones” (these
are interchangeable terms). Jesus says in his hyperbolic fashion: “If you cause offense to one of my little
ones or chosen ones, if you cause one of these chosen ones to suffer injustice,
it would be better for you if a millstone were hung around your neck and you
were thrown into the sea.” (I wish our so-called Christian congressmen
would read Jesus and take him sersiously. If we did we would have a country
that cares about justice, rather than now have to be concerned if our democracy
even survive. And it may not. It happened in Germany it can happen here.) This
widow is one of these “little ones” or “chosen ones” whom God gives special
attention. The story teller asks: “Will
he delay long in helping them? [these chosen ones, these little ones, these
vulnerable ones] I tell you, he will
quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find
faith on earth?”
In its original or first setting, I
suspect that this story reflects the belief of the early Jesus followers in the
imminent consummation and clean up of the world. Many of them believed that
Jesus was going to return soon to fulfill the kingdom of God on earth. We know
from Paul’s earliest letters that the first followers of Jesus were expecting
this in their lifetime. Now, they didn’t believe that Christians would be
evacuated from the earth while the rest of the world destroyed itself in a
global holocaust as some Christians today believe. They did not believe that,
but they did believe that God would be wrapping things up fairly quickly. They
believed that the resurrected Christ would return in some interventionist way
to make the world right. Now, obviously that didn’t happen. So the church had
to re-adjust its expectations. Many Christians are still waiting and expecting
some kind of visible or personal intervention by Christ to clean things up and
bring the kingdom of God to fulfillment. Personally, I don’t believe that, but
I certainly don’t disparage those who do.
If we look at this from God’s point of
view we should consider that what we think of as a “delay” may not be a delay at all. God’s idea of “quickly” may be very different from our
experience of “quickly.” If 98% of
the scientists in our world are right, it took approximately 13.8 billion years
(give or take a few million years) for life on earth to evolve to its present
state. Surely, God experiences time differently than we do. The main point or
truth in this story is not “when”; the main point is not the timing of it. The
main point is that because God is the kind of God God is, there will be
vindication for God’s chosen ones. Because
God is just and good, there will be vindication for God’s little ones who are
beaten down by the powers that be. These “chosen ones” or “little ones”
are, from the world’s point of view, forgotten ones. For every murder or
injustice that we hear about, there are thousands of others who suffer and die
alone in silence. And the question is:
Will they be vindicated? These who cry day and night for justice; these who
suffer and die and are forgotten, will they be vindicated? This scripture text
says: If an unjust judge can be compelled to execute justice, how much more
will the loving, compassionate, just God of creation vindicate those who have
suffered unjustly? It’s a shame that we were not taught that restorative
justice is at the heart of what Jesus meant when he talked about the kingdom of
God on earth. The vast majority of Baptists were not taught this. And we can
throw up our hands and say, “Oh well” as if that relieves us of responsibility,
or we can try to learn and grow and change.
The final question is where the rubber
hits the road. “When the Son of Man
comes, will he find faith on earth?” Faith, in this particular context, has
very little to do with belief. It is better translated “faithfulness.” When the Son of Man comes will he find us being
faithful to the justice or righteousness of God? And when we say, “I wasn’t
taught this” I don’t think God is going to buy it, because you are being taught
this now. This is not about having faith
in Jesus. This is about having the faith of Jesus. This is about being faithful to the justice or
righteousness of God. To have the faith of Jesus means that we will love our
neighbor as ourselves, even if the neighbor is a Samaritan, or someone we don’t
particularly like, or even an enemy, that is, someone who wants to do us harm.
To have the faith of Jesus means that we will be faithful to pray for them and
do good by them, even as we speak against what they are doing. As a disciple of
Jesus I have to stand up and speak out against injustice, even while I pray and
seek the good of those who perpetuate injustice. To have the faith of Jesus
means that we will trust God with our fears and insecurities and anxieties, and
seek first God’s just world. It means that we will join Christ in his work to
liberate the oppressed and set the captives free – whether it is a captivity to
physical disease, or mental illness, or spiritual angst, or whether it is a
captivity to political or social or economic or religious powers that exclude
and impoverish and destroy life.
The question, “When the Son of Man comes will he find faith on earth?” can be
translated into our time and context by asking: When the living Christ, when
God, when the Divine (use whatever name you like) looks at our world, what does
Christ see? Does God see people who are being faithful to act justly, to love
mercy, and to walk humbly with God and each other? Does God see people who are
being faithful to God’s will by loving each other the way God loves each of us?
What will God see?
In the movie, The Abyss produced in 1989, a US ballistic missile submarine, the USS Montana, sinks near the edge of the
Cayman Trough after some accidental encounter with an unidentified object. With
a hurricane moving in and Soviet ships and submarines wanting to get to the
sub, the Americans decide that the quickest way to mount a rescue is to insert
a SEAL team onto a privately owned, experimental underwater oil drilling
platform called the Deep Core. The designer of the platform, Dr. Lindsey
Brigman, insists on accompanying the SEAL team, even though her estranged
husband, Virgil “Bud” Brigman, is currently serving as the platform’s foreman.
As the SEALS and platform crew attempt to discover the cause of the Montana’s
failure, they come into contact with strange creatures they cannot identify,
which they later call “NTIs” meaning “non-terrestrial intelligence.” The heart
of the story is about their interaction with the NTI’s and the renewal of the
relationship between Bud and Lindsey, who had never stopped loving one another.
When one of the Navy SEALS goes crazy,
they lose a live nuclear warhead that is timed to explode down the trough where
the NTI’s live. Bud descends on a one way trip to disarm it. He communicates by
means of a keypad on his arm. He says to Lindsey, “Knew this was a one-way
ticket, but you knew I had to come.” The last thing he says is, “Love you,
wife.” After he disarms the warhead, he waits to die. Just as his air is about
to run out and he is about to lose consciousness, an NTI comes to his side and
takes him to a massive NTI spacecraft sitting in the trench. In the ship, they
create an atmosphere for him to breathe.
The NTI’s have created massive mega-tsunami-level
waves that threaten every coastline, that are stalled towering and hovering above
the coasts. The NTI’s show Bud images of humanity’s destructive behavior on a
view screen, destroying and killing one another. And we have done a lot of
destroying and killing haven’t we? But then they show him the messages of
self-sacrifice and love he wrote with his keypad. The NTI’s conclude that there
is hope for humanity and they cause the standing tsunami’s to recede harmlessly
back into the sea.
I believe that in spite of all the ways
we mar and malign one another and destroy our planet God sees the potential for
goodness, for justice, and for love. I really believe that, even though there
is a ton of evidence to the contrary. In the text we read from Jeremiah, the
prophet envisions a day when the hearts of God’s people are so changed that
they don’t even need laws to tell them what to do, because they instinctively
know what to do, they intuitively know how to act justly, live mercifully, and
walk humbly. I believe God sees what we can become. I believe God has great
hope for humanity. Obviously God has great patience. We should be asking right
now, “When God takes an inventory of our lives and relationships, when God’s
looks at us, what does God see? Does God see us praying and working for justice
on earth? Does God see us praying and working for a just world healed and made
right? Are we becoming more of what God has called us to be or less?
Comments
Post a Comment