I saw her. The woman Jesus spoke about in the parable we have just read: I saw her. There she was. Dressed from head to foot in her black chador, she was standing in the dust of Gaza in front of a row of Hamas fighters railing against the camera that was pointed at her. Her words were unintelligible, but her defiance was clear: she had something to say, and it was going to be heard. Her fist was raised, and heaven protect those on the end of her tongue lashing.
Kenneth Bailey, who interprets the scriptures through the eyes of someone who has lived in the Middle East for many years, tells us that in these, the most patriarchal of societies, women have a protected status. That might not appear to be obvious to western eyes that see nothing but oppression of women, but what he describes is his experience in the Lebanese Civil War: When it was dangerous for any man to show their face on the street (lest he be shot by the various militia in Beirut) women could go about their business. …older women (in particular) could berate the fighters for the destruction they were bringing to the city (and they were unafraid to do so). The men might turn away, dismiss the women with annoyance and feign contempt but the middle eastern honour culture meant that no harm would come to the women no matter how brazen their complaint.
So, I saw her. Lifting her voice and crying for justice as her city lay around her feet in ruins and the men posed with their weapons: a show of strength. A widow perhaps. Someone with no power, no man to speak for her…and nothing else to lose. The judge in the parable – he who has no fear of God (contempt for God’s ways) and no respect for people (utterly separate from the community in which he lives) he will hear me. He will not dismiss me.
The parable works from the lesser to the greater. If this heartless judge will give in to the pleas of this woman how much more will God grant justice to those who cry out to Him. If the judge needs to be worn down, so reluctant is he to give the widow her due, how much faster will the Lord respond to those who cry out to Him. God is not like the judge: far from it. He wants to hear his people’s prayer. He wants to respond.
The message of the parable is even spelled out for us: Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. So there it is. He expects his disciples to pray and He expects His disciples to persist in prayer…and He expects this prayer to take the form of supplication or intercession.
It’s at this point that we might have a problem. There are, we need to say, different ways of praying and any prayer is better than no prayer. Temperamentally, some of us are ‘quieter’ than others. Some lean towards contemplative prayer. Sometimes what we might call prayer is more akin to ‘self-actualisation’, just sitting still and breathing deeply (no bad things in a hectic world). There are prayers of praise and thanksgiving. Some people prefer to use others’ words in their prayer, some are more content trying to frame their own words. A lot of the time we don’t know how to pray (we’re in good company: remember the disciples asking Jesus to ‘teach them how to pray’). And perhaps most of the time we don’t know what to pray: but take heart, the apostle Paul speaks of ‘the Spirit groaning in sighs too deep for words’ as our prayers are taken up into the Spirit’s prayer for the saints according to the will of God (Romans 8.27). There are prayers of confession and prayers of lament (many of the psalms take this form) but we cannot escape the call to intercede, to lay our own needs before God and to pray for others too.
We sometimes hit a brick wall – or two. Culturally, we struggle with the idea of an interventionist God. We even struggle with the idea that God might actually ‘do’ something: perhaps that’s why we lean towards more ‘passive’ forms of praying (though I realise that contemplatives would say that contemplation is hard work). With all our modern insight and knowledge we view the world as a closed system: there’s no space left for ‘acts of God’ within it. Everything that happens is the result of some process – ‘cause and effect’- medically, societally, environmentally. This is true but it’s not the whole truth. God is already present in ad through all things. Prayer, intercessory prayer, places us in a dependant relationship to God (just as I said on Harvest weekend concerning thanksgiving). Praying for ourselves or others is a recognition that our whole lives are dependant upon His grace. Praying for God to ‘be involved’ in our lives or the lives of others is surely a natural expression of need, a way of our participating with God in ‘opening up’ a situation to His grace, his healing, his forgiveness. Our prayers are like opening the curtains so that the light of God’s presence might shine on someone, some place, some situation.
It’s not that God doesn’t know about our friend in hospital, certainly not that he doesn’t care. No. Rather, he wants us to join with him in how He might strengthen, encourage, comfort and heal our friend. When we were baptised, we were baptised into the life of God. As we seek to understand and live this out, we grow in understanding of what this ‘life’ might mean: God invites us to work with Him in embracing His broken but loved creation with His loving care and that involves the work of prayer. Remember. The whole bible story is that God wants us to be involved in shaping His world with Him. Adam and Eve have a job in the garden. Abram and Sarai, the patriarchs, Moses the Kings and prophets are called to work with God in recreating and reordering the world. So intercessory prayer is an invitation to work with God in bringing His life to the world.
There is no area of life that our prayers cannot touch or reach. But how should we pray? …or rather, for what should we pray? Perhaps it might help to say clearly that God has created a world in which there are some natural laws: He does not ‘normally’ change these! But what is natural can be imbued with a depth, a sense of opportunity or possibility that pushes the bounds so far as to be in some way more than natural, ‘super-natural.’ We might not feel it appropriate to pray for someone to be cured of an illness: but (as today’s service bears witness) we can still pray for healing (cure and healing being very different things).
We also have a clear steer in the scriptures as to the concerns that God has: areas of life where our prayers are not just invited but needed. Old and New Testaments show God having a concern for those who are poor, excluded (by race or illness), those on the boundaries of society. In the epistles we are told (not just asked) to pray for our political leaders – and considering that meant the pagan Emperor in Rome for a lot of the time that means those we like and those we might dislike. The Lord’s prayer reminds us to pray for the coming of the Kingdom. On Tuesday some of those who lead intercessions in church looked at the Lord’s prayer and talked around what this prayer might mean: what does the Kingdom look like -answer that question and it will give you some ideas of what to pray for as we pray for the Kingdom to come on earth as in heaven. Perhaps praying with the scriptures in one hand and the newspaper in the other is not so cliched a thought
We should be unashamed to pray for ‘our daily bread’ (ours…not just mine): the things we need, not the things we might want. The things our community (church or wider community) need. He wants us to ask. He tells us to ask. Might we pray for protection? – not just for ourselves but for the innocent before those who abuse their power – in court, in theatres of war – deliver us from evil.
In the epistles Paul prays most especially for his churches that they might grow in love for one another and in wisdom – in understanding the ways of God. We know the fruits of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control: can we not pray for these things for those we know and love? What do we most need? What might they need? Will God delay in helping His people?
Of course not. But he looks for faith on earth. Just a mustard seed’s worth of faith will move mountains, but he wants to hear our faith in a living and loving God voiced in prayer. Is that too much to ask?