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.
“Yes!” persons have sometimes said, and still oftener have thought, when they read this passage,—“Yes, if God were an unjust judge, we might weary Him with our petitions. But as we believe that He is altogether just and merciful, what need is there of such importunity? Does He not grant to all men liberally? Does He not send His rain upon the righteous and the unrighteous? What proof have you that His bounty depends in any degree upon our solicitations? What evidence, except what is furnished by some records of fanatical experience, that our prayers are answered at all, in the common sense of the word, answered? And if not, what is there in this Parable, or in any other, which should encourage us to pray and not to faint, or should make us think that we may not fare as well if we never pray?”
Let us see whether the story of the Widow does not meet this difficulty, more than it seems to do when we merely look upon it as an instance of successful urgency.
I. Her petition was this: “Avenge me of my adversary.” She had, then, an enemy, a perplexing, tormenting, powerful one. By some means or other he was able to terrify or oppress her continually. This vexation or this fear was the cause of her going to the Judge. He did not want her to come to him. He had issued no command that she should do it. He would far rather that she had left him in peace. But she could not. The sense of her misery and hardship was too galling. If she had ever so little chance of being heard, she must try. There was a tribunal in the city. What kind of person occupied it was not the question. It spoke, by its very existence, of redress for wrong. It witnessed to her that she was not meant to be the victim of mere power. It told her that even she, a weak woman, might be avenged. Cry therefore she will, in the full sense that she was crying for right against a tyrant, that she was crying to one whose business it was to help her. So long as that sign—if it had become but a sign—of protection, of punishment, of order, lasted, so long 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, this kept her hope alive; the sheer necessity of getting deliverance in some way from an actual disturber and destroyer of her peace. That you may feel it to be so, you must leave out for a time any other consideration. You must put the case as strongly as you can, so as to exclude, or almost to exclude, every motive or influence except this one. The Judge must be an unjust judge, one who fears not God nor regards man. He must give the help merely to rid himself of the petitioner. For thus our minds are fixed by the Parable upon this great truth: Each one of us also has an adversary. It is the goading of this adversary which drives us to prayer. We must pray, not because any ruling power in Earth or Heaven says “Draw nigh,” but because there is a pressure of evil around us, beneath us, upon us, which we must shake off if we can. It presents itself to some in one shape, to some in another, to some with immeasurably more conscious strength than to others. But all feel it, and therefore all pray. All cry to some power or other in Earth, or Heaven, or Hell, for rescue. All cry, even if they half, or more than half, believe that the God Whom they are beseeching is an Unjust Judge, one who cares little or nothing for them, one who has a spite against them for the wrongs they have committed, one who heeds them not, or else desires their destruction. They think this; their miseries seem to confirm the impression. For whence do they come? Are they not divine messengers? May not the Judge himself be the adversary? Their miseries speak this language; that part of their misery which is sin speaks it most strongly, for that transfers its own quality to the Being who is worshipped. He must be dark, for we are. And yet, in spite of all these confusions, men must go on beseeching even such a Being, one who is coloured with all the mists and clouds of earth, to avenge them of their adversary. They still feel that he is a Judge, that it must be his function to exercise Justice, that he cannot wish evil to be, or them to be destroyed by it. These feelings are contradictory, no doubt; it is a chief part of men’s wretchedness that they are so; but the contradiction only makes the fact more remarkable. Even to their unjust gods have men prayed, do men pray, under the bitter and intense weight of their calamities. And these calamities would be immeasurably more intolerable if they did not. If they once came to think, “There is absolutely no help or deliverance, we must give over looking for it, thinking of it, wishing for it,”—a condition entirely animal would succeed to one that is at least partly human. There does come an answer to even these petitions, for there is a seat above that of the unjust Judge whom they have made for themselves.
II. And now comes in the mighty argument of our Lord: “Men will cry even to an unjust Judge, because they have a tormenting adversary. Yes, and not cry in vain. Would you pray less because you have God to pray to, because it is a Father you are calling upon, because He has chosen you to be His children, because you know what His will is, because you know that He hates wrong, and seeks to rescue you from it because He has encouraged, and invited, and commanded you to flee from it to Him? Do you think,” Jesus says, “the deliverance came from the Unjust Judge on this very ground, that he was unjust? Do you think that you may not expect, with something more of confidence than the Widow had, to be avenged by God, even if He bear long with you?”
This, you see, is precisely the point from which we started. The doubt was, whether God’s Righteousness and Mercy are reasons for prayer or against it. Now, I think, we are in a condition to solve this doubt thus: Reasons against it, if by prayer we mean seeking to convert the mind and will of God to ours. Reasons for it, if by prayer we mean the cry, “Avenge us of our adversaries. Deliver us from these powers which are crushing us to earth or hell, and separating us from the Mercy and Justice and Truth which we believe dwell perfectly and absolutely in God, and constitute His nature.” And this we shall find, I am satisfied, not a formal or artificial, but a thoroughly practical solution,—one which will account to us for most of the perplexities in which we feel ourselves involved when we approach the subject of Prayer, and of the answers we may expect to it. If we suppose that God enjoins prayer upon us as an arbitrary exercise, by which we may hope to attain certain rewards or to avert certain punishments hereafter, it cannot be wonderful that we should at times be led to ask ourselves, “What good comes to us from this? What pledges and tokens have we here of a bliss that is to result from it hereafter? Can it be meant, can it be necessary, that we should go on with this practice day after day, when each day it seems more unmeaning than the last?” Such thoughts are likely to arise, and I am sure do arise, in a great many minds. And then fine theories are produced, which show clearly why prayer should belong to the early stages of the world’s history, and not to the later; why it was a very suitable and natural utterance for the lips of children, or for those periods when grown men were children; why it becomes obsolete with innumerable other practices, when we put on the manly dress, and the race is no longer under priestly tutelage; why it hurts our conception of the Divine character, and the Unity and Harmony of the world.
All such suggestions must and will be listened to, because they chime in with men’s experience, and seem to provide an excuse for that which they had been ashamed of. There is a sense of the dryness, inefficacy, weariness of prayers, which assails most as they grow into years and into the use and custom of the world; they remember something different when they were children; they compare what they have heard of their forefathers with these feelings of their own. It is no doubt pleasant to think that the change is a sign of progress, a proof that we have outgrown habits which were made for another time. But then comes a sharp twinge of actual suffering, from without or from within. The man who had supposed prayer was for children or women, and not for him, finds that he has an adversary. He must say to some power or another, “Avenge me of this adversary.” He must clutch at a prayer of some kind to some man or some god, to Fortune or to Fate. He finds it a natural, necessary, human utterance still. To suppress it may look like a great act of manliness, but it is an impossible one. The groan may be suppressed before bystanders, but it must be poured forth in secret. But to whom? Oh, brethren, this is the difference: the man has lost, not the necessity for prayer; that is stronger for him than for the child; he has lost only the belief that there is One Who would care to hear him. He had reconciled himself to the world, with all its confusions and anomalies. He had forgotten, or ceased to believe, that there was any Judgment Throne in the midst of it; must not all his impressions be very strange, when he finds that he wants a refuge from an actual tormentor? Must he not doubt whether the tormentor may not be the God to Whom he would pray? Yes, out of the most advanced civilization, out of the philosophy which is the exponent of that civilization, there comes the very same question which haunted the mind of the savage. The man who has learnt to believe that evil and good are not radical opposites, only names for certain agreeable or disagreeable sensations; that the whole world is a mere machine, that he is a part of it, that he must take its irregularities for better, for worse, and that all notions of asking help of God to man are fantastic and infantine, has to pass again through the oldest experience of all, has to utter his shriek to an unknown being in earth or air; to a Jehovah, Jove, or Lord, who may mean good or evil to his creature, who may be just or unjust, may insist upon importunity or may despise it; but who, in spite of all the vagueness, fear, darkness, which surrounds him, must be invoked, for the adversary is at hand, and there must be a way of flying from him, though it be the most trackless region, even into a deeper abyss than has yet been sounded. What a revelation it is to hear some of the old childish lore again; to be told of a Father Who willeth not the death of His creatures, and Who has sent His Son into the world, to release them from their adversaries, and to reconcile them to Himself; Who has sent His Spirit, that they may call Him “Abba, Father!” and may draw nigh to Him as their everlasting Deliverer and Comforter and Friend! What a witness such words bear that they are meant for actual human beings, sufferers in an actual world, for men who do not know anything about abstractions, or who do know them to be cold, heartless, worthless, mere shadows cast from ourselves! What an escape for the reason, as well as the heart, from a philosophy which demands a more blind, implicit, impossible faith from its subjects than the most unprincipled priests ever demanded, the faith, namely, that the world is in harmony, that good and evil are only different notes of the harmony, when we feel and know that we are in the midst of discords, that we are only become insensible to them when we lose all perception of that which they contradict! Oh, the comfort of being told: “You have adversaries, and you are not to explain away your inward conscience and conviction that you have; you are not to crush your natural instinct to complain against them, to cry for vengeance against them. You are to gratify it, knowing that there is One Who is carrying on a perpetual war with these adversaries; the scheme of Whose government is a perpetual war with them; Who would have you take part with Him in that war; Who by the sense and experience of misery is drawing you to Himself, that in the very midst of the struggle you may find peace, which is to be yours for ever.”
Do you want to know whether there are any evidences that prayers are answered, except certain stories which are leavened with much superstition? See whether every cry, “Avenge me of my adversary,” does not bring its answer,—does not bring with it a witness that there is a Judgment Throne, to which we may fly for the redress of our evils, and of the world’s evil. See whether that answer is not worth more to you—is not of a more solid and certain kind—than the very most direct and peculiar of those answers about the verity of which you have doubted. See whether what offends your conscience in these reports is not mainly this, that they seem to speak of a partial Divinity, who is granting special indulgences to certain favourites, who departs from eternal laws for their sakes. If that is what they mean, I do not complain of any amount of indignation with which you regard them, or reject them. For your very rejection is a testimony that there ought to be a Being—that there must be a Being—Who hears all His creatures when they call upon Him; Who, because He upholds Eternal Laws, will give heed to all who cry against the violation of them. Assert such a Being against all who impugn or narrow His nature. Prove to your own inmost hearts, in the act and effort of prayer, that such a One verily is. But do not hastily condemn those who have perceived only that aspect of Him which is turned towards themselves. Do not say that they are false or superstitious, because they think that He saved them individually from some calamity that had befallen them, or that might have befallen them. Why not? Are you not narrowing the idea of an all-seeing, all-loving Creator, if you suppose He cares for the universal and not for the particular, for the race, and not for the individual? Is that a kind of love,—a kind of wisdom,—which you would cultivate in yourselves, or admire in a fellow-man? Is it not a very dry, unreal, almost dishonest love? Is it not a vague, pompous, imaginary wisdom? And would you attribute to the Most High God that which you would count insincere, heartless, unfaithful, in a child of earth?
No! I dare not tell any man that he may not pray to the God of Life to oppose Death, in any form in which it may assail the creatures whom He has formed, and whom He watches ever. I dare not tell him that he may not call loudly to be avenged of some sickness which is crippling the energies of his body or his soul. I believe the sickness is sent him to awaken that cry. I believe the cry will certainly have an answer. The plague may not depart, the sufferer may go down to his grave with his pain unabated. But if that sickness has brought him into acquaintance and fellowship with One, of Whom he was ignorant before,—if he has found a Friend, an Everlasting Friend,—I suspect he has a better answer than he ever expected. If he recovers, I would not preach to him that that was not an answer. I hold it to be so. God has given him that token, instead of some other, of His presence and His care;—that token, instead of some other, that He is asserting the unchangeable principles of His government, that He is fulfilling, and will fulfil, His glorious threat and promise, “O Death, I will be thy plague.” Let the sufferer, in awe and humility, accept that decree from the Judgment Seat of the Universe; let him learn what is implied in it. That he may do so, let him pray again to be delivered of the narrow, superstitious, self-glorifying thoughts which will make him boast that God cares for him on some ground of his merit, or out of some partiality. There will come an answer to that prayer too. He will be avenged of another and a worse adversary than any bodily sickness can be. That which his proud, evil heart would have taken as a sign of his difference from his fellows, he will find was given him as a sign of his relationship to them, of the common care of the Father of all, for him and for them. He will begin to perceive why Christ, when He came to manifest that Father to men, did not merely preach of Him to crowds, but went about healing this palsied man, purifying that leper, bidding the unclean spirits go from those who dwelt in the tombs. God could not be discovered to the hearts of those who had deemed Him an enemy, unless He came unto them in their particular grievances; unless He proved that He was bearing each infirmity and each sickness. But this was done that He might bring the outcast, excommunicated wretch, shut up in his lonely self, back into the concert of humanity, that he might know he was one of a body, every member of which must suffer with every other, because the Head of it suffers for all. Each was taught that he might cry to the Just Judge, “Avenge me of this adversary who is tormenting me,” that so having his voice prepared and mellowed, all its false, jarring notes at last cleared away, he might be fit to unite with those Saints beneath the Altar, who never faint in their hope and prayer that the Lord God, faithful and true, will avenge the earth of its destroyers. He learns that he has had a Priest on earth, touched with the feeling of his sorrow, in all points tempted like as he is, that he may learn that he has a Priest within the veil Who originates all our intercessions, Who presents them all with the incense of His Own sacrifice, Who sits on His priestly, filial throne, till His Father has put all His enemies under His feet.