The Challenge of Change

The following appeared as the editorial in our parish magazine for September.

There’s an old hymn that starts with the words, “Through all the changing scenes of life…”. It’s a good hymn, and those words sum up for me something of the essence of life – change. Everything changes, moment by moment, day by day, year by year. And it happens whether we like it or not. Like the change from summer to autumn, it’s just the way things are. We get older, people we know change, or move on; we change jobs, we retire, we have children or our children grow up and leave home. Change is all around us and it is constant. And yet, how many of us expect the church to stand still and never change? How many times is the remark ‘but we’ve always done it that way’ used as if it’s the last word, the one argument that cannot be countered?

Of course, the church is in a strange and unique position. In a sense the church shouldn’t change. It shouldn’t change in what it stands for, what it believes. It shouldn’t change because God does not change and Christ does not change. He is, as Hebrews puts it, the same, yesterday, today and forever. The church stands for eternal, unchanging principles like truth, faith, love and peace. It cannot and must not blow with the wind, defining right and wrong by whatever happens to be fashionable in the media this year. There is a difference between right and wrong, between truth and falsehood, between good and evil.

But the fact the church is supposed to stand firm for God’s truth does not mean it can afford to stand still and never change how it does things, in how it communicates those truths in relevant ways. Sometimes we do need to change how we do things.

Now, a lot of people hate change. It makes them feel uncomfortable. It makes something that was easy into something that feels different and scary. I know what that’s like, because my first reaction to change is exactly like that. I know a new shirt doesn’t feel comfortable at first, and I’d rather keep using the old one. Yet at some point, the old one is just not up to the job and has to go in the bin. If we are committed to serving God, then sometimes that means doing things that make us uncomfortable at first. We’ll get used to them in time, and even forget they once were new.

Imagine how different the Bible’s story would have run had Abraham simply refused to give up the familiar, easy life he had in Ur, when God told the then 80-year old Abram to get up and leave everything he knew and go into the unknown like a travelling Bedouin. Imagine if Moses refused to go back to Egypt when God told him to do that. Imagine if Jesus had turned his back on the ministry the Father called him to, because he preferred the quiet life as a carpenter in Nazareth!

Sometimes, we have to do difficult things. Things we’d just rather not. Sometimes that’s the only way God’s will can be accomplished. I feel very much that we are at a crossroads as a church. Perhaps we are every year when things start up after the summer break. Are we going to carry on just as we have for the past five, ten or twenty years? Or is God calling us to something new? I don’t know what that might be for you. I wonder what it might be for me. Let’s listen for God’s voice, and do what he tells us. It might just surprise us, like it must have shocked Abraham and Moses in their day, just how much God can then accomplish through us.

The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge

The following sermon was recently preached at our morning service in a series on the Parables of Jesus.

Imagine a scene. You’ve got to phone up a big company to make a complaint. It could be about your electric, or your gas, or your phone bill. Or it could be about some bank charges that you just can’t make head nor tail out of. So you get out the bill or the letter, and you phone the number on it. You get yourself all geared up don’t you? You think over what you want to say. You get your story ready. And your call gets answered, and an automated voice says if you want this, press 1, if you want that press 2, and if you want something else press 3, and you try to work out where your call fits into their scheme and then you press 3 and another automated voice tells you you’re in a queue, and then finally, at long last, you get to speak to a person, and 9 times out of 10 they’re in India and they can’t understand you, and you’re getting nowhere, and you can feel your temper rising, and finally you just hang up (or as happened to me once – they hang up on you!) and you decide either to just pay the bill to get some peace, or accept the substandard service you’ve received. Anything for a quiet life. It’s just not worth all the hassle.

Does any of that strike a chord with you? Have you ever tried to get something you want and felt you were getting nowhere? Have you ever felt that there’s a wall of bureaucracy that it is impossible to get past?

Well if you have, you’ll understand the parable of the widow and the judge that we’re looking at today.

You’ll identify with the poor widow in the story, and you’ll sympathise with her overriding sense of frustration that she can’t get her complaint dealt with – she can’t get justice from the system.

Picture if you will the court room scene Jesus paints for us in this story. This is a civil case. A poor widow comes to the court to ask for justice against her adversary. Someone has wronged her. We don’t know if someone’s committed a crime against her, or cheated her out of money, or ignored her rights. But something’s been done against her, and she seeks justice from the court to get it sorted out. And she comes up against the wrong kind of judge, an unjust and corrupt Judge.

The position of a judge in Bible times was in many ways similar to that of judges today. Judges were people who were supposed to command respect. Then, like now, they wielded enormous power over other people’s lives, and of course then, like now, people would look to judges to give them justice and punish evildoers. The judge was supposed to be person of wisdom and righteousness, someone to look up to.

But the judge is this parable is anything but a shining example of justice and righteousness. In fact he is a disgrace. Jesus sums up his character. “He neither feared God, nor respected man.” In other words, he wasn’t interested in doing what God’s law said. He wasn’t interested in doing the right thing. And he wasn’t interested in helping people, or sorting out their problems either. He was in it for himself. Jesus says he was a “corrupt” or “unjust” judge. I don’t think it’s going to far to say “corrupt” probably means this judge could be bought, and he was a man for whom justice had a price-tag. If you could come up with a bribe, a backhander, he would see you all right in court.

That’s the judge in the story. The other character is a poor widow.

When Jesus first told this story, everyone would have realised the signifance of the fact that the woman is a widow. In Bible times, there was no social security, and most jobs were not open to women. So a widow whose husband did not leave enough for her to live on, or who did not have other family to take care of her would be in dire straits financially. Widows were among the most vulnerable of people in Jewish society. That’s why time and time again in the Old Testament special provisions are made, and God’s people, especially the rich, are commanded to look after the needs of widows and orphans, the poor and the fatherless.

But although this was what God demanded, the fact was that a poor widow would not rate much attention from the rich and powerful people who ran her world. A poor widow was a drain on society and didn’t carry much clout.

We don’t know for sure, but I think it’s suggested in the parable that this widow was poor and destitute not so much because her husband didn’t provide for her, but because someone has robbed or swindled her out of property or money. And so she goes to the lawcourt to ask for justice and possibly to recover what she has lost.

But this judge has no time for her. You see, for a corrupt judge, a poor widow really was useless because he knew she wouldn’t have enough money to bribe him into deciding the case in her favour.

The only weapon she has at her disposal is persistence. She keeps on asking him, she harps on at him, she nags him, and pesters him, until finally he gets fed up and gives her what she asks for, not because it’s justice, or because he feels compassion for her, but simply to get rid of her. She’s become a pain in the neck, and his attitude is finally “Oh anything for a quiet life...”

It rings true doesn’t it? We know that keeping on at officials, ‘making their life hell’ to get what we want, isn’t that how we sometimes put it – the constant letters or phone calls in the end usually achieve results. In the end it did for the widow in the story.

It’s a pretty straightforward story. The question is, why did Jesus tell it? What point was he trying to make from it?

We might have expected Jesus at the end of the story to praise the widow for her persistence and condemn the judge as the lesson of the parable, but Jesus was a master story teller. And like all good story tellers, he delivers a twist in the story. Rather than focusing on the widow’s actions, which we might have expected, he actually focuses his attention on the judge, not to condemn him so much as to use him to tell us what God is like.

Now wait a minute, you might be thinking. How can a corrupt, dishonest, sinful judge teach us about God? It is an audacious story. Perhaps no-one but God the Son would dare make the comparison, but Jesus does exactly that. Jesus uses the bad things done by a bad man – in this case an unjust and corrupt judge – to show up the goodness of a good and righteous God.

Many of Jesus’ parables were stories designed to show what God is like. The most famous might be the picture Jesus gives us of a loving Father seeking his lost son in the parable of the Prodigal Son. But this story is different. Here Jesus does the opposite. He contrasts what God is like with what this corrupt judge was like. It’s similar in tone to what Jesus says in Luke 11:

Would any of you who are fathers give your son a snake when he asks for fish? Or would you give him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? As bad as you are, you know how to give good things to your children. How much more, then, will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!

You see? In both cases a comparison is being made. In a nutshell, Jesus is saying here, if even a corrupt judge could be talked into doing the right thing by a widow’s persistence, how much more can you be sure your heavenly Father, who loves you and delights in you as his children, will hear and readily answer your prayers to him. God doesn’t have to be nagged into blessing us. He longs to bless us. He is ready, willing and able to hear the prayers, the cries of his chosen ones, his own dear children. That is the lesson Jesus wants us to grasp in this passage. He’s not saying God is like this judge, he’s saying if even this disgrace of a judge will do what someone asks him, how much more will God, the gracious judge and provider, give us what we ask of him.

So the key to this parable is this contrast between the judge and God.

The Puritan, Matthew Henry, used this passage to contrast the many differences between the widow and the judge on the one hand, and God’s people and God on the other hand. He wrote:

She was a stranger to the judge, where we are known completely by our heavenly Father.

She was alone, where we are many – God’s own family.

She was kept at a distance by the judge, where we are welcomed into the very presence of God.

She came to an unjust judge, where we come to a righteous Father.

She had no-one to speak for her, where we have Christ Jesus himself pleading our cause before God.

She got no encouragement from the judge, where we have God’s own promises that he will hear our prayers and give us whatever we ask for in his name.

She could only go to the judge at certain times, where we can cry out to God anytime, day or night.

She had to rely on nagging the judge into giving her justice, where we know it is God’s delight to hear our prayers.

How much more then should be willing to persevere in prayer, to “pray without ceasing” as the apostle Paul puts it?

So, all this leads us to ask a natural question. What’s all this got to do with us today? Well, we’re fortunate because Jesus explains the purpose for this parable himself. So we know what he meant to teach with this story. As verse 1 puts it, it was to teach his hearers and us Luke’s readers, that we should “always pray and never become discouraged”.

All summer, I’ve been fighting an ongoing battle of wills with a spider who has taken up residence in the casing of the wing mirror on my car. Each time I get into the car, there’s a spiders web constructed between the mirror and the door or the window. Each time I get a cloth and clean the cobweb away. (There’s never any sign of the spider by the way). The next day, a new web is built in its place. Never fails. I suppose a bit like Robert the Bruce and his encounter with a spider, when I think of that spider, I the word that comes to mind is perseverence. It never gives up in its task.

That’s what we’re called to be like in our prayer lives. People who never give up. Who keep on coming back to God in prayer, every day, no matter what we go through. Sometimes the spider’s web is large and elaborate. Sometimes, it’s smaller and tighter. That’s what our prayers will be like sometimes. Some days longer, more complicated, other days, short and sweet, sometimes not in words at all, just inner thoughts too happy or sad for words. But present and persistent nevertheless.

Just before this parable, Jesus was asked when the kingdom of God would come. And Jesus gave a startling answer. The Kingdom of God is here he said, it is among you. That’s because the Kingdom of God exists wherever people like you and me believe in Christ and follow his teachings. In other words, Jesus said that the Kingdom of God was not some far future event that they would have to wait for. The Kingdom of God was already there in the hearts and lives of ordinary people who followed Jesus. The Kingdom of God is here and now!

It has already started, and yes it will grow and grow until it reaches its eternal fulness and glory, but it has been growing ever since the very beginning of history when God promised Adam and Eve that one of her offspring would crush Satan’s head and destroy him. The kingdom entered a new, decisive and final phase when God himself came to earth to rescue humanity from itself through his Son, Jesus Christ. And the kingdom will come fully and culminate when Jesus Christ comes again to earth in glory and triumph to bring about a new heaven and a new earth. That’s the future, but the change in the world has already began. It happens every time someone becomes a Christian. And yet, he is real with them. His followers will still have problems during this life until he comes again to complete the Kingdom project and make all things new, all things joyous, all things loving, all things perfect, forever. In fact, it’s in the knowledge of what is to come in the future, and what Christ has already achieved for us in the past – in the cross and the resurrection – that he encourages us to face the present. Life here and now. To live as his people, remaining faithful and never giving up, resolutely going forward with him as people of prayer.

I think that helps us understand what might otherwise seem like a curious last line to the story. In verse 8, Jesus ends the story with a cryptic question, “But will the Son of Man find faith when he comes?”

It’s really Jesus answer to the Pharisees question in chapter before this one: “when will the Kingdom of God come?” they asked him. Jesus’ answer is, don’t get caught up in when it will be. Instead, make your focus on whether or not you are prepared for it, are living for it and are praying for it. If he were to come now, would he find you or me faithful? That’s the question we all have to consider, and each must give our own answer to him.

For Jesus there is an inseparable connection between faith and prayer. By faith we enter into the Kingdom of God, by prayer we ask God to make that Kingdom grow. Isn’t that what we pray each week here? “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done in earth as it is in heaven”?

Jesus calls us to be people who pray. Who pray expecting God to answer. Who pray expecting our prayers to change the world. And we should be persistent in our prayers, just like the widow in the story. Not because we think that we can talk God into doing what we want, but because persistent prayer is simply one of the ways, maybe even the most important way, that God uses to change things. Because persistence in prayer is evidence of a living faith in our hearts. For Jesus faith results in prayer, and prayer shows faith.

But will Christ find us faithful? Will Christ find us praying? Are we ready to put prayer at the top of our priorities? Or is prayer something we pay lip service to in church and then let others get on with. Is prayer important to you? After all it’s simply talking with God. Is talking with God something that matters to you?

Enthroned in heaven Jesus hears our prayers and knows he has a faithful people still here on earth. When he returns, where he hears prayer, there he will find faith on the earth.