Twenty-second Sunday after Pentecost, October 16 2016
Jeremiah 31.27-34; Psalm 119.33-40; 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5; Luke 18.1-8
Páraic Réamonn, St Andrew’s Scots Memorial Church, Jerusalem
On Thursday in New Hampshire, Michelle Obama lifted the US election campaign out of the gutter in which it had lain captive far too long and set it free to fly. She named what has been most shameful in a campaign season that has not been short on shame: a candidate for president bragging about sexually assaulting women.
“This is not normal,” she said. “This is not politics as usual. This is disgraceful.”
“I listen to all of this,” she said, “and I feel it so personally, and I’m sure that many of you do too, particularly the women. The shameful comments about our bodies. The disrespect of our ambitions and intellect. The belief that you can do anything you want to a woman. It is cruel. It’s frightening. And the truth is, it hurts.”
As I listened to her speak, I thought of the widow in our parable.
*
The story of the widow and the unjust judge is, to begin with, a story about power and the abuse of power. In the world of the Bible, widows are, like orphans and strangers, especially vulnerable. Because they are vulnerable, they are especially the concern of God and they should be especially the care of God’s people.
But the judge in this story doesn’t care. He is an unjust judge, a judge who has no fear of God and no respect for anyone. He violates the two great love commands – to love the Lord our God with all our heart, and with all our soul, and with all our strength, and with all our mind; and our neighbour as ourself (Luke 10.27). Two commands that are in fact one: for we cannot love God if we do not love our neighbour and the stranger in our midst.
But the widow is undaunted. She keeps coming to him and saying, “Give me justice”. She refuses to give up.
He doesn’t learn anything from this. He doesn’t learn to care, or to see the woman as someone for whom he should care. But she keeps coming, and in the end he gives her what she asks, not because he has suddenly discovered an interest in justice, but simply to stop her annoying him to death.
*
God, it needs scarcely be said, is not an unjust judge. But if we are honest with ourselves, it doesn’t always feel like that.
Luke asks, Will God delay long in granting justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? It’s a question expecting the answer, “No”; but this isn’t always the answer we want to give. When we look around the world, it is indeed tempting to complain about the long delay.
Why is God taking God’s own sweet time in putting right all that is wrong in our world?
The passage doesn’t say. Instead, it urges us to pray and to remain faithful, in the sure and certain hope that God will act.
*
Michelle Obama said two things on Thursday that I want to bring together.
She said that “strong men – men who are truly role models – don’t need to put down women to make themselves feel powerful. People who are truly strong lift others up.”
And she spoke of women “just trying to get through it, trying to pretend like this doesn’t really bother us maybe because we think that admitting how much it hurts makes us as women look weak.”
“Maybe we’re afraid to be that vulnerable.”
I want to say that for all of us – men and women alike – true strength lies in the combination of strength and weakness, strength and vulnerability.
Jeremiah speaks of God writing the law on our hearts. The prophet Ezekiel puts it even more graphically: not once but twice he speaks of God performing a heart transplant, opening our chests, taking out our hard hearts, and replacing them with hearts that are truly human:
“A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances.” (Ezek 36.26f; cf Ezek 11.19f)
It’s radical surgery; but it’s what God most needs to do for us.
For only when our hearts are human can we open ourselves to the other. Only when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable can we live as true men and true women. Only in the strength of vulnerability can we stand up straight and live in peace with our neighbours and reach out to those in need.
*
We live in the tension between the already and the not yet. In our New Testament readings this morning, we find ourselves in the trenches, hanging in there even when times are tough, and never losing heart. We need, says 2 Timothy, to “be persistent whether the time is favourable or unfavourable”. We wait with patience for the appearing of Christ Jesus and the kingdom of God.
In our Old Testament reading, Jeremiah gives us the long view, looking to the new covenant that fulfils the old. In the new covenant of which he speaks, the new covenant we believe to begin with the life, death and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth, God doesn’t give us a rule book or an instruction manual. God takes the law and writes it on our hearts, so that he may be our God and we may be God’s people.
God doesn’t give us a rule book, and he certainly doesn’t give us a script. God doesn’t tell us in anything but picture and symbol how God’s purpose for us will be fulfilled. Instead God asks us to believe with Martin Luther King that the arc of history may be long, but it bends towards justice. God asks us to trust with Julian of Norwich that all shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.
*
On April 4 1967, in Riverside Church, New York, “confronted by the fierce urgency of now”, Martin Luther King declared his independence from America’s war in Vietnam. Preaching later that month, he produced one of his most famous phrases:
“I’ve long since learned that to be a follower to the Jesus Christ means taking up the cross. And my bible tells me that Good Friday comes before Easter. Before the crown we wear, there is the cross that we must bear… I’m not in despair, because I know that there is a moral order. I haven’t lost faith, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”[1]
King never saw the arc of history bend far enough. A year later, in Memphis, Tennessee, he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet; and today we find ourselves in the third phase of the struggle for African-American emancipation.
But why did King, and why should we, believe that the arc of history does bend towards justice?
The young Frederick Engels insisted that “history does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, it wages no battles.”
It is real living human beings, he said, who do all that, who possess and fight. History is not, as it were, a person apart, using us as a means to achieve its own aims. History is nothing but the activity of human beings pursuing their aims.
History is what we do.
*
Indeed. And yet we believe that history is also the activity of God working out God’s purpose.
History is what God does. We live in a moral universe, not because we make it moral, but because God does. The arc of history bends towards justice because God bends it into that shape, and all we need to do is follow.
Martin Luther King never minimized the difficulty of standing up for truth and justice and peace. He thought that none of us would have the will, the courage or the insight to do this without a mental and spiritual revolution, “a change of focus which will enable us to see that the things which seem most real and powerful are indeed now unreal and have come under the sentence of death”.
“We need,” he said, “to make a supreme effort to generate the readiness, indeed the eagerness, to enter into the new world which is now possible, ‘the city which hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God’[2].”
We need to be faithful, and we need to pray.
Hymns
Praise, my soul, the king of heaven (CH4 160)
Teach me, O Lord, the perfect way of thy precepts divine (Psalm 119.33-40, CH4 79)
For the gift of God the Spirit, with us, in us, always true (CH4 603)
Longing for light, we wait in darkness (CH4 543)
O God of blessings! All praise to you (Soli Deo Gloria! CH4 177)
Sources
Martin Luther King, “Beyond Vietnam: A time to break silence”, Riverside Church, New York, April 4 1967
Martin Luther King, “The quest for peace and justice”, Nobel Lecture, December 11 1964
Martin Luther King, “Why I am opposed to the war in Vietnam”, Ebenezer Baptist Church, April 30 1967
Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (1844), Collected Works vol 4 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975)
Michelle Obama, “Remarks by the First Lady at Hillary for America Campaign Event in Manchester, New Hampshire”, October 13 2016
Klyne R Snodgrass, Stories with Intent: A Comprehensive Guide to the Parables of Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2008)
Notes
[1] It wasn’t the first time he used this phrase, and it didn’t originate with him. It begins with Theodore Parker, a 19th century US minister and abolitionist: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.” See Quote Investigator, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice”
[2] Hebrews 11.10