29th Sunday in Ordinary Time

In the parable we hear in today’s gospel, Jesus’ point is not to liken God to the unjust judge who needs to be pestered into giving us what we need. Rather, Jesus wishes to contrast the unjust judge with God. If an unjust judge can give in to a persistent widow out of sheer exasperation, then how much more would God come to the aid of those who remain faithful in prayer. But we might ask ourselves, if God already knows the time that is most appropriate to respond to our requests, then what is the point of persisting in prayer – is it not enough to simply pray for what we need once, and then leave it in God’s hands? The following story might help us to answer this question.

There was a certain village that had a cobbler, a carpenter, a blacksmith, a dressmaker, a tailor, a baker a farmer and all the other trades necessary to village life, save for one essential trade, a watchmaker. Their last watchmaker had died a sudden death while ago and he had not been able to train a successor. So with time the village clocks and peoples watch’s and clocks at home started to lose time and give inaccurate times. Some people simply gave up on their clocks and watches and stopped tending to them, while others persevered with their daily ritual of winding up the clock so that they continued to function, albeit badly and inaccurately. Then one day a new watchmaker came to the village and decided to settle down. The village people were overjoyed and brought their broken clocks and watches to him to fix. Those watches and clocks that had been faithfully tended to and wound up every day by their owners were able to be fixed by the watchmaker as it was simply a matter of retuning them. However, those watches and clocks that had been abandoned by their owners had rusted so much so that they were incapable of being repaired.

The reason it is important to remain persistent in prayer is so that we remain in a constant state of attunement to the grace of God. If we let the clockwork within our souls seize up and become rusty, then there will be little that God’s grace will be able to do when it floods into our lives. And so much of our spiritual lives are all about learning to wait on the time of God.

Jesus assures us that God will not be slow in answering our prayers. Indeed, in today’s parable, Jesus asserts the very opposite, namely, that God will ensure that justice is done to them speedily. But given the years, perhaps even decades that we have been praying for a breakthrough in a certain situation in our own lives or in the lives of a loved one, perhaps someone struggling with an addition, or with an illness, God certainly does not seem to us to be acting on our request speedily. If anything God seems to be delaying in responding to our request. So how do we square this seeming delay of God’s action with Jesus’ assurance that God will act speedily?

I think that the only way to remove the apparent contradiction here is to realize that our notion of time is different from God’s notion of time. The Holy Scriptures remind us again and again that our timetables and God’s timetables are often not aligned. “My ways are not your ways, my thoughts are not your thoughts” (Is 55 8-9). The Psalmist tells us that to God a thousand years are like a day (Ps 90:4). This means that when God does eventually answer our prayers after years and years – God has done this in a speedily manner, in other words, it hasn’t taken God a day longer than it should have. In the grand scheme of God’s plan of salvation for the whole universe, all is going according to schedule, and God is speedily bringing about our liberation from all that oppresses us. Even though it seems slow to us, we can take consolation in the fact that God is indeed answering our prayers, melting our hearts and moulding them to prepare them to accept the influx of God’s grace.

We might take the example of St. Theresa of Avila, whose feast we celebrated recently. For the first 18 years of her life as a nun, St. Theresa persisted in her life of prayer without ever feeling that she was making much headway at all. She didn’t feel she was progressing in the spiritual life. Then she got very seriously ill with a bout of malaria that almost killed her. During her long recovery from this illness which saw her endure three years of partial paralysis, she almost stopped praying altogether, considering herself too much of a sinner to be worthy of God granting her favours through prayer. This situation of an impasse lasted four long years, at the end of which, a priest suggested that she go back to praying. She followed the priest’s advice and soon she found herself being graced with deep mystical experiences and delights in prayer. St. Theresa of Avila advanced so far along the path of contemplative prayer that her writings on the subject are still to this day considered one of the major authorities on mystical prayer. She has also been declared a doctor of the Church.

We might ask ourselves, if God intended to give her these graces, why did God make her wait 22 long years before she had this breakthrough in prayer. Why didn’t God respond to her desire to grow in prayer right from the start – which would have saved her a lot of self-doubt and agony and spiritual tepidity. We can only speculate as to the reasons for God’s seeming delay. Perhaps it was so that she might first grow spiritually from her experience of suffering in sickness, from her experience of false humility of thinking herself so much a sinner, from the experience of spiritual dryness before she was able to accede to the delights of mystical prayer. Whatever the reason, St. Theresa’s life assures us that, in the words of a fellow mystic, St. Julian of Norwich, “all is well and all manner of things will be well.”

Questions for reflection

1. Does God’s seemingly delay in answering my prayers affect my image of who God is and what God is like?
2. Am I able to “trust in the slow work of God”, or do I find myself “impatient wanting to skip the intermediate stages” (Tielhard de Chardin)?
3. What have my long years of seeming unanswered prayers taught me?