Keep praying and don’t give up. Your angel is coming.
Just Endurance
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
~ the Gospel According to Luke, Chapter 18, verses 1 to 8, from The Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. 1989, Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers. (Revised Common Lectionary, Year C, Proper 24, 16 October 2016)
In 1999, Malcolm Bryant was convicted of murdering Toni Bullock in Baltimore, Maryland. Seventeen years later, through the efforts of the University of Baltimore Innocence Project, DNA evidence from the case led a court to determine that Malcom Bryant was innocent of the crime. He was released in 2016, stepping out into a moment that he—and surely his family and friends—had prayed for throughout seventeen years.
Seventeen years of praying. Perhaps you’ve prayed for something for a week. Perhaps you’ve mentioned it for a month, every Sunday in worship. Perhaps for something big—like making the varsity team, a dream job, the arrival of a child, or the selection of a spouse—you have laid into prayer for a few solid months. But for years? Or decades?
Jesus’ parable, strange and offensive in some ways, has a straightforward teaching: Keep praying. The enigmatic punchline—“will the Son of Man find faith on earth?”—may mean, Will you have the endurance to keep praying for the things that really matter: the things of justice?
The sorrow of Ecclesiastes can quickly weigh on our prayer lives (Eccl. 4:1-4ff): “All is vanity.” Do we have the trust to keep praying? How long will we, must we, pray for the strife in the Middle East? How long will we pray for the scourge of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa? How long for others wrongfully imprisoned, abused, or oppressed? Do we have the endurance to pray daily for teen pregnancy in our society?
An easy theological conclusion, come by honestly in the gospels (Matthew 6:8, for instance), is that God has a plan and knows everything that has and will go on. Why pray?
Because, says Jesus with equal temerity, God takes the relationship seriously, hears our pleas, and will bring justice. And perhaps it is our very endurance—the irritating persistence of children who may be capable of little good but know the good to ask for—which causes God to respond with new possibilities. Are we naïve and faithful enough to persist in prayer?
Upon his release from prison, Malcolm Bryant told those still wrongfully imprisoned: “Keep praying and don’t give up. Your angel is coming.”* How much more are those words for us, who call on the one higher than any angel?
Holy Spirit, Speaker for our souls, drive us to pray. When our minds have grown cynical, when our hearts have grown weary, when our spirits have grown numb and we are tempted to ignore justice: ignite us! Give us the passion for justice in our divine DNA, especially for the poor, the oppressed, and the afflicted. Drive us to pray. We ask it in the name of our teacher in prayer, Jesus Christ.
~ emrys tyler