A Reflection for Saturday of the Thirty-second week in Ordinary Time
Will not God then secure the rights of his chosen ones
who call out to him day and night?
Find the readings here.
Recently my 6-year-old was having a tough day. “I prayed that I would have a good day,” she said, sorrowfully, “but it was a bad day.”
My heart broke for her, and I longed to comfort her by saying that this experience was a fluke, a one-off, that God always answers our prayers in the time and manner we request.
Today’s Gospel would seem to indicate as much. If a dishonest judge will eventually grant the request of a persistent widow, Jesus argues, then certainly if a person of faith asks something of our loving God, God will “see to it that justice is done for them speedily.”
If I’m honest, my gut reaction to this claim is to immediately refute it with thousands of years of suffering. Does our God not see all the people dealing with long-term disease, seemingly endless wars or ongoing famine? Is there any earthly way to describe the relief from these horrors as “speedy?” What about those from which there has been no relief?
Perhaps trying to put these things on “earthly” time is part of the problem. Our human understanding of time may be different from that of an eternal God. Our attachment to our own preferred timelines and our frustration with what isn’t happening may be causing the sort of unfreedom that blocks our ability to see what is happening, those smaller moments of hope or kindness or generosity in our world that change us in small and then, often suddenly, big ways. And our own frustration, while justified, may also stall our internal growth, the conversion of heart that gives us the ability to live and even thrive in the midst of hardship.
We all feel like the widow questioning the judge at times when we are talking to God. And the thing is, the woman had a right to ask. She was due a response and her cause was just. And so while we continue to pray to bend that long arc of the universe more quickly toward justice, we continue to work, through prayer and action, for an end to suffering that, if not speedy, comes sooner because of our efforts.
