“Jesus told his disciples a parable…” (Lk. 18:1).
This morning we begin with “parable”: Jesus’ characteristic way of teaching, in which a story or an illustration becomes the chief focus for instruction about the kingdom. Parable means to throw something alongside another thing: suggesting similarity and shedding light on it. So, in our Gospel today, it’s as if Jesus says, “You want to know about prayer: let me tell you a story about an unjust judge who finally gives the widow what she wants because of her persistence.” Here Jesus is illustrating and revealing: instead of just telling the disciples that they need to persist in their prayer, he brings this story alongside in order to make his point. The kingdom comes when people persist in prayer and never lose heart.
Now, one of the curious things about parables is that Matthew, Mark, and Luke unite in testifying that Jesus used parables, not only as a means to reveal but also to conceal. The parables will be understood by the disciples, by Jesus’ followers, but not by the rest of the crowd. The reason Jesus teaches in parables is so that people will not understand. “To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of God; but to others I speak in parables, so that ‘looking they may not perceive, and listening they may not understand’” (Lk. 8:10). In this, the nature of a parable is turned on its head. It’s brought alongside not to illustrate but to confuse and baffle.
Jesus tells the disciples that they will understand the teaching, even if other people don’t; but we know that, when push came to shove in Jesus’ ministry, the disciples really didn’t understand what Jesus was trying to tell them. The moment of truth was when the inner circle fled from the cross. They abandoned Jesus even though they were privy to the secrets of the kingdom. Jesus had taught the disciples in parables, but even they didn’t get the point, on any meaningful level.
As Jesus said in Luke’s Gospel, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed…” (Lk. 17:20). If it could have been observed I guess the disciples would have taken note. In other words, the coming of the kingdom of God isn’t obvious. It goes beyond our comprehension. The disciples turned out to be clueless at the exact moment at which the nature of the kingdom was revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection. They turned out to be poor observers of the signs of the times. They missed the point.
At this point, parable begins to turn into paradox, a word etymologically related to parable but with a different meaning. In paradox, something is encountered that goes beyond common belief or opinion. “How can that be?”, we say. If this is true, then other things can’t be, yet it seems on the face of things that the other things must be true as well. Thus, a paradox: a perspectival dilemma that awaits resolution. When Jesus forgives the sins of the paralytic in Luke’s Gospel, the disciples say, “We have seen strange things today” (Lk. 5:26): “strange” being the translation of the root word for “paradox.” For the disciples, the fulness of the truth of Jesus Christ was not alongside their experience, as in parable, but beyond it.
The disciples were taught in parables; they were given the secrets of the kingdom of God. Yet they didn’t understand the most important point: that God would raise Jesus Christ from the dead. They did not understand that, as Jesus says in John’s Gospel, “unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains but a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life” (Jo. 12:24-25). Here, Jesus sums up the paradox of death and resurrection embedded in his ministry itself.
The paradox in our parable today is that we tend to think that the point of prayer is the petition we make, the result that we seek. We pray toward a result, and it’s right that we do so. The widow makes long and loud supplication to influence the judge. At the end of the story the judge gives her what she wants because he is tired of listening to her. We know that the judge is not a very nice person; as Jesus says, he neither fears God nor has any respect for other people.
Here the paradoxical parable begins to edge into parody (a final related word!), a sending up of the widow and the judge alike. They are almost comic figures: the annoyingly persistent supplicant, and the bored and indifferent official who’s hearing her complaint. Parody offers a counterexample, of how life ought not to be, but often is. It too uncovers the truth of our situation. Jesus’ parable of the unjust judge does exactly that, revealing both irritating persistence, and bureaucratic indifference.
The paradoxical point in Jesus’ teaching about prayer is that it’s not the result, but the persistence of faith that counts. We’re looking for results, but maybe the point of prayer lies elsewhere. Consider that when the angel came to the Blessed Virgin Mary with the news that she was to be the mother of the Messiah, and she responded with “let it be with me according to your word” (Lk. 1:38), she stood on the shoulders of generations of believers who looked to God in faith, even without seeing the result.
Our Lady responded with genuine openness to what God would do, even though she could not know what the final result would be. She persisted in faithful prayer, and so should we. Remember how our parable began: “Then Jesus them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Lk. 18:1). And then of course how it ends, with Jesus teasing question, “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Lk. 18:1, 8).
