Sermon 19 October 18th Sunday After Trinity
Readings: Genesis 32.22-31; 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5; Luke 18.1-8
Theme: Wrestling with God
Prayer is central to the Christian life. If the doctrinal aspect is to be rooted in a lived experience of God, prayer should be the soil in which this cognitive aspect is embedded. And, if our moral and social guidance and outreach is not to relapse into moralism and social activism, prayer is necessary to place these crucial dimensions of our discipleship into the matrix of a personal and communal encounter with God. In brief, prayer is the heartbeat of church and it is this which pumps the spirit around the body. Or, I should say, prayer is the motive force given by God so that the Holy Spirit can freely pulse through our veins and arteries, as it were. The Christian life is thus one in which the living and dynamic encounter with God is to be at the heart of all that we do and are. It is this spirit which should characterize the weekly celebration of our Eucharistic liturgies together.
However, for this to happen, preparation is required. It does not come naturally, because it comes through grace, freely given by God, so that we can come to know and love God in the depths of our being. The Holy Spirit elicits within us this spark of wonder and exploration into the divine mysteries that have been codified in doctrinal statements, and practiced through living out social and ethical norms and principles, characterizing at our best, the Christian community. Compassion and insight, social concern and wisdom are to be knitted together in the fabric that clothes the church, because only then are we prepared for the battle which lies ahead of us.
Yes, battle indeed it is, the life of prayer, because as our gospel reading for today brings home, it is only through persistence that it is properly cultivated within us. Just like the widow in the passage harassing the unjust judge for justice against her opponent, it is persistence which wins the day. And, if this is the case with the unjust and rather uncaring judge, how much more will justice be given to us who persist in prayer to the all-compassionate and loving one.
This contrast between the judge in the gospel and our living Lord is meant to encourage us in our pilgrimage of prayer through life so that we do not give up. Though the darkness may come and the night fall on our prayer life, we are to keep pounding on the gates of heaven until day breaks and the sunlight of the morning arrives across the dew-soaked fields, dampened by the sweat of our brows as we persist in the dry times of our prayer.
This theme of coming somewhat exhausted through the night in the calm and peaceful light of the morning is taken up in our first reading from the Book of Genesis. There can be few so enigmatic of passages in the Bible as that of this first reading. It portrays the encounter of Jacob, who will from henceforth be called ‘Israel’ (which means ‘man seeing God’), wrestling with the man, or angel or God at Peniel/Penuel (which means ‘the face of God’). We never find out the name of the opponent. It is all very mysterious, but struggle through the night, he does. Bizarrely, Jacob’s hip is put out of joint in the struggle, and following the request for a blessing from his opponent, and the receipt of a new name, ‘Israel’, the unnamed opponent then leaves the place of combat. ‘Israel’ then limps away too, having been given that dislocated hip in the struggle.
Read together with the gospel, it is clear that the theme offered to us for reflection on this Sunday is that of the combat involved in the encounter with God, which we call ‘prayer’.
The idea that you wrestle in prayer is one which flies against much of what we might commonly understand about the life of prayer. Whatever else prayer is, it is certainly not a walk in the park! Any serious and long-term commitment to prayer involves a great deal of struggle, a great deal of wrestling with all sorts of things, most of them within ourselves, of which we are not always aware.
In the Christian mystical tradition these combats typically occur in darkness; as is the case of the wrestling of Jacob in the Genesis passage. This ‘night’ or ‘darkness’ is what we would understand as various levels of consciousness, or awareness of self. The challenge of being still, of coming to attentiveness in prayer is one which is difficult in our distracted world. But attention is required in contemplative prayer, and we need to struggle with all sorts of hindrances or opponents to come to this type of concentration.
Such contemplative prayer is beautifully portrayed in the lives and writings of three of our most inspiring of mystical saints here in Spain: Teresa of Ávila, Peter of Alcántara, and John of the Cross. These religious figures have left a legacy of spiritual writings and teachings which have nurtured the prayer lives of countless generations of Christians throughout the ages, and have pointed the way to a certain ‘holy attentiveness’ which is to be cultivated so that the hindrances and blockages can be removed by the workings of the Holy Spirit.
However, when this ‘holy attentiveness’ visits us, and some blockages are removed, the ground is prepared for us to listen deeply to God. Through the wrestling that such a contemplative journey involves, we are prepared to hear the voice of God because the other voices have been silenced in the struggle. For this disposition of contemplative listening to visit our prayer, the persistence of the widow in the gospel for today is required. And, when it does arrive, even though like Jacob/Israel we may still be limping from the struggle, we are then blessed to receive the Lord’s justice which rises like the dawn from on high, as we hobble past Penuel.