Jeremiah 31.27-34, Luke 18.1-8
I remember an advert for the Children’s Society from a few years back which featured a very disaffected looking teenage boy – someone who looked like he might be up to no good - staring straight out of the poster, and the caption was “What he needs is a good listening to”. It has stuck with me ever since. What he needs is a good listening to.
During thirty plus years of ordained ministry I have done a lot of listening. People tell you stuff when you are a priest. You hear happy stories, sad stories, stories of old hurts and regrets and family feuds. You hear extraordinary stories of spiritual experiences which people think no one else would believe. Couples booking their weddings tell you how they fell in love. Baptism families tell you about the birth of their children. And you hear whole life stories of people whose funerals you are preparing to take – both the bits the family want you to include and the bits they don’t – you soon discover that it’s vital to know which is which! You often hear things people have never told anyone else.
Listening is one of the great privileges of ministry, but I have come to realise that for many people it is quite rare to be listened to. There are long waiting lists for counselling on the NHS, and private counselling is expensive, and anyway, it’s not just when we’ve got a problem that we need to tell our stories and feel that we’ve been heard. Being listened to is a basic need for all of us, whether things are going well or badly. It reminds us that we are known and loved, that we matter.
In the parable we’ve just heard we meet a woman who is desperate to tell her story and be listened to. We don’t know what’s happened, but she comes to the local judge for justice against some unnamed opponent. Instead of a listening ear, though, she gets the brush off. He doesn’t want to know. He “neither feared God nor had respect for the people” we are told, and he even says it of himself. He doesn’t care, and he knows he doesn’t care, and he doesn’t care that he doesn’t care. But the widow doesn’t give up. She keeps turning up on his doorstep until, very reluctantly, he hears her grievance and gives her justice. He still doesn’t care – but he’s so fed up with her that he gives in.
Parables, like all stories, invite us to step inside them and try them out for size – how would we feel in this situation, who would we identify with, what would we do? They aren’t always – or even usually – simple moral or theological lessons. They are more like mirrors which show us ourselves and help us to reflect on the world we live in.
And that’s certainly the case here. It’s tempting, when we come across a powerful figure in a parable, to assume it’s meant to be a picture of God. But this judge, who is the complete opposite of everything a good judge should be, certainly isn’t that. Quite the opposite. But he is meant to help us think about what we think God is like. Through this rather over-the-top story, Jesus asks us a very important question. “When you pray, who do you think you are praying to? Is it someone like this uncaring judge? Is this what you think will happen if you cry out to God? That you will be given the brush off. And when you do cry out for healing and are still ill, when you cry out for an end to war in the world and it doesn’t seem to come, do you conclude that it’s because the God to whom you cry doesn’t care? Is this what you think God thinks of you, that you are nothing but a nuisance, a bother to him?”
When we need “a good listening to”, whether that is from a fellow human being or from God, one of the reasons we are sometimes reluctant to reach out and open up to others is that we don’t think they want to hear what we need to say. We feel like we’d be bothering them. We feel like we’re taking up their time and space. We’re afraid of being rebuffed, sent packing.
The same can easily be true of our feelings about God. We all carry around in our minds an image of God. Even if you don’t believe in God, you will have some image of the God you don’t believe in…We can’t help it. We are people with imaginations. If we imagine him to be like this unjust judge, it’s no wonder we don’t want to take what’s on our hearts to him, and yet, if we don’t, how can anything change?
This story is set in the context of a longer conversation with some Pharisees who have asked Jesus to tell them when “the kingdom of God is coming”. They are thinking in terms of some grand supernatural event when God will swoop into history to overthrow the Romans and usher in a new and better age on earth.
Whether their question is genuine, or a trap for Jesus isn’t clear, but Jesus’ answer to them is. He says that “the kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say , Look here it is, or There it is! For in fact the kingdom of God is among you…” or in some translations, within you. They’re looking for a magic wand, for someone to intervene “out there”, but Jesus tells them that, if things are going to change, the place God needs to work is within their own hearts and lives. “Be the change you want to see” we sometimes say – it’s a quote attributed to Gandhi, though he never actually said it. But I think Jesus goes further. “You want to see the kingdom of God around you,” he says. “Then you will have to start by letting it become established within you first.”
We can’t ‘be the change we want to see’ unless we have been changed ourselves first. As God says to Jeremiah in our Old Testament reading, “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord’, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest.”
To be changed like that, says Jesus, we need to pray, to keep turning up in God’s presence – however we do that, whether it’s in church or at home with a cup of tea, or out walking the dog - turning up with our questions, with our doubts, with our laments, with our anger, with our sorrow, with whatever is on our hearts.
Prayer is a mystery. I don’t know how prayer might affect events out there in the world. But I do know that it has an effect on those who pray, changing and shaping us, inviting us to discover a God who isn’t some unjust judge, but someone who listens and hears us. And when we get the “listening to” we need, then we can start to “be the change we want to see” that will change the world around us.
Amen
