Fr William Fennelly OSB
In the readings today we are given some understanding of how our requests to God relate to time, our time and God’s time. In both the reading from Exodus and the Gospel passage from Luke we encounter urgent need. In the first reading the urgency is more obvious, for if there is not a speedy sorting out of the issues, then there’s going to be a defeat. Amalek has come to wage war against Israel, and Israel must defend itself then and there. To wait would simply allow them to be slaughtered. There’s also urgency in the widow’s plea for a just decision against her adversary. She does not seem to be able or willing to wait for the judge to take action in his time. She wants resolution now does all she can to get it.
But if they want resolution now, then both Moses and the widow cannot be passive onlookers. They have to be willing to play their part. Our actions, what we actually choose to do, show something of what our desires really are. If we want something badly enough we usually can muster up the necessary energy. In Moses’ case, he’s too exhausted to keep his hands up, so he uses not only his body, but also his intelligence by getting Aaron and Hur to support his hands when he is no longer able to keep them up. The widow, it would seem, also uses both body and mind. She figures out that her persistence will eventually get the better of the judge. And she is right.
When we ask God for things in prayer, we need to be involved, our bodies, our minds, our all. To ask God for something we desperately need makes clear that to do so in a lazy fashion risks treating God as a mere solver our problems, and so not letting Him be just Him. It may also show that our need is not really as great as we think it is. When we ask God for help, even though we put our needs in God’s hands, we show by our perseverance that we are truly engaged, our praying to God means above all not giving up, our active trust in God.
Yet in today’s readings there is another perspective on the relationship between our asking God for things and time, even if it is less obvious. As well as the perspective of our needs right now, there is the perspective, that is, seen from the perspective of eternity. We may think of this perspective, as how time is seen from God’s viewpoint. From the perspective of eternity all of our cares and concerns are seen in a much wider context.
We are reminded of this perspective in this Sunday’s Gospel where Christ speaks of final judgement, to judge the living and the dead, as we heard in the second reading. It is interesting that it’s after he speaks of the persistent widow that Christ then moves on to speak of the coming of the Son of Man, the great event of the end times, the establishment of an everlasting kingdom where the rule of God orders all things.
The widow comes across a bit like Mrs Doyle in the Fr Ted comedy badgering character to have a cup of tea, go on, go on, go on she repeats, go on give me me justice. Jesus tells this story, he says, so that we can pray continually and not lose heart. To pray is to raise the heart and the mind to God, that is to raise the heart and mind to our ultimate concern, our origin and our destiny. This is wearying because the daily round my wants and my disappointments is so much easier to
care about than who I am and where I am going. Is it any wonder we fall back in dismay. To have a goal oriented future vision of our destiny is to have an understanding of who we are, as not being fixed, but rather our true selves are in the act of becoming; becoming different, becoming better, becoming more than what we are right now. The stakes are as high as possible and this is what gives us the urgency of todays’ readings. To enter into this perspective, is not to ignore the issues that face us right now, but to see them in a new light. If we fail
in this, we should not be too hard on ourselves. The scriptures show us that the Lord never abandons us, not even in our greatest moments of doubt. To enter into the perspective of eternity is an invitation to enter into a deeper relationship with the God who ‘stepped out’ from eternity into the vulnerability of time and space in Jesus Christ. It is also to situate our problems into a bigger picture, a bigger picture that can be a great source of consolation, especially when our problems seem to be getting the upper hand. The perspective of eternity reminds us that these difficulties will not have the last word, that our lives are infinitely precious and that God is Lord of all of who we are and no part of us lies beyond his concern.