Luke 18:1-8 "Persistent Grace" Scott Hoezee

Eugene Lowry is a preaching professor and author who has a very consistent piece of advice when teaching seminarians how to construct sermons. Lowry believes that all good sermons unfold almost like the plot of a novel. Preachers need to hook listeners early on in the sermon, tantalizing them and intriguing them with this or that line of thought or question yet without revealing precisely where the sermon is going or how it will get there. Like the plot of a mystery novel, preachers should hide their main ideas so as to keep the congregation on the edge of its collective seat, making the listeners stick with the sermon precisely because they can't wait to find out (albeit at the very end) what it's all about.

In other words, Lowry tells preachers not to tip their hands too early. If in the first two minutes of the sermon you have more-or-less already told people the bottom-line application of the sermon, what will motivate them to keep listening? The gig is up. The goods have been delivered. And so the next thing you know, people start looking at their wristwatches every few minutes!

From the looks of the New Testament, both Jesus and the four gospel writers often as much as heeded Lowry's advice. Many of Jesus' parables drew listeners in because you just couldn't tell at first what in the world this story was even about, much less, therefore, what its bottom line would be. But that did not always happen. Luke 18 is a classic example of a parable that most certainly does not follow Lowry's blueprint. Luke says right up front, "Jesus told the following parable to teach the disciples that they should always pray and not give up." Well, that's the application, the bottom line, the end of the story revealed to us before the story has even begun! But that's like opening a mystery novel by writing on Page 1, "And so we will eventually see that it was the butler who killed the old man with a candlestick in the library." End of story! Why read on?

As if Luke 18:1 were not obvious enough, in the end Jesus likewise does what he typically did not do with his parables, and that is very overtly give away the parable's meaning. As we have seen in this series, that did not always happen. In fact, most of the time Jesus' parables left people scratching their heads in bewilderment. Sometimes Jesus would explain the parable to the disciples, but only in private long after the befuddled crowds had shuffled on back home.

But not in Luke 18. Luke hits us over the head with the parable's meaning even before Jesus has spoken a single syllable of it. Jesus then whacks us upside the head a second time in reaffirming the parable's meaning. Yet we've suggested in this series that parables were designed to be narrative time bombs, deliberately confusing the hearers so as, eventually, to shock them into some new understanding. Parables were designed to put people a little off-balance as a way to force folks to dispense with the pat answers and pious platitudes they had grown up with. Jesus wanted people to dive deeper and so just maybe arrive at a brand new idea about God and his kingdom. So if we've been overall correct that this is the way Jesus used his parables, then what are we to make of a parable that is given such a tidy explanation both before and after the presentation of the actual story?

Given the nature of Jesus' ministry, the explanation for this may be a secret hidden in plain sight. That is to say, there may well be more going on in this deceptively simple parable than meets the eye at first glance. By probing the various layers of this tale, we may well discover a deeper meaning--a depth of meaning that is properly bracing, that will shake us up and so throw us off-kilter a touch after all.

The first item to note is the oddity that the character who will later be made more-or-less analogous to God is not a nice character at all. He is a kind of anti-hero. This judge is a self-centered narcissist. He gives little or no thought to God in the course of his work and really does not much care for other people, either. It looks as though this is one judge who is very much in it for himself. He is proud and arrogant and does not typically see much farther than the tip of his own nose.

The only other character of the story is a widow with a complaint, an allegation, a legal case for the courts. As plaintiffs go, this widow should have, by ancient Israelite law, been able to garner the court's attention more easily than most. There is even a law in the Old Testament that says that only an orphan could be considered a more urgent case than a widow. All along in his judicial codes given to Israel, God made it clear that the neediest and most vulnerable people were to be cared for way ahead of everyone else. So although not the most urgent of all possible plaintiffs, a widow did rank in the Top 2 categories of persons most deserving of very diligent judicial care.

We have no clue precisely what her case was about but it doesn't matter--this unjust judge wanted nothing to do with her in any event. He wouldn't even take the case. Lacking any other recourse, the widow pursued the only avenue open to her: becoming a public nuisance! Some commentators speculate that after a while, the woman did not content herself with standing in line in front of the judge's formal bench at the courthouse. It's possible she started essentially to stalk the man, approaching him in the marketplace when he was trying to buy a bag of onions, waiting for him outside his sports club and nailing him the minute he stepped out of the building, following him into restaurants and loudly inquiring after her case while the man waited to get seated.

Basically she hit him where he lived: in his public reputation. He maybe didn't care about other people and had little or no regard for even God, but his own ego was another matter. He did care what others thought of him. In verse 5 he complains that the woman is "bothering" him. In the original Greek, however, the word translated here as "bother" literally means to give somebody a black eye. It wasn't just that she was bugging the living daylights out of him, she was doing it in such a way as to damage his reputation. It was embarrassing finally! So sheerly out of a sense of self-preservation, the judge gives in. It's difficult to imagine a worse motive, but there it is. Persistence, the willingness to badger somebody and give him a public black eye, paid off in the end.

Now, of course, a standard way to connect this unjust and dreadful judge to God is by way of the rhetorical move of what in Latin is known as ad minior maius which is the "how much more" line of thought we often read in the gospels. You read this in the "scorpion for bread" story. What earthly father, if his son asked for a piece of bread, would give the boy a scorpion instead? And so if even you imperfect earthly fathers know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more so with God who is perfect and loving, etc. In the case of Luke 18, you thus expect the line of thought to be, "If persistence can pay off with even a lousy human judge, how much more effective will not we be when we pray to a perfectly just and loving God!?"

But notice that Jesus doesn't quite say that, does he? Instead he says "Listen to what the unjust judge says." Well, OK, but what are we supposed to hear from him other than sheer exasperation (and self-centered exasperation at that)? Are we supposed to make God exasperated, too? Are we to imagine that even God worries about getting a black eye, a bad public reputation and so gives in to us on that basis? And what about verse 7 when Jesus asks, speaking of God, "Will he keep putting them off?" Why doesn't Jesus say flat out that God will never put us off in the first place when we pray to him? Throwing in the word "keep" makes it sound as though God does sometimes put us off but that the good news is that he won't keep doing it. So does God put us off sometimes, even for a little while?

These are all very difficult questions. By implication we can assume that God's character is the opposite of the unjust judge. Maybe that is so obvious a point that Jesus scarcely needs to mention it directly. Even so, there is a queer implication that there is some point of contact, some point of comparison, between the how and the why of this judge's having given in to the widow and God's giving in to us when we pray. But before you can even ponder that for more than a second or two, the parable then ends with a surprising question that we didn't see coming: "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?"

And suddenly this parable, whose meaning at first seemed obvious in an almost clunky, pedantic way, has turned the tables on us after all. Right up to the very end we kept wondering how a plaintiff can get what he or she wants from someone who may not always be inclined to grant the petition. The focus, in short, has been on how to move a seemingly unmoveable person. But now this last question reverses the scenario: suddenly we are no longer thinking about a judge but instead are focused squarely on ourselves as potential plaintiffs. Suddenly the question stops being, "Is the judge stingy?" and becomes instead "Are we faithful enough to keep asking?" The parable turns itself on its own head and becomes all about not the judge but about us. Forget the character of the judge, what is your character like?! Do you have faith no matter what?

The point seems to be that no matter what the judge is like, nothing will happen if we give up. This parable is about faith, about trust, and about how the vision granted to us by faith makes us stay true over the long haul whether or not we can see anything in life that encourages us to hang on. We can make even more sense out of this parable if we notice that this story follows directly, without interruption, on the apocalyptic discourse Jesus held at the end of Luke 17.

The Pharisees asked Jesus when the kingdom of God was going to show up. In Luke 17:20-21 Jesus tells them that they have it all wrong. They were waiting for something they could see, something that would make newspaper headlines. Yesterday we marked the grim 40^th anniversary of President Kennedy's death. They say that more than anything, that assassination, and the aftermath of Oswald's shooting and the president's funeral, represented television's coming of age. Indeed, ever since then when major events happen (as we witnessed in a big way with 9/11), all the cable and regular networks provide wall-to-wall coverage on every conceivable angle of the story. Meanwhile, the rest of us sit rapt for hours watching it all even as many of you did 40 years ago this weekend following that dark day in Dallas.

When the Pharisees asked Jesus about the kingdom's arrival, that is the kind of event they had in mind. No one would miss it, news agencies would go wild to cover the story, and the whole world would sit at attention. Ultimately, of course, we Christians do hold out for a global, cosmic event in the return of Jesus. But Jesus' immediate answer in Luke 17 was that the kingdom's arrival inside our hearts is the key for now and this inner reality is just as stunning as anything that could catch the attention of CNN. "Careful observation," Jesus says in Luke 17:20, is not the way to locate the kingdom. It's not out there in the world where all the news reporters are looking, it's within you where no one but you yourself are looking. You apprehend it by faith. You hold onto it and "see" it by faith.

But Jesus then went on to warn his disciples not to be taken in by the folks who will keep on claiming that they have found heaven on earth. "Don't run around all excited just because this or that person says, 'The kingdom is coming over there!' or 'I think Jesus just returned in New Zealand!' or some such thing. Be quiet, have faith, have patience. The kingdom of God is for now about faith, not sight."

But that's precisely the challenge, isn't it? Maintaining just such a lively faith, a faith that keeps us on our knees in prayer, that is our vocation as disciples. One of the things we pray for, of course, is deliverance. We pray for the return of Christ and the final righting of all wrongs. We pray for justice in the short run, yes, but also in that ultimate long run when shalom will be the order of the day for all nations.

Praying like that takes a lot of faith after all these centuries. And not a few have long since stopped pleading. In a recent article in the New York Times the sorry state of most churches in Europe was described. As many of us know, although there are pockets of great religious fervor here and there in places like England, the Netherlands, France, and Germany, nevertheless the vast majority of Europeans long ago stopped going to church. The Times interviewed many people as to why they have stopped attending worship, and naturally there were lots of reasons. But interestingly enough one reason that was brought up a lot was the simple fact that most Europeans see prayer as totally irrelevant and useless--a whistling in the dark that is a sorry substitute for actually doing something about life's difficulties. It seems that once people stopped having the faith that fuels prayer, suddenly the whole of the Christian life withered and looked out-of-date. Once you've given up on prayer, then going to church looks about as futile as a vegetarian going out for dinner at a steakhouse. What's the sense? There's nothing for you there anyway.

In the end it's not about whether, or to what extent or in what manner, God will rain down justice on the earth. It's not about whether God wants to do that or even whether or not there are seasons when for some inscrutable reason God has to put us off for a while. There are countless unknown variables that go into God's providential maintenance of the world. We cannot see all ends and so there are prayers that go unanswered--not unheeded perhaps but unanswered in the sense of our not receiving what we wanted or what we deemed the best outcome. That kind of disappointment usually leads us to begin wondering what God is up to, what is on God's mind, what kind of a God he is.

In Luke 18 Jesus turns the tables on us and puts the focus back on our faith. We have to assume the best about our God's goodness, love, justice, and mercy. By faith we hang on to our belief in all that whether we are awash in answered prayers at any given moment or not. But in the end we should worry less about the character of God and more about the strength and the persistence of our faith. God may well be, as Christians say he is, the most generous source of grace and light in the universe. But if people stop praying to him, how can they expect ever to help display God's hidden kingdom to the world? How can those who will not pray access and tap into the power and love of God?

Jesus is coming again. The scary question is whether or not that Savior will find a warm welcome. Will he find people who, through the act of prayer, had been asking for his return all along and so, when he shows up, will heave a sigh of relief that finally their prayers were answered? Or will he find people who stopped asking for his return long ago, relying instead on their own wits to get ahead in life, and so they will be merely surprised to see Jesus? The widow in this parable very nearly made a fool out of herself in order to get justice. In the twenty-first century not a few people regard Christians who bow their heads in prayer as likewise looking very foolish, too. Luke 18 wants to encourage us. There really is more to this brief parable than meets the eye, yet in the end, just as we were told in the beginning, it truly is about showing us that we must keep praying and not give up. Not ever. May God grant us the persistent grace to do just that. Amen.