Luke 18:1-8 - Always Pray and Do Not Lose Heart - October 16, 2022

It’s a situation familiar to most of us. You’re running late but you still have to pick up the last few ingredients for supper. You grab a cart, scramble through the aisles and hurry back to the register. At the register, you have everything ready – your Fresh Perks number, your coupons, your credit card. With a quick ‘have a nice evening’ to the cashier, you run back out to the car. But then, as you’re going, you happen to glance at the reciept – they overcharged you for the milk. What do you do? There are two different types of people in this world with two radically different responses: 1) You run back in to customer service, demand a refund – and won’t take no for an answer no matter how much it will delay dinner; or 2) you shrug your shoulders, decide the money you would save isn’t worth your time, drive off, and make the mental note to hide the receipt from your spouse when you get home. Which one are you? In the end, it doesn’t matter how persistent you are or how valid your demand – your refund doesn’t depend on your pleading and begging but on the willingness and ability of the customer service rep to help you, to give you justice.

In a continuation of Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about a more serious, but similar situation. He sets the stage: there was a judge in a certain town who did not fear God and did not care about people. Just like today, in ancient Israel, disputes between citizens were decided by a third party: an independent judge. Unlike today, there was very little red tape – there were no lawyers, no class action lawsuits, no appeals courts. But in the parable before us, we are told something unexpected about the judge. He was an unbeliever; he did not fear God. Now, taken by itself, that’s not a big deal. There are plenty of unbelievers who are perfectly honest judges. Earthly justice doesn’t depend on faith, it depends on reason. But this judge’s unbelief makes the second part even more troubling – he did not care about people either. He didn’t care what others thought about his decisions and judgments. Care – or better here ‘respect’ – for men is an essential quality for a judge – an honest judge is one who is concerned for the weak in society, who stands up for their rights against powerful oppressors. But this judge was neither fearful of God nor a respecter of men; he was – as Jesus puts it – an unjust judge.

Then Jesus takes us to the other end of the spectrum. There was a widow in that town, and she kept going to him, saying, ‘Give me justice from my adversary!’ Why would Jesus pick a widow to be the protagonist in his parable? Well, we know that Jesus always showed special concern for the weak and powerless in society. Jesus spent much of his time on this earth with children, the sick, the handicapped, and widows. A widow, by definition, had lost her legal protector when her husband died. She didn’t normally have the assets to bribe her way to justice. She was an especially easy target for those who prey on the helpless. Jesus picks a widow because a widow was powerless to get justice for herself – she needed the help of a just judge.

But this widow wasn’t getting the justice she demanded: For some time he refused, but after a while he said to himself, ‘Even though I do not fear God or care about people, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice so that she will not wear me out with her endless pleading.’ Although this widow may have appeared helpless, she had one tool at her disposal – persistence. The phrase translated wear me out is literally ‘give a black eye’ – this widow was coming close to giving a judge a black eye. Not physically but metaphorically. If it became public knowledge that this judge was ignoring the pleas of a helpless widow – he ran the risk of having his reputation tarnished – he might even lose his job. (Incidentally, how many elected officials do the right thing only for the same reason – because they may damage their reputation or lose their job?) This judge may have been shamelessly crooked and godless, but he had to keep that fact hidden, he had to keep up at least a façade of honesty to keep his job, and this widow was a threat – so he finally gave in and gave her justice.

A nice story, right? But what’s the point? What does it mean for us? Unlike many parables, we don’t have to go searching for the point of this parable – Luke gives it to us directly: Jesus told them a parable about the need to always pray and not lose heart. Ok, Amen, we can all go home now, right? We should be like that widow and pray persistently until we get a favorable response from God. Point taken Jesus, see you next week! But Jesus isn’t done applying this parable to our lives. Maybe you have begun to put the dots of this parable together in your mind – it’s easy enough to see how we are like the widow; we often feel weak and helpless to get answers and justice from God – but that second part, the part about the godless, shameless, unjust judge – what is that about?

And this is the crux of the parable. We’re pretty familiar with the places in Scripture where Jesus invites us to come to him in prayer: keep asking, and it will be given to you. Keep seeking and you will find. Keep knocking and it will be opened to you (Luke 11:9); therefore I tell you, everything that you ask for in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours (Mark 11:24). In hard times – for that matter, at all times! – we know we should pray. When things beyond our control take over our lives or cause destruction and pain around the world, we know that God invites us to talk to him about it. If we are the ones undergoing pain or trial, we might even have friends and family who try to help us out by encouraging us to pray, saying: I know you’re going through a rough patch, but God has a plan for you, even in this. And isn’t it a great comfort that you can take all your cares to God in prayer? But when you are sitting on rock bottom, it can be difficult to see the point of prayer, instead we think: you know, prayer doesn’t seem real helpful right now, I’ve been praying for years, my family has been praying – it hasn’t helped in the past, why would it help now? Even with prayer, things don’t get any better, they just keep getting worse.

Have you ever been there? Have you ever decided that God is going to do what he’s going to do and nothing you say or pray will change it? If so, you’re not alone. I would wager that just about every Christian has, in a time of crisis, experienced such feelings of helplessness and despair. Fortunately for us, our Lord Jesus, was a true man who knew and experienced every emotion we feel, also knew that we would feel this way sometimes. That’s why he tells us this parable.

But, at least at first glance, Jesus’ interpretation doesn’t seem very comforting, does it? The Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. Will not God give justice to his chosen ones, who are crying out to him day and night? Will he put off helping them? “So…God is like that wicked judge – he doesn’t really care about me or upholding justice – but he does care about his reputation? So I should keep praying because if he doesn’t answer that makes him look bad, and he can’t allow that to happen? Is God afraid of losing his job?” Not at all. Jesus’ lesson is a lesson in contrast. He’s saying that if even an unjust judge who doesn’t care about God or widows will grant justice in order to protect his good name; how much more will the Lord who loves his children dearly, and who is very much concerned with upholding justice, and who, by the way, has a flawless name to protect, help his chosen ones from affliction when they cry out to him for help? What kind of mother ignores her crying baby? What kind of father stands idly by when his child is suffering and they’re crying out to him for help? Only terrible parents – the very worst kind. But here’s the thing: when we give up on prayer, that’s what we’re accusing God of being. That’s also what we’re witnessing to the world when we neglect worship and prayer: Hey, why don’t you become a Christian? It’s wonderful! We have an awful God who plugs his ears to our prayers and can’t be bothered when we’re suffering. Christians who fail to pray are breaking the 2nd commandment and need to repent.

But that’s not who God is. That isn’t who he’s revealed and proven himself to be. And that’s the point: our attitude toward prayer (and worship) is directly connected to who we believe God to be. If you imagine that he is a villain on par with that unjust judge, then by all means, go ahead and give up praying, it’s not doing you any good anyway because the God you “believe” in doesn’t exist. But if you believe, as Jesus taught us (Matthew 6:7-13), that you have a Father in heaven who loves you, who always wants what’s best for you, and who is so deeply concerned about every detail of your life that he has numbered the very hairs of your head (Luke 12:7), then pray knowing that your Father hears you and that whether his answer is yes, no, or not yet – that is the best answer for you.

Prayer is above all an act of faith (which incidentally, is why we don’t pray with people of other faiths). Prayer is an expression of your belief that God is who he says he is. It’s in this context that Jesus asks: when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth? If Jesus were to return this instant, would he find this kind of faith in the world, in our country, in our community? Would he find it here, at Risen Savior? Jesus is asking if people like you and me will be ready and waiting for His return; praying for it; confidently expecting that the Lord who promised to come again will indeed come to answer our prayers and rescue us from this broken, sinful world. If that’s who you believe the Lord to be, then you will be persistent in prayer.

Now, we might argue: but often, when I pray, I don’t always get what I ask for. No, you don’t. But you can be sure of this: the Lord always gives you what you need. And he’s a whole lot wiser than you are. So if he doesn’t give you what you want, you can be sure there is a good reason for it. A better question is: what good things could you have that you’re not asking for? James writes: you do not have because you do not ask (James 4:2). And he’s not talking about the things we think are so important in this life; relief from pain, a happy family, an easy retirement, or job security. No, the Lord is more interested in giving us the gifts of the Spirit: things like faith, patience, peace, kindness, wisdom, and love (Galatians 5:22-23). The Lord wants to give us these gifts – but how often do we ask for them? If our wise God sees fit to send trials and hardship into our lives – our knee-jerk reaction is to pray that he would remove them immediately. And sometimes he does – but sometimes he doesn’t. Maybe it would be better to ask for the faith and strength to endure them and to be a faithful witness of the Gospel in the midst of them.

But back to the question: When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? On that day, there will be only two kinds of people: those on our Lord’s right (believers) and those on his left (unbelievers). And on that day, the most important thing won’t be how persistent you have been in prayer; it will only matter whether God is an unjust judge or a benevolent Father. What do you believe about Him? And if we believe what he says about himself won’t we wait for that Day patiently and hopefully? Won’t we wait for the Lord to answer our prayers like young children waiting for their parents to put supper on the table? And it won’t matter what it is because we trust that whatever it is – it is for our good. So keep on praying, keep on asking, knowing that the Father will give you justice and he will give it quickly – Jesus promises it!

And that’s how it has to be – because it’s only through Jesus that we can have that kind of faith. It’s in the Son that we see the full extent of our Father’s love for us. We can be certain that our prayers will be answered for Jesus’ sake – because his most desperate prayers went unanswered. Jesus begged his Father in the Garden of Gethsemane to find another way to save us, so he wouldn’t have to drink the cup of eternal suffering that we had earned (Luke 22:42). God denied his request. And while Jesus was hanging in our place on the cross, his cry my God, My God, why have you forsaken me? (Mark 15:34) was answered with deafening silence from heaven. There, on the cross, Jesus received his Father’s cold shoulder in our place – and that’s the greatest proof that our Father will never give us the cold shoulder. In fact, properly understood, you could even say that on Good Friday, God did play the role of the wicked judge: ignoring the plea of his innocent Son who made himself helpless for our sake, while we who are wicked prospered at his expense. That is the Savior we have. That is the Father we pray to. That is how much he loves us.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter what kind of shopper you are. But the kind of God we pray to – that is eternally important. Will not the same God who did not spare his own Son…graciously give us all things along with him? (Romans 8:32) Of course he will. So we pray. We pray boldly, persistently, and confidently no matter how dark things seem to be – because we know who our God is and that when the Son of Man returns all our prayers will be answered once and for all. Amen.