Homily — 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Fr. Timothy W. Castor

Today, we hear the first of two parables on prayer found in the 18th chapter of Saint Luke’s Gospel. It’s known as the parable of the importunate (or persistent) widow. Next Sunday, we’ll hear the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector. Each of these has something important to teach us about prayer, and about our relationship to God in prayer. You see, every relationship is based upon communication: where there is no communication, there can be no relationship.

Did you ever have a close friend who became separated from you because of a job or because of school? You can easily maintain that friendship through letters, through phone calls, through e-mail. But if you stop communicating, that friendship will soon become nothing more than a pleasant memory.

Some years ago, I had a good friend in college named Peter. We were together at school for only one year (while studying abroad in Jerusalem), but we became very close and maintained our friendship for quite a few years. Then, as it so often happens, our life situations caused us to drift apart. For some reason, Peter no longer responded to my letters, and before you knew it, I had completely lost track of him. From time to time, I tried to locate him through internet searches, but with no success. Then last year, out of the blue, I received an email from Peter. He had found me through the Web, and was writing to let me know that he is happily married and living in Florida. Our communication renewed and our friendship came back to life. Many of you could tell a similar story—sometimes with a happy ending, sometimes not. But communication, or the lack thereof, is always the determining factor.

This is true in marriage as well. When problems arise between married couples, it is almost always because of a failure to communicate, or simply a lack of communication. When communication ends, the marriage itself is seriously threatened. Many people wonder why the Catholic Church requires such a long period of time for marriage preparation – it’s a minimum of four months in our diocese. Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret: One of the most important things we priests do during those months of preparation is simply facilitate communication between the engaged couple. We help them to talk about things they might have never even thought of before. And this enables them to build a solid foundation for a strong and permanent relationship.

So, communication is necessary to maintain relationships on a natural level; it’s necessary on a supernatural level as well. In Holy Baptism, we become the friends of God—his sons and daughters through the waters of regeneration. As the Church, we are the bride of Christ—in nuptial relationship with our Creator. This relationship is strengthened through faithful reception of Confirmation and the other Sacraments, especially Holy Communion and the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation. This is how God communicates his grace to us. But equally important to maintaining our relationship with God, is our communication with him. We do this through prayer. So you see how important it is to listen to what our Lord Jesus has to say about prayer. We couldn’t hope for a better authority on the subject than the Son of God himself.

"Then he told them a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary." Right away, the Evangelist tells us that this parable will teach us about perseverance in prayer. It does so in an interesting way. Naturally, we tend to think that the judge stands for God and the widow stands for you and me. In fact, these characters have very little in common with their real-life counterparts. This kind of analogy is a comparison of opposites: God is the opposite of the wicked judge, we are the opposite of the helpless widow. The only thing the judge has in common with God is that both are in a position to help those who come to them in need. But, unlike the judge, God loves his people and cares deeply for our welfare and happiness. Likewise, the helpless widow is similar to us only in one respect: we seek justice in our fight against a wicked adversary. We don’t know who the widow’s adversary was; ours is easy to identify: the world, the flesh and the devil.

But are we really as defenseless as the widow in this story? Are we really as abandoned and alone? Not by a long shot! We are part of a large and loving family, the Church, in which each member is supported and cared for by all the other members, just as the arms of Moses were supported by Aaron and Hur in the first reading. We fight our battle against sin and Satan, not as individual combatants, but as soldiers in a huge and triumphant army, with Jesus Christ as our commander in chief, just as Joshua commanded the armies of Israel in their victorious battle against the Amalekites.

But why does God delay in answering our prayers? Why does he make us wait? Is it because he doesn’t care about us, like the wicked judge? Is it because he wants to be cruel? No. He asks us to wait so that he can show mercy and kindness to all his creatures. He is patient even with those who persecute his people, those who treat us with injustice and contempt. He waits for them to repent and to turn back to him in love. And so, we wait for his answer to our prayers. In the process, our faith and trust in God grows stronger. If God were to give us everything we want as soon as we ask it, we would be no better than spoiled brats; and a spoiled child has little love for his parents. He sees them as nothing more than the source that satisfies his selfish desires. But love grows in proportion to our perseverance. If we remain faithful in prayer, our love for God will increase. But if we give up and become tired of prayer because the answer seems long in coming, soon our love will grow cold and eventually vanish altogether, along with our faith.

This is why the Lord ends the parable with the sobering question: "But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" Will his own people, the Church he ransomed with his Blood, remain faithful in prayer? Will they persevere? That’s a question that you and I must answer, and we’ll do so in how we live our Christian calling. Let’s prove ourselves to be the true sons and daughters of God. May he give us the grace to "pray always without becoming weary." He will answer – in his time, not ours. And may he find us watching and waiting when he returns.

© 2004, The Rev. Timothy W. Castor

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