I want first to ‘put a word in’ for that importunate widow in Jesus’ parable, and for all who cry out against what they consider their unjust fate and beg for justice – like her, even to the point of annoying others. Her nagging persistence may have been the butt of tavern ridicule in ancient, patriarchal times, but profound anxiety can grip human beings and consume them. Even in apparently ordered schedules of domestic life, work and responsibility we – and certainly I – can fall victim to besetting insecurity that can make us fearful of failure, of illness, or of simply not keeping up with everyday tasks and deadlines. Still more so in circumstances of external instability. We regularly see on our screens the naked fear and profound anxiety in the faces of all sides caught up in world conflicts and disasters. This anxiety is often captured well in the Psalms, and particularly so in Psalm 55, the phrases of which seem to resonate closely with this experience: ‘Hear my prayer, O God and hide not thyself from my petition…..My heart is disquieted within me and the fear of death is fallen upon me. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and an horrible dread hath overwhelmed me’.
Taking Christ’s encouragement to us to ‘pray always’ only on an earnest, one-dimensional level, risks making us self-consciously pious in a way he didn’t intend. Having used the ridiculous spectacle of the ‘unjust judge’ granting the widow’s request merely to keep her quiet to insist that his Heavenly Father will assuredly ‘avenge his elect’, Jesus closes with a serious question: ‘Nevertheless when the Son of man cometh, shall he find faith on the earth’? It seems that ultimately the quality of faith within human beings is of more importance to Jesus than their particular approach to, or pattern of, prayer.
In the Bible there’s perhaps no greater antidote to a static image of prayer as a series of petitions, requests and entreaties to God than that story in Genesis that formed our first reading, of Jacob wrestling with a man until dawn. The text tells us, ‘Jacob was left alone; and there wrestled a man with him until the breaking of the day’. The encounter isn’t sought by Jacob; the stranger seems to emerge out of the shadows. Jacob was no ‘saint’. Having cheated his twin brother, Esau, of his birth-right he had fled to his uncle, Laban, and married two of his daughters. Having always had a difficult relationship with Laban – either cheating him, or being cheated by him – at this point in the story he’s on his way back to his homeland and has sent ahead to his brother Esau, to seek to make peace. We can imagine the turmoil he would be in, having wronged him so terribly all those years ago. How would it go – would there be reconciliation, or would Esau wreak vengeance and kill him in bitterness for his betrayal? It’s at this point of suspense that Jacob meets the stranger, and he goes away from the episode marked for life – with a dislocated hip. This is a true wrestling contest, with each player dominating at different points, and yet by the end Jacob knows that the shadowy stranger he has fought with has been God himself, as he calls the place of the contest Peniel, ‘for I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved.’. Names are key to this whole story. He has gone through his life with a name that defined his character up to this point: Jacob, meaning heel, ‘trickster’, over-reacher, supplanter. When his foe, having already put his hip out of joint because Jacob had the upper hand, asks to be released because day is breaking, Jacob refuses unless he gives him a blessing. But the stranger deflects the question by asking Jacob his name. In his commentary on the passage, Walter Brueggemann writes that, in all the guilt he carried, Jacob ‘would do anything to get a blessing…But for the moment, that request is ignored… what he got was a new identity through an assault from God. Now he is “Israel”. It’s only when Jacob in turn asks the stranger to tell him his own name that, instead he grants him his original wish of a blessing. Perhaps the blessing tells Jacob all he needs to know. He limps away from the scene weakened by his injury, but at the same time blessed, and with a new name, and by implication a new character as well. He is to be a community whose name means, variously, ‘God rules’, ‘God preserves’, or ‘God protects’.
The writer of the psalm I mentioned had dreamt of escape from his turmoil: ‘O that I had wings like a dove, for then I would flee away, and be at rest’. But real life generally doesn’t offer such escape, any more that it offers a perpetual safety-net against misfortune. The psalmist settles eventually to state ‘As for me, I will call upon God, and the Lord shall save me’. Jacob’s wrestling with the Lord until dawn shows a different perspective on ‘praying always’ – of seeking where God is in the very difficulties we encounter – in moments of challenge and even discomfort, and glimpsing the possibility of fresh blessings and new beginnings, even in the midst of failure and suffering. Thus we might find more of the meaning of Jesus’ encouragement to ‘pray always and not to faint’ Amen