I don’t know how to plead, or to pray, like the widow. She persists in putting forward her case again and again until at last she is heard, and there, overcoming all that has resisted her, she finds satisfaction, justice, and rest.
It has been my experience that when our prayers are answered, the change is more often not in what we get, but in what we ask. At some point after years of praying for life to go back to being as it was, we begin to give thanks, however tentatively, for life as it is. Old losses do not abate, but there are things other than loss, in time. We give thanks for the good days without ever denying the depth of pain and hurt. We long to live, even though to live involves continuing to live with grief. This is where God meets us. This is where we find that God was always waiting.
Such a change of heart, such an expansion of life, however, does not require that we ever deny the wounds we have incurred. We should never pretend that we do not wish that some things could be otherwise. The negative sense, perhaps even the evil sense, that we might take away from transformation through prayer, would be that we should have gone from grieving to giving thanks right away, that we should push past all our complaints, and simply be grateful for what we have. Christ provides us with another image.
***
The widow demands justice against her opponent, but the only judge there is who can grant her relief is unyielding, with no respect for anyone, not even any fear of God. For days and days she pleads her case. The futility of her pleas is obvious. There is nothing that can move this judge to act, but the widow has nothing to lose and everything to gain: she will not tolerate the silence that the judge offers to her yearning, and so she asks again.
Now week by week, and month by month, and year by year she asks again. She continues on into infinity, praying without ceasing, and pleading once again her case for justice. She demands it. She will not let go. So, at last, in the fullness of time, she is heard.
I wonder who the widow’s opponent was, and I wonder about the nature of their dispute. It was no good thing to be a widow at that time, and probably it never is. I wonder if it might have been the injustice of her alienation from society about which she made demands. Perhaps she even made her case against death itself, having been wronged by the loss of her companion and her lover. She prayed until she found relief, but we don’t know what that relief was like.
***
The prophets of the Hebrew Bible often used understatement, irony, antiphrasis, litotes, and a range of rhetorical techniques that we might think of as something like satire.
We find this, too, in the parables of Jesus, and in his encounters with the religious leaders of his day, to the point that he sometimes seems to be almost clownishly sarcastic. He makes a point that is obviously untrue, and so shows the futility of another way of thinking, most often one which is concerned with power, authority, or social hierarchy.
A widow in this era has no power, no authority, and dwells at almost the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy. She goes about her life without notice by anyone, and is easily dismissed as a poor wretch at best, and more likely as a disposable nuisance. None of the great and the good will have anything to do with her, let alone give her what she asks for.
So, too, some powerful judge will have no trouble putting a stop to unwanted badgering. Perhaps he has guards who can give him the peace of distance, or he can simply jail her, if she persists in disturbing his life. He is laughably inhuman, full of himself in every way, to the extent that he does not even fear God. He is a law unto himself, and some pitiful speck of a woman is not going to overwhelm him quite so easily.
I wonder, in fact, if this is how we see God.
***
It is not enough to see God as our Creator, but we place around God’s neck also the title of Ruler of the Universe, and we go about our lives imagining that God must have some plan, and that God chooses all those things which happen. We tell ourselves, one another, and God, that if only we could make our case, time would be reversed, loss would be erased, and things would be set right as only we can know. We try to wear God down.
I would say that we must persist, but not imagine that God is reticent. I think of a little child who pleads with their parent to make things all better, and who receives a defensive rebuke to stop asking, and so learns that their parent is not actually as impotent as they are, but simply refuses to grant them that which they most long for. This is not what God is like, but, God, how it feels like it, sometimes.
God is with us, and hears us, and fills us with life, but God will not simply bring back one dead man among many, so that the widow can be a wife once again. We continue with life as it is, and hold space for something new to emerge. She must continue to be a widow until something new becomes possible. She must allow herself to mourn and grieve without ceasing, until she finds that she can also give thanks. She will not forget her pain, but in time she may also have joy.
Dietrich Bonhoffer, who knew well of the urgency of the life, says this about God’s power:
God allows Himself to be edged out of the world and on to the cross. God is weak and powerless in the world, and that is exactly the way, the only way, in which God can be with us and help us.
So it is that God will be with us in suffering, but is not simply waiting to offer us up the victory for which we long. God is a companion in the journey, and not a reticent judge. We pray to God to be heard and to be loved, but our hope is not that a wish will be fulfilled, but that something which seems impossible will, at last, become possible.
In the world of psychotherapy we joke that technique and theory are there to give the therapist something to do while the real work is going on. The real work is the relationship, the unfolding of new experiences, and the slow, slow shifting of what we can ask or imagine. Our ideas about why we should be there give us the space to continue to be there, until at last we are transformed.
Prayer is not the arguing of a case before a judge, and it is not about asking in the right way, but about our genuineness, our openness, and our persistence. We must continue to pray, because this is the most central way in which we can be bound up in the working of God’s power in the world. This will not make us powerful and victorious, but offers the very real assurance that we do not suffer alone, and that God sees our pain, and shares it.
This is the path to wholeness, and this is the only path to healing: that we can share with our Creator, and perhaps even with one another, the reality of our inmost lives.
***
May you persist in your pursuit of a justice that lies somewhere deeper than words. May you set your heart on impossible things, and hope for still more than has been lost. May you let your very soul be broken open, so that God may plant a new Creation somewhere deep within you. May you walk in the way of the Cross, which is liberation from the loneliness of suffering, and the reconciliation of all.