Sexagesima Sunday
February 6, 1858
“And He spake a parable unto them to this end, that men ought always to pray, and not to faint; saying, There was in a city a judge, which feared not God, neither regarded man: and there was a widow in that city; and she came unto him, saying, Avenge me of mine adversary. And he would not for awhile: but afterward he said within himself, Though I fear not God, nor regard man; yet because this widow troubleth me, I will avenge her, lest by her continual coming she weary me. And the Lord said, Hear what the unjust judge saith. And shall not God avenge His own elect, which cry day and night unto Him, though He bear long with them? I tell you that He will avenge them speedily.”—Luke xviii. 1-8.
The passage: Jesus told a parable to teach that people ought always to pray and never lose heart. In a certain city there was a judge who feared neither God nor man. A widow there kept coming to him, saying, “Give me justice against my adversary.” For a long time he refused, but at last he said to himself, “Though I fear no God and respect no man, because this widow keeps bothering me I will give her justice, or she will wear me out by her endless coming.” And the Lord said: Listen to what the unjust judge says. Will not God give justice to his chosen, who cry to him day and night, even though he is slow to act? He will avenge them speedily.
“Yes!” people have said, or at least thought, on reading this—“If God were an unjust judge, we might need to wear him down with petitions. But since he is wholly just and merciful, what need is there for such persistence? Does he not give generously to all, sending rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike? What proof is there that his generosity depends at all on our asking? What evidence, beyond some records of fanatical experience, that prayers are actually answered in the ordinary sense of that word? And if not, what in this parable, or any other, should encourage us to pray and not faint, or suggest we would not do just as well without praying at all?”
Let us see whether the story of the widow answers this difficulty more fully than it seems to, when we treat it merely as an instance of successful pestering.
I. Her petition was: “Avenge me of my adversary.” She had an enemy—a perplexing, tormenting, powerful one—who by some means terrified or oppressed her continually. This fear was why she went to the judge. He did not want her; he had given no command that she should come; he would rather have been left in peace. But she could not help it—her misery was too galling. If there was any chance of being heard, she had to try. There was a tribunal in the city. What kind of man sat on it was not the point; its mere existence spoke of redress for wrong. It told her she was not meant to be simply the victim of power, that even a weak woman might be avenged. So she cried, for right against a tyrant, to one whose business it was to help her. As long as that sign of protection and order lasted, she could not despair. She might have much to bear, but the adversary would be put down at last.
This, then, was the secret of her importunity: the sheer necessity of getting deliverance from an actual disturber of her peace. To feel this, you must set aside every other consideration and put the case as strongly as possible: the judge is unjust, fearing neither God nor man, and gives help only to be rid of her. The parable fixes our minds on this truth: each of us also has an adversary. It is the goading of this adversary that drives us to prayer. We pray not because some ruling power says “draw near,” but because of a pressure of evil around us, beneath us, upon us, which we must shake off if we can. It takes different shapes for different people, with more or less conscious force, but all feel it, and so all pray—cry to some power in earth, heaven, or hell for rescue. They cry even while half-believing that the God they beseech is an unjust judge who cares nothing for them, bears a spite for their wrongs, or even desires their destruction. Their miseries seem to confirm this: where else could such miseries come from, if not from him? Might the Judge himself be the adversary? Misery speaks this language, and the misery that is sin speaks it loudest, transferring its own darkness onto the Being worshipped—he must be dark, because we are. And yet, despite this confusion, men go on beseeching even such a mist-covered Being to avenge them of their adversary. They still feel he must be a Judge, that justice must be his function, that he cannot wish evil to triumph or wish them destroyed by it. These feelings contradict each other, and that contradiction is itself part of men’s wretchedness—but it only makes the fact more striking. Even to unjust gods have men prayed under the weight of their calamities, and those calamities would be far more unbearable if they did not. If men once concluded there was absolutely no help to be hoped for, a condition entirely animal would replace one still partly human. There does come an answer to even these prayers, for there is a seat above that of the unjust judge men have made for themselves.
II. Here comes Christ’s great argument: men will cry even to an unjust judge, because they have a tormenting adversary, and not in vain. Would you pray less because it is God you pray to—a Father, who has chosen you as his children, whose will you know, who hates wrong and seeks to rescue you from it, who has invited and commanded you to flee to him? If deliverance came to the widow from a judge precisely because he was unjust, may you not expect, with far more confidence than she had, to be avenged by God, even if he bears long with you?
This is exactly the point we began from. The doubt was whether God’s righteousness and mercy are reasons for prayer or against it. Now we can answer: they are reasons against it, if by prayer we mean trying to bend God’s mind and will to ours. They are reasons for it, if by prayer we mean the cry, “Avenge us of our adversaries, deliver us from the powers crushing us and separating us from the Mercy and Justice and Truth that are God’s very nature.” This is not a formal solution but a practical one, accounting for most of our perplexities about prayer and its answers. If we suppose God commands prayer as an arbitrary exercise for future reward or to avert punishment, it is natural to ask: what good comes of it? What sign have we of the promised bliss? Why keep at something that seems more meaningless each day? Such thoughts arise in many minds, and then come clever theories explaining why prayer suited the world’s childhood but not its maturity, why it fit ages when grown men were childlike, why it becomes obsolete once we put on adult dress and are no longer under priestly tutelage, why it damages our idea of God’s character and of the world’s unity and harmony.
Such suggestions get a hearing because they match men’s experience and excuse what they had been ashamed of. There is a sense of dryness and weariness in prayer that grows on most people with age and worldly habit; they remember feeling differently as children, and compare themselves with their forefathers. It is pleasant to call this change progress, proof of having outgrown habits suited to another time. But then comes a sharp twinge of real suffering, from without or within. The man who thought prayer was for children or women, not for him, discovers that he has an adversary. He must cry to some power—to Fortune, to Fate—“Avenge me of this adversary.” He finds it a natural, necessary, human utterance still. Suppressing it may look manly, but it cannot really be done; the groan may be hidden from others, but it must be poured out somewhere. To whom, though? Here is the difference: he has not lost the necessity of prayer—it is stronger in him than in a child—only the belief that anyone cares to hear him. He had made his peace with the world’s disorder, had forgotten or ceased to believe there was any Judgment Throne in the midst of it. How strange his feelings must be, now that he wants refuge from an actual tormentor—must he not wonder whether the tormentor is the very God he would pray to? Out of the most advanced civilization and its philosophy comes the very question that haunted the savage. The man who has learned that good and evil are not real opposites but only names for sensations, that the world is a machine and he a part of it, that all notions of asking God’s help are childish fantasy—this man must pass again through the oldest human experience, must shriek to some unknown power in earth or air, a Jehovah or Jove or Lord who may mean him good or ill, may be just or unjust, may want begging or despise it—yet must be invoked, because the adversary is at hand and there must be some way of escape, even into a deeper abyss than has yet been sounded. What a revelation, then, to hear the old childlike teaching again: of a Father who does not will the death of his creatures, who sent his Son to free them from their adversaries and reconcile them to himself, who sent his Spirit that they might call him “Abba, Father” and draw near to him as their everlasting Deliverer, Comforter, and Friend! What a witness that these words are meant for real human sufferers in a real world, not for people who traffic only in abstractions—or who know those abstractions to be cold and worthless! What a release, for reason as much as for the heart, from a philosophy demanding a blinder faith than any priest ever asked: that the world is in harmony, and good and evil only different notes of that harmony—when we know ourselves to be in the midst of discord, and become insensible to it only by losing all perception of what it contradicts! What comfort in being told: “You have adversaries, and you need not explain away your conscience’s testimony to that; do not crush your instinct to cry out against them, but give it voice, knowing that One wages perpetual war on these adversaries, that his whole government is that war, that he wants you to join it, and that through the very experience of misery he is drawing you to himself, so that in the midst of the struggle you may find a peace that will be yours forever.”
Do you want evidence, beyond superstition-laden stories, that prayers are answered? See whether every cry of “Avenge me of my adversary” does not bring its answer—a witness that there is a Judgment Throne to flee to for redress of our evils and the world’s evil. See whether that answer is not worth more, more solid and certain, than the very reports whose truth you have doubted. See whether what offends your conscience in those reports is not mainly this: that they describe a partial Divinity granting special favors to favorites, departing from eternal laws for their sake. If that is what they mean, I do not blame your indignation in rejecting them—for your very rejection testifies that there must be a Being who hears all his creatures when they call, who, because he upholds eternal laws, heeds all who cry against their violation. Assert such a Being against all who would narrow him. Prove to your own hearts, in the very act of prayer, that such a One exists. But do not hastily condemn those who have perceived only the side of him turned toward themselves—do not call them false or superstitious for believing he saved them individually from some calamity. Are you not narrowing the idea of an all-seeing, all-loving Creator, if you suppose he cares for the universal and not the particular, for the race and not the individual? Is that the kind of love or wisdom you would cultivate in yourself, or admire in another—or is it not a dry, unreal, almost dishonest love, a vague and pompous wisdom? Would you attribute to God what you would count insincere and heartless in a fellow man?
No! I dare not tell any man he may not pray to the God of Life to oppose Death in whatever form it assails God’s creatures. I dare not tell him he may not cry to be avenged of some sickness crippling his body or soul. I believe the sickness is sent to draw out that cry, and I believe the cry will have an answer. The illness may not lift; the sufferer may go to his grave with his pain unabated. But if that sickness has brought him into fellowship with One he did not know before—if he has found an Everlasting Friend—he has a better answer than he expected. And if he recovers, I will not tell him that was no answer; I hold it to be one. God has given him that token of his presence and care, fulfilling his promise, “O Death, I will be thy plague.” Let the sufferer accept that decree from the Judgment Seat of the Universe in awe and humility, and learn what it implies. To do so, let him pray again to be delivered from the narrow, self-glorifying thought that God cares for him on the ground of his merit or out of partiality. That prayer too will be answered: he will be avenged of another, worse adversary than any sickness—what his proud heart had taken as a sign of his difference from others, he will find was a sign of his kinship with them, of the Father’s common care for him and for all. He will begin to understand why Christ, in revealing the Father, did not merely preach to crowds but went about healing this palsied man, cleansing that leper, casting unclean spirits from those who dwelt among the tombs. God could not be discovered to the hearts of those who took him for an enemy unless he came to them in their particular troubles, proving that he bore each infirmity himself. This was done to bring the outcast, shut up in his lonely self, back into the fellowship of humanity—to teach him that he is one member of a body, every part suffering with every other, because the Head suffers for all. Each was taught to cry to the Just Judge, “Avenge me of this adversary,” so that his voice, prepared and mellowed, its false and jarring notes cleared away, might at last join the saints beneath the altar who never tire of hoping and praying that the faithful, true Lord God will avenge the earth of its destroyers. He learns that he has had a Priest on earth, touched by the feeling of his sorrows, tempted in every way as he is—so that he may know he has a Priest within the veil, who originates all our intercessions, presents them with the incense of his own sacrifice, and sits on his priestly, filial throne until his Father has put all his enemies under his feet.