I remember in my first year at theological college we had a seminar on intercessory prayer. The tutor, who joined us daily for the compulsory services of Morning and Evening Prayer, said she was fed up with our prayers. Every day a different student led the intercessions and the tutor expressed how bored she had become of hearing people pray for the same things- the end of the war in Iraq for example- day in and day out. She issued a challenge, did we really think that God was going to intervene and bring about a peaceful solution just because we were asking him to? If we didn’t believe this would happen we simply shouldn’t bother. She then opened up the debate and asked us to consider what we really thought happened when we prayed. And there followed one of the most invigorating debates that I can remember; it didn’t leave us in a very good place as a community as opinion was polarised and our different understandings of who and what God does was suddenly revealed in a way that it hadn’t been before. Forget homosexuality or the place of women within the Church- what we think happens to God when we pray was much more contentious.
Today’s readings might have provided a helpful input into this debate on intercessory prayer. Many people regard the account of Jacob wrestling throughout the night as a realistic depiction of what it means to pray. Similarly the widow who irritates the unjust judge into considering her plea for justice is presented by Jesus as a model of the righteous intercessor. This is all a long way from the notion of prayer as a contemplative, gentle exercise that might be more popular today.
Of course, if we accept this view of intercession as so strenuous as to be almost physically demanding, we have to ask what sort of God is it that requires us to bother him in this way. Perhaps we need to think about how Jacob and the widow appear in these stories a bit more before we can draw conclusions about God:
Jacob was not a good man- in fact his name means ‘deceiver’ and until this point in the story he has got what he wants largely through deception and trickery. He obtained the blessing that was due his brother by pretending to his blind, aged father that he was in fact Esau. His life seems to have been about getting one over on others followed by fleeing the repercussions.
We might wonder if something similar doesn’t happen when he wrestles with his opponent- whose identity isn’t entirely clear. We are told Jacob prevails over his antagonist and will not let him leave until he is given a blessing.
Of course, this encounter is unlike any other that Jacob has had- although he prevailed he leaves the wrestling match with a permanent limp and his opponent has revealed his sovereignty by not answering Jacob’s questions about his identity. Most significantly the opponent renames Jacob: He is no longer ‘the deceiver’ but he is ‘one who struggles with God’- and hence the Israelites are brought into being as a people who struggle with God throughout history. .
Many commentators put a psychological spin on this story; surely Jacob had to face the things that led him to deceive before he could receive a true blessing and be the righteous father of Israel? Taking this line we can ask ourselves what is that we must confront, wrestle with, in order that we can receive the blessing God seeks to give us. Read in this way the antagonist Jacob faces is perhaps not God, but his inner demons.
Whoever Jacob wrestles with and whether we see in this struggle a model for prayer or an account of psychological redemption, it seems that persistence is key. A persistence which is embodied by the widow in today’s gospel reading. A woman who kept coming to the negligent judge to an extent that he feels worn out and grants her justice simply to get rid of her.
But I find myself wresting with the idea of a God who demands such persistence in intercessory prayer. Surely life with all its pressures, with all the decisions and compromises we have to make, is something like a wrestling match already without prayer adding to the battles we must fight.
Well once again we are bought back to issue of what we think is happening in intercessory prayer and how today’s readings help us to reflect on this;
The parable about the widow seeking justice is not simply a tale of someone wanting something so badly that they will not let the judge have peace. The widow was a symbol in the Jewish culture of those who were poor, marginalised and dependent for their survival on the goodness of the community around them. God has commanded the Israelites to care for the widow and the orphan. In The Kingdom of God the widow will receive justice, mercy and peace. So both the widow’s call for justice and that she is a widow, means we must interpret this parable as a call to participate in God’s desire to bring about justice, mercy and peace. The widow’s persistence is the persistence we all need in ushering in the reign of the Kingdom of God.
But still we might ask why does God need us to engage in a process of persistent and arduous prayer if he is sovereign?
The medieval theologian Aquinas believed that God might will for something to happen in the world but he might also will that our prayer be a contributory factor in bringing these things about. So if we don’t pray we might be standing in God’s way. Another way of looking at this is to say that we are co-creators with God.
To provide a concrete example, and in the spirit of stewardship month, it may be that God wills that this Church extends its mission and outreach and that our giving matches his aspiration. If we don’t pray for these things we may be standing in God’s way. So it is not simply that he decides the way the world should be and moves us about like pieces on a chess board to ensure these things happen; instead he seeks for us to participate in the creation of a world where his Kingdom comes. So Jacob might have needed to wrestle with God so that God’s purposes could be fulfilled in him, and in the whole history of the people of Israel.
Archbishop Rowan Williams puts it in a similar way when he writes “God is always at work, but sometimes the world’s processes go with the grain of his final purpose and sometimes they resist. …There are some things we can think, say or do that seem to give God that extra ‘freedom of manoeuvre’ in our universe”. Although we cannot know exactly how all this works “All we know is that we are called to pray, to trust and to live with integrity before God…in such a way as to leave the door open, to let things come together so that love can come through” (Tokens of Trust p.45)
An American academic (Walter Wink) writes of prayer as creating “an island of relative freedom in a world gripped by unholy necessity…A space opens in the praying person, permitting God to act without violating human freedom”. (From ‘The Powers that Be: Theology for a New Millennium’)
So in our prayers this week let us pray with the persistence of the widow, with the bloody-mindedness of Jacob, knowing that through doing so God’s will may be done on earth as it is in heaven.