It’s a healthy British characteristic, making fun of people in authority, particularly if they wear funny clothes, like lawyers and clergy. But, and certainly in the case of the judiciary, it is coupled with ultimate respect and even fear. British judges are impartial and, in a word, just. But, as we well know, that’s not the case everywhere in the world, and hasn’t always been the case in history.
In Jesus’s time, the Jewish courts, often consisting of three elders, did command respect for being generally just. But the occupying Roman authorities appointed civil judges in parallel. And these judges were notorious for corruption. Officially they were known, in Hebrew, as ‘Dayanim gezeroth’, ‘Judges of decrees’, or ‘judges by laws’. But, with a dreadful pun, the Jewish people referred to them, rather not as ‘Dayanim gezeroth’, but as ‘Dayanim gezeloth’, ‘Judges by robberies’ or ‘robber judges’, ‘corrupt judges’.
It was one such judge who was in Jesus’s mind when he described a judge ‘who neither feared God nor had respect for people’. The widow who petitioned him for justice against an opponent was, by implication, neither powerful enough to persuade him to hear her case, nor well enough off to bribe him to get on with it. But the one weapon she did have was persistence, and did she use it! She wore the judge down by constantly badgering him with her plea for help. And in the end, the judge more-or-less said to himself, ‘Oh well, I will grant her justice, so that she won’t wear me out with her continual battering’.
So what is Jesus telling us? Is he really saying God is a God who has to be battered with prayers to get anything done? I don’t think so. In fact, Jesus himself, when he was introducing his disciples to the ‘Our Father’, the Lord’s Prayer, said it was pointless to keep praying with many words. God isn’t a God who can be battered into submission before he gives in and delivers what we want. After all, God knows what we want even before we get round to realising it or asking.
We all know what we want. We know what we want for the world. We want peace in Ukraine and relief for the poor people flooded out in Pakistan. We want the Government to sort themselves out and do the best for our country. We want our friends and relations to be happy and successful. We want our sicknesses and disabilities to go away. We want to do well in exams and our careers, or be happy in our retirement.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of these things, and there’s nothing wrong with praying for them. But prayer is a time for pondering and reflection, and maybe reflection itself is a kind of indirect and implicit prayer.
St Paul had a helpful approach for when we can’t find how to pray. He wrote to the Christians in Rome:
. . . the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, know what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit interceded for the saints [in Paul’s vocabulary that means all Christians] according to the will of God.
So the result of our ‘sighs too deep for words’, in other words the result of our reflective prayer, may be that we shall see things differently. Maybe we shall begin to realise ways we ourselves can help things along. Maybe it will occur to us that our own aggressive attitude could be contributing to that great pool of human aggressiveness from which tyrants draw their strength. Maybe ideas will occur to us as to how we can help our friends and relations. Maybe unselfish and caring things will occur to us that we can do that will make our own lives truly happy. And maybe we come to accept the way things are. And so on.
And, please make no mistake about it. This is God answering prayer. Prayer isn’t magic, and God isn’t a wizard who waves a wand to change the way things are. Rather, if it’s me doing the praying, it may be me that’s God’s instrument for change.
So – Jesus’s story about a corrupt judge who has to be cajoled into obliging a petitioner is for us to see the contrast with God who is his and our Father, who is ready to hear and respond. But not always in the way we expect.
