In today’s Gospel, Jesus sets up a foil between the unjust judge and God, the Father. There is often a danger that we can become convinced of the lie that God is like this judge who only listens to us out of a sense of annoyance. God can seem to be distant and completely indifferent to our day-to-day circumstances. We tell ourselves that “if only I pray more piously, or do this or that, then God will listen.” And this sentiment that we must contend for God’s attention may not even be overt, but perhaps it may be lingering in the shadows of our souls. Perhaps our tendency to think this way is why Jesus presents us with the image of this judge. Yet, Jesus knowing our hearts presents us with the stark alternative. He presents us with the reality that God is the true judge that is deeply concerned with every detail of our lives. We read earlier in Luke’s Gospel that “God has numbered the hairs of our heads” (Lk 12:7). God cares deeply about you and me. Even that which may seem trivial to us is not trivial to God. And even if we feel distant from God because of sin, we must remember that God is not in love with the shadow of some ideal of who we could be, rather he sees us in our woundedness and filth and chooses to love us, desiring that we always come to know him and our Father better.
The question then that Jesus leaves with us, is whether God will find faith on the Earth when the Son of Man comes again (Lk 18:8). And here we must pose the question to ourselves, will God find faith in our hearts? Do we really trust that God will come through in our lives, as he did, for example, for the Israelites as we see in the first reading, or is it just a nice idea, but does not really touch our lives?
So many of us carry burdens that we think we can carry on our own or that we must carry on our own. Perhaps it is the troubles of a loved one, a wound that cuts us to our core, or the loneliness so common to our modern world. We see these struggles in the widow who has no one to defend her cause but herself. Yet Jesus is calling us out of our self-reliance, to trust in God who is not indifferent to our pleas. Jesus is calling us to have faith and to reveal our hearts and our burdens in constant prayer to God who is always waiting, listening, and ready to receive our hearts, as they are, and give us His heart. Therefore, let us pray with the psalmist, “from where will my help come? My help comes from the Lord, who made heaven and earth” (Ps. 121:1-2).
Isaac Nibourg – St. Joseph Seminary, Edmonton, Alberta
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