29th Sunday Year C - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2019 

We are only too familiar with the “unjust judge” type. Under pressure he changed what he had been doing, but there was no change of heart on his part. Either way, he acted purely out of self-interest. That is not justice. It reminds me of how politicians act only too often. They can change their policies or their tactics, not from considerations of justice but purely in response to opinion polls or public protests — no principles involved, no change of heart, no conversion. At least the widow got what she saw as her just rights. I have been involved in protests myself on occasion, and sometimes persistence worked [though more often it didn’t]. Even when it did work, the suspicion that there had been no real change of heart on the part of the decision-makers still left an unsatisfying taste in the mouth.

Fortunately, Jesus said that things are different with God and us. Personally, I do not believe that persistence on our part changes God’s heart [or even God’s timing] — even though today’s Gospel passage may sound that way. At first sight, the passage in fact is not all that clear: “Will not God see justice done to his chosen who cry to him … even when he delays to help them? I promise you, he will see justice done to them, and done speedily.” Which is it? Does God “delay” or respond “speedily”?

I think that it is important to hear Jesus’ teaching through the lens of what he told us about God elsewhere: that God loves and can only love; that God loves unconditionally; that God’s love has no favourites; God is on everyone’s side.

Why then the seeming “delay” so often on God’s part? That there be true “justice” in our world requires people’s cooperation — anything less just looks like it. Justice is based in freedom. So when we pray that “justice be done to God’s chosen who cry to him”, that is not up to God alone. God is always at work. God’s participation is ‘already’, more than just “speedy”. But justice for everyone is a work in progress, and that progress is measured by humanity’s readiness to cooperate with God. God chooses to respect human freedom — hence the “delay”. Justice will be universal only with the coming of God’s Kingdom. It seems that the timing may be up to us.

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find any faith on earth?” Jesus was talking not about intellectual faith, like the things we list in Creeds or in the Catechism, but faith in the sense of trust — trust in his message that “the Kingdom is close”, and that it is “Good News”. We all have heard that before, and sort of believe it, but not with passion. Our prayer, “thy kingdom come” can at times be only half-hearted. We hardly “cry to him day and night”. God’s apparent delay can be a summons to check whether we really yearn for it — and to change accordingly.

If anyone is changed by persistent prayer, it is not God but us. We can start off praying for something definite in our minds, but if we persist over time, even as nothing seems to happen, we may come at times to pray as Jesus did, “Father, not my will but yours be done”. If we look more deeply into ourselves and get to know ourselves better, we may see that what we prayed for was not what we really wanted, but only a possible means to a deeper need that we really wanted. The only thing that will truly satisfy is the experience of the Kingdom.. The more we pray and the better we come to know God, the deeper our trust becomes and the simpler our prayer becomes. Spontaneously we tend to leave the details to God — and relax. It is a great place to be.