Wrestling With Brick Walls - Sermon 21st October 2007
Some years ago, we went on holiday to Center Parcs in Sherwood Forest. We've been to the Penrith one too, and strangely enough, since it's prayer we're talking about this morning, I had an experience of the power of prayer there, too. I prayed hard not to have to do the abseiling I'd recklessly signed up for - and it was cancelled, because not enough people had put their names down!
Thank you, God...
But the Nottingham Center Parcs furnished me with quite a different experience of prayer. It had an octagonal chapel, stylish but plain, in which a very jolly lady Methodist conducted worship on the Sunday morning. I was so struck with the place that I went back in the afternoon to do that strange mixture of sketching and praying that some of us practice in churches. And I found myself thinking that one of the most striking features of the building as a worship space was that you were sat facing a brick wall. And I thought, how symbolic!
How many people must come to a place like that looking for time away from it all. Away just from the pressures of life, or from worries and cares, maybe real, desperate anxieties about money, relationships, work - or just the crushing routine. How many people were fleeing from the feeling that their life had them facing a brick wall?
And now, here they were, being invited to pray, facing - a brick wall...
That's some parable we have to look at this morning!
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.'
This has to be one of the edgiest, most daring of the parables. It's immensely high-risk because it invites people to contemplate a picture that they may already have been thinking about - or even struggling not to think about - when they have God in mind.
One of the most dangerous images we can have is of God as a Santa in the sky, who is there to be asked for anything, because he will give it if only we have enough faith - as Harold Bishop keeps telling us in Neighbours, but also as a lot of very dangerous voices on the Christian right keep insisting. When prayer doesn't work like that, there can only be two kinds of response to a belief that it does. We either blame God, and loudly proclaim "Stuff this for a game of soldiers", or we carry on blaming ourselves for our lack of faith, and pray more and more and more, with a greater sense of frustration, of inadequacy, and inevitably of anger and bitterness against God which then fuels our guilt even more - because you're not supposed to feel like that about God. So the anger and guilt rebound more and more on us. And God begins to look and feel like an angry, implacable God, because we are now worshipping our own anger and self-loathing as an idol.
I hope you can all see - though you might be a bit shocked to hear it from the pulpit - that of those two attitudes, the "Stuff this for a game of soldiers!" is a great deal less unhealthy than the sort of humiliating grovelling before a God who thrives on our self-hatred. Yet that very attitude is preached as the heart of the Christian faith - and sometimes even in the Church of Scotland.
Notice how Jesus demolishes it instantly, in his parable. He invites his hearers to imagine an unjust judge. Somebody who is part of the system, and in whose interest the system operates. Not an actively evil man, but someone who won't do anything unless there's something in it for him. Someone who represents frustration - but not boundless unrighteousness, not a Nazi gauleiter equivalent of the first century. Someone - and this is really important - you can be honest about your feelings towards, someone you don't have to pretend to like. And along comes a widow-woman to make her petition. Again. It isn't a big request. Whatever it is, it's entirely in scale to her life. It's an unfairness that she is having to endure at the hands of an "opponent".
We aren't told who the "opponent" is. There may be a hint - or we may be importing it into the story - that the "opponent" has more social clout, is a much more useful friend, than a little old lady. In the social whirl of first century Palestine, in the circles the unjust judge moved in, it was maybe inconvenient, socially and politically, to rock boats in favour of wee widow women.
Or maybe he just couldn't be bothered.
Or maybe it fed his sense of power, close to the bottom of the judicial ladder, to thwart people occasionally just because he could. Maybe this widow-woman was more of a Margaret Rutherford than an Irene Handl, more Ena Sharples than Mavis Riley. Just because she was in the right didn't necessarily mean that she was very nice... But she was powerless. Widowhood, along with the orphaned state, crops up throughout the Old Testament as the very measure of social vulnerability, the weak, powerless, influence-bereft people that you could only claim to be righteous if you looked out for them and protected them. If you justly judged their cause... This is old, traditional language, here.
So, says Jesus, take this situation. God isn't in it, and neither are you. What is there is this. An unjust reality. An unjust reality made harder by the unyielding judge. And an old lady, a widow woman, the very symbol of powerlessness in the face of all of this, who keeps on plugging away. No "Stuff this for a game of soldiers!" But also no self-hatred, no pretence, no pious pretending that we aren't frustrated, aren't deeply angry and disappointed with God - because this isn't God. This is the unjust judge.
Jesus' parable models prayer in a way that steers round those aspects that we won't usually look at. He turns it into a wrestling with reality, which takes reality completely seriously. But it's also a wrestling with God which takes God completely seriously. "Why do things have to be this way?" "Why is nothing changing?"
God isn't the unjust judge. But again - and this is what modelling prayer using this parable makes possible - we can now stand back and look at the proposition "You'd keep at it and at it with an unjust judge, who was just giving you the runaround. Do you really think that God is like an unjust judge?" (D'you know, I find myself thinking more and more that to update this parable in an instant, all you'd need to do would be to substitute for the unjust judge a call-centre! And I apologise to everyone who works, or ever has worked, or has a family member who has ever worked, for a call-centre...)
This is a really bold, edgy parable. So much so that Luke, in setting it before his church in his Gospel, felt he had to tame it quite a bit. He slaps onto the end of it the equivalent of those idiotic warnings meant, in our society, to protect manufacturers from lawsuits: I came across a smashing collection of them on the internet (1):
"Caution: The contents of this bottle should not be fed to fish." -- On a bottle of shampoo for dogs.
Caution: Hot beverages are hot!" -- On a coffee cup.
"Warning: May contain small parts." -- On a frisbee.
...or my personal favourite,
On a laser pointer -- "Do not look into laser with remaining eye."
Sadly, Luke, too, succumbs to the comfortable safety of actually stating the blindingly obvious: "Caution: The Unjust Judge is not God".
And he compounds this by going on to depict prayer in faith as a blank cheque - exactly the opposite of Jesus' point that prayer is hard work:
And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? ...I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.
And worst of all, he then manages to fit in the insinuation that, yet again, if things don't go as we feel they should, it's always lack of faith:
And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?"
If you lop off these additions, you are left with - what? A rather shocking, but very salutary, model of what prayer isn't. It isn't an encounter with injustice, with callous uncaring, with cold contempt. It isn't the unjust judge who is on the other side of prayer.
But - what do we know about this God who is, apparently, on the other side of prayer? The parable actually assumes that the whole experience of praying can be one of feeling thwarted, stymied, blocked - even unheard. If that isn't what prayer can feel like, then the very comparison with the unjust judge wouldn't work. So - who is on the other side of this encounter?
Jesus' parables, inasmuch as they come from Jesus, come from before the first Easter. They come from before the Passion, the Cross - the Resurrection. They come from the one who would go to the cross, and they are part and parcel of everything Jesus of Nazareth was - and what Jesus was, and what he refused not to be, was just exactly what put him on the cross. Humanly, too, everything Jesus was, as he lived it, the human life he lived before God, is just the kind of life that goes against all the values of our world the way it is. So too, the parables, inasmuch as they go back to Jesus, go back to this man who lived in this way. There is an integrity of life and teaching.
But there is also change over time. And above all, when Jesus goes to the cross, for refusing to be other than he is, a bewildering new component is added. It's one thing to live in a world that kills people for being open and honest and gracious and loving, for living out of God. That constitutes a risk. But when Jesus actually dies on the cross, that constitutes an event. The cross becomes bound up with who he was, with what his life meant - and with what his life means for us.
For the earliest Christians this life, this cross, this event, somehow reveal God to us in a way that is totally unique, and totally definitive. Our understanding of God is transformed because of the death of Jesus, and his resurrection. And the sense that the earliest Christians made of this was one that they expressed not in dry theologies, not in theories of who Jesus was, or what exactly his death did or did not do. They did something much more fundamental than that.
They worshipped him.
Now that, for good Jews to do, is shocking and outrageous. They wouldn't have done it if they hadn't felt that they had to. But basically what they did was to treat Jesus of Nazareth as, for them, ultimate, in a way that only the one God of the Jewish people and their Bible was ultimate.
And it took several hundred years for theology to catch up with the insight that worship had grasped at the Resurrection.
But what's clear is this. That worshipping Jesus means that the story of Jesus is an insight into what God is like.
Or - put it in terms of the parable this morning - understanding Jesus of Nazareth as ultimate for us tells us something about who is on the other side of the encounter of prayer. The human Jesus, who teaches, and heals, and prays in the garden "Let this cup pass from me if it be possible" and who hangs on the cross and cries "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" - is God-with-us - Immanu-el. As Karl Barth says, God-forsaken God... God at the furthest point of remove from God."
Go back for a moment to that brick wall in the chapel at Center Parcs. And to all those people facing brick walls in their own lives, who had come there to pray and seek some sort of respite.
It wasn't actually a plain brick wall. On it there were some words - beautiful words; "Believe in my mercy and my love..." I could imagine people being consoled by these words. But I could also imagine people recoiling in frustration from them. Words, words, words. Promises - just words. And anyway, whose words were they? A distant God in the sky?
But next to the words was a crucifix. We Protestants are far too prejudiced against the cross with the figure of Christ on it. Here was the God who spoke these words, the God who becomes part of our suffering, who prays with us, and stands with us even when things seem not to change, the God who faces the brick wall of our reality with us. The God who strengthens us to persevere. The crucified God who stands the world on its head, and by the slow, patient power of his love, transforms everything.
The God who is on the other side of prayer is the God who stands with us on this side of it, too...
1) http://www.rinkworks.com/said/warnings.shtml
2) A fascinating exploration of this theme is Leander Keck's "A Future for the Historical Jesus" (SCM Press 1972) For a different slant, see Herbert McCabe "Law, Love and Language" (Sheed and Ward, 1968) I use the "Abebooks" site a lot, looking for good second-hand books (abebooks.co.uk) but there are others.