29th Sunday in Ordinary Time Luke 18, 1-8 We have an old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” Thomas Edison, the inventor of the incandescent lamp, had laboured hours and hours in order to perfect his invention. After many failures, it was said that his assistant asked him because of his perseverance to his project despite of many failures, “Mr. Edison, you have failed for about a thousand times now.” He answered, “at least I’ve learnt there are about one thousand ways of not doing it. The gospel for today gives us a lesson at persistence. Again, Jesus the master storyteller has another story for us on how we should persevere and be persistent in our prayer. In the parable, Jesus used a very familiar character, a widow. He used a widow because they are one of the most vulnerable women in Jewish society. In the Jewish society, women are not supposed to speak, they need a man to speak for them and that is usually her husband or son. If they have lost their husband and son, they have to fight for their rights because widows can’t work and has to rely on the generosity of their neighbours in order to survive. In the gospel for today, most probably, this widow is fighting for a property that is legally hers but because of some unscrupulous relative has lost the little property that she has. The other character in the story is the dishonest judge. Now, Jesus who loves to use exaggerations has certainly exaggerated on this one. Judges usually favour their decisions to widows because it is a requirement of the Torah, but Jesus described this person as a person who “doesn’t fear God or respects any human being”. So it means that he doesn’t actually care any rule by the Torah that should be imposed to his judgments, instead he would always rule against the widow. In the next scene, the widow continues to persist even if the judge doesn’t decide on her favour. She just keeps on pestering the judge until the judge gave in because he became afraid that the widow might strike him and also a way to shut her up. One day, I was reading my Facebook wall and I saw a quotation posted in one of my friends. It says, “God doesn’t say no to any prayer. He only has three responses when we ask him something. He would say, “Yes”, “At the right time” or “I have a better idea.” In the gospel, Jesus tells us not to be discouraged by our prayer. We should continue to persist in our prayer to God. For God would truly listen and if the dishonest judge gave in the honourable God would do infinitely more than what the judge did. There are times in our lives that we want to give up praying if we don’t get what we want. However, the parable is telling us to be like the widow because like the widow who has lost everything, she has nothing to lose any more by persisting. We are also the same. We can’t lose anything if we persist in prayer because we have a God who is there and will always hear our cry. Today is Mission Sunday. It is the day when we are asked to support the projects of the Pontifical Mission Society. Here in New Zealand, we are lucky to live the lifestyle that many countries would have it only in their dreams. And we are asked to be generous and give to peoples who are struggling to find the next meal. So hopefully, today as we celebrate Mission Sunday, we remember that mission is not only for missionaries for all of us are missionaries and we all have a mission and that is to propagate the Word of God and through supporting generously the MISSONZ here in New Zealand, we are doing our part on the universal call of the church to be missionaries here in our country and all over the world. Fr. Elmer I. Ibarra, SVD Wellington, New Zealand
Posted on: Sat, 19 Oct 2013 04:26:10 +0000
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