16 November 2013 Lk 18:1-8 TODAY’S GOOD NEWS Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice against my opponent.” For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” ’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’ I knew a devout old nun long ago, one of whose tasks was to teach arithmetic to 10-year-olds. The arithmetic book said something like this: A train carrying 155 passengers collided with another train carry 140 passengers. 20% of the passengers on the first train lost their lives, while 15% on the other train lost theirs. How many passengers died in the accident? “Oh dear me!” said the old nun, “God rest their poor souls! We’ll say a decade of the Rosary for them.” It’s a true story. Is prayer about taking numbers and words (all language) too seriously? Or not seriously enough: is it asking God, as someone said, to let two plus two equal five? When you pray are you telling God how to run the world, or how to improve it? Are you at least dropping broad hints? Prayer makes no sense at all unless we see it where it arises: in the heart. Old Sr Lawrence was praying for all the dead. The ones in the arithmetic book, who were immortal in any case like arithmetic itself, were only reminders of the real dead. From the day she walked behind her mother’s coffin she could not be fooled about death. She carried the world in her heart, and everything reminded her of its tremendous frailty. What could she do but bring it to the Father as Jesus did and as Christians have done since the beginning? Luke’s gospel focuses intensely on the prayer of Jesus. He prayed before receiving the Spirit (3:21-22), he prayed all night before choosing the Twelve (6:12), he told two parables about prayer: today’s reading (18:1-8), and the parable about the importunate friend (11:5-13)…. There’s nothing sentimental about prayer in today’s reading. On the contrary, it is so far to the other side of the scale that it seems cold and merciless. For one thing, it is good to get rid of sentimentality. But notice too that Jesus is not comparing God to the merciless judge, he is contrasting them. He is not saying they are alike, but that they are unalike. It is the familiar idiom of the ‘how much more’. A good example of it is the other passage mentioned above: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:13).
Posted on: Fri, 15 Nov 2013 11:41:14 +0000
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