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The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost
Almighty and everlasting God, give unto us the increase of faith, hope, and charity; and, that we may obtain that which thou dost promise, make us to love that which thou dost command; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (Proper 25)
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The Twenty-First Sunday After Pentecost
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Scripture citation(s): Luke 18:1-8a
A Sermon by
Fr. Stafford
on
Luke 18:1-8a
✛
A Sermon for the Twenty-first Sunday after Pentecost
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“…When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (Lu 18.8)
Today’s Gospel is a teaching about prayer and the need for perseverance in the spiritual life. It is taken from that greater portion of Luke entitled Jesus’ Journey to Jerusalem (9.51-19.44), which has as its general, overall theme the kingdom of heaven, which for the Evangelist, remember, Jesus both is and brings.
But, before I say much about today’s Gospel, I want to back-up for a brief word about where we have been with Luke in these recent weeks and months.
We are presently on the last leg of a pilgrimage, which began in early July, wherein Luke established the destination of a fateful adventure telling us our Lord set “…his face to go to Jerusalem” (9.51); Jerusalem being journey’s end and the time and place where Jesus is to meet his destiny.
If we now look back on the past three months of the Sunday Gospel readings from the Journey to Jerusalem, we begin to perceive the many things we have been taught by Luke while on this walk with our Lord; for example, an understanding of surrender, mercy, and forgiveness as underpinnings of the Christian spiritual life and signs of the presence of God’s kingdom. And, again, by way of example, most recently, last Sunday’s account of the healing of the ten lepers (17.11-19), where we were instructed about gratitude for the generosity of God’s grace to do in and through our powerlessness what we cannot accomplish for ourselves. So, suffice it to say, the Kingdom of heaven or what is also termed eternal life is revealed by the Evangelist as being many things, certainly more than simply life after death. Better understood, I think the kingdom of heaven/eternal life is associated with the discovery of the mystery of the Everlasting in the here and now; an awakening to power in powerlessness; and, the imitation of Christ’s life, a way to God intended for all who are coming to believe.
Additionally, throughout these same three months, we have been given a theological perspective by Luke as to the nature and person of the one whose destiny we also are to share, Jesus, in whose image all human beings are created and, Jesus, the Saving One, who has ultimately taken the world – its people, places, things, and events – into the mystery and life of God. Thus, the Incarnation, which is also a strong narrative developed early in Luke’s Gospel, is for the Christian not simply an event but a process of life-long transformation; reminding us that at journey’s end, we and the history of this planet are not the same as when this walk began and that another journey with our Lord and Savior, more interesting than the previous, is about to re-begin.
This morning’s Gospel is, as I have said, a simple teaching about prayer, more specifically about a certain style of prayer, intercession, and the need for persistence in praying. As such, it is a spiritual lesson skillfully and cleverly couched in a story about a yenta (Yiddish); a pushy, abrasive, scolding, and relentlessly importuning Jewess, a widow (18.3), we are told, who has been wronged in some way and demands justice from a rather cold, hard-nosed, and unsympathetic judge, whom Luke tells us, “…feared not God, neither regarded man” (18.2).
These two individuals, the yenta and the judge, are “tough cookies,” as we might say, easily people like ourselves, hard boiled New York types! They are also opposites; the yenta is passionate, as we see in her re-currant, imploring pleas, to “Avenge me of my adversary” (18.3); the judge dispassionate, as we note in his refusal to grant her request. Neither character is particularly likeable, so they don’t capture our heart. As a dramatic pair, they, however, resemble dueling buck elk, their antlers locked as it were in a contest of supremacy of will and might; their combative interaction the tension around which the story today revolves and from which truth is spun out in the mind and imagination of the listener, a style that is very much within the Jewish teaching tradition.
The tension between the two adversaries is finally broken when the exasperated judge says, “I will avenge her…” [ not because he cares but] “lest by her continual coming she weary me” (18.5). Worn out, therefore, by the yenta’s ceaseless and repeated demand for intervention, the judge, his self-protective and insulating defense of indifference battled down, at last acknowledges defeat and capitulates. The woman’s request for justice, Luke tells us is granted; a reminder to the disciples, at whom the parable is directed, and therefore by extension to us, that concerning prayer, more especially the petitions, requests, and intercessions we continually put before the Almighty, one should never give up beseeching God, especially when one does not receive an immediate answer, as God will answer in God’s own time. The mandate spiritually, therefore, is for persistence, like that of the badgering yenta of today’s Gospel, whose pressing-on in the face of silence and pressing against hostile indifference are also signs of the energy and discipline needed in meeting the demands of discipleship as one journeys in daily life toward Jerusalem.
Understood and worded differently, the actions of the yenta in today’s Gospel could also be understood as yearning, beseeching, and beholding: she yearns for justice; she beseeches the judge for it; and, she at last beholds it. This tripartite pattern reminds me of something Lady Julian, the fourteenth century English mystic, once expressed in which she speaks of yearning, beseeching, and beholding to describe the movement or journey of the soul as it travels to its heavenly home and Creator. Yearning is for Julian the first mark of the awakened soul, which leads to beseeching, which in turn leads to beholding the One, True, and Living God in whose goodness our lives are enfolded, as she would say. Persistence, therefore, in these three actions, which are also expressions of prayer and faithfulness leads us, Julian teaches, to transformation unto eternal life, the kingdom of heaven. In other words, they make of us, through the grace of God, who we are not; precisely the purpose expressed in Luke of our walk to Jerusalem with our Lord!
Most of us this morning, I think, would agree that some answer from the all too often silent Almighty of Creation would make the burden of our lives, our walk on this planet, an easier matter, or so we want to believe! Concerning this universal need for answered prayers, the modern German theologian, Johann Metz, says “God does speak, but he does not give answers and almost never repeats himself” (p. 25, The Courage to Pray). What Metz says, discomforting as it might be to some of us, does not deny that God in fact communicates. Metz instead calls into question our expectations about how God does indeed speak. And, I think if we are to examine the record of Scripture of when God speaks, isn’t it usually to accomplish two things; to either create or to judge? And, sometimes isn’t it both in the same Word? Let’s keep that particular duality in mind for a moment, because it’s important, especially in understanding the purpose of the one who leads us on toward his destiny in the Holy City, a destiny in which we share both as participants and beneficiaries.
[Now, lean on me here. I’ve put before you a number of themes. And, you may be wondering just what I am going to do with all this. Let me answer. I intend to pull these themes into a larger pattern that I hope is both challenging and helpful.]
So, let’s return to our Gospel. Today’s parable should ring a bell of prior familiarity in our minds this morning, because this theme of faithful and repeated willing perseverance in the face of unanswered petition, which can be a disheartening or daunting challenge for many if not all of us, is also presented in a different guise in our first lesson, the beautiful account of Jacob wresting with God at Jabbock (Gen 32.3-8, 22-30).
In this sparring match or physical contest of human strength with and against the Power of the Unknown, Jacob prevails over the Almighty in a knock down, rock ’em sock ’em old fashioned wrestling match. This results in what is a reversal of expectation and also life changing consequences for Jacob, like that of a new identity and a renewed destiny. In his prevailing singularly against the might of God, in what is indeed an unlikely occurrence or outcome against the Omnipotent God of Creation, Jacob earns for himself the triumph of a new name, Israel (32.28) and a new name for the place of his victory, Peniel (32.30), that being where Jacob “…saw God face to face and… [his] life was preserved” (30). So, from this account, we can deduce that perseverance, or faithfulness, in one’s relationship to God, a wrestling match of sorts, or what Julian called the soul’s yearning for and our beseeching and beholding the Divine is never an easy matter. It is instead a process that costs us something, exemplified for example in Jacob’s wounded thigh.
Here, we need to note that this particular account of Jacob at Jabbock would be a story already known and deeply engrained in the minds of the Jewish listeners or readers of today’s parable of the yenta wrestling verbally with the judge. The two accounts are each about disparate or unequal power caught or entangled on one another. In addition, the first lesson and today’s Gospel parallel each other thematically, each relating a story about struggle, hidden reward, and blessing. And, isn’t this also a description of the relationship between the human and the divine in Judeo-Christian Scripture; unequal powers entangled, yet in the ensuing struggle in which expectation is overturned, judgment and re-creation are hidden in a Divine design?
Unlike, the Genesis account of this morning’s first lesson, Luke’s parable ends with a question, an unsettling one, I think, posed by the unjust judge, “When the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth?” (18.8). It is a tough question Jesus is also addressing to his disciples and through Luke to us as well. Put differently, Our Lord is asking, “Do you who follow me have persevering faith, willingness to endure both the calamity and the judgment of what is to come?”
Because, we, unlike the disciples of today’s Gospel, know before hand the events of journey’s end, we have some answer to Our Lord’s question. The tumultuous welcome that Christ is to receive in the Holy City, remember, quickly fades and turns to betrayal and abandonment, signs of the faithlessness and bankruptcy of the kingdom of this world, a world bound in servitude to fear, violence, and death; the stuff that another contemporary German theologian and the teacher of Metz, Karl Rahner, says makes for “rubbled over hearts” (c.f., The Need and Blessing of Prayer, p. 7); which is to say, a world of un-love from which no one and no thing is free. Shall the Son of man find faith on earth? No, he will not. He will find only betrayal, abandonment, and the shame of the Cross.
Yet at the Cross, the place of God’s defeat, are to be found hints and glimpses of answers to our many questions, prayers, and petitions. In an action of self-sacrificing love that is so complete and perfect that it is offered once and for all time and all people, in a never to be repeated victory over the powers and principalities of the kingdom of this world, God in Jesus wrestles for us, against Satan, sin, and death, interceding once and for all time on behalf of a world and countless numbers of hearts rubbled over with fear, violence, and mortality. In Christ’s passion and death are revealed a new world and a new order, where surrender, mercy, and forgiveness are the way, truth, and life. Calvary, where holy blood is poured out, like Jabbock, the place of God’s defeat by Jacob, we see also the place of God’s ultimate triumph, a glory we too share because of the Crucified One, who has done for us what we cannot do for ourselves; which is to say, won for us eternal life. This self-offering or sacrifice by God is love, love not as answer but as a way through life, a way intended for imperfect creatures to walk daily, as one and all move closer to journey’s end with the one whose surrender, mercy, and forgiveness we are commanded in faith to imitate, the one in whom his passion and death give us hope that there can ultimately be no bad news, no unanswered questions in a kingdom prepared for us before all time and where we shall at last see God face to face and know that our lives are preserved!
Perhaps, and, I think this is, indeed true, we are most fully human when we participate in this mysterious journey to Jerusalem that is our life and destiny in God, a destiny in which we are both judged and recreated, a way of self-surrender, mercy, and forgiveness that leads us day by day through victory as well as defeat to ultimately see God face to face, the God who at the Cross is revealed as Love, the God whose dying breath promises to see us unto eternal life.
