Set readings for the Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity
2022: Luke 18:1-8 (Jeremiah 31:27-34, Genesis 32:22-31, 2
Timothy 3:14-4:5)
This past week I took part in a four-day consultation
on Christian Ethics in a Postliberal Age. Ethics is concerned with how we
determine how we ought to act towards one another, and how we might proceed
when we are unable to choose for ourselves or agree with one another. This is a
pressing issue in our society. For some time, at least in the West, there has
appeared to be a liberal consensus, perhaps summed up by what have been
identified as ‘British values’: democracy, the rule of law, individual freedom,
and mutual respect and tolerance for others. But values are morally neutral. A
thing is neither good, nor bad, simply because a majority favour it. And from the
concerted efforts of Trump Republicans to overthrow a democratic election, to Extinction
Rebellion protestors, to tax avoidance, to cancel culture, from the Left and
the Right the liberal consensus is being pulled apart.
Is there something distinctive to being a Christian
that shapes how we make moral decisions, even if we, as Christians, differ
among ourselves in the decisions we make? Is there something distinctive that
we can hold out to others beyond the Christian community? Or do our ethics
apply only within the Church?
Like Jeremiah wrestling with the faithlessness of
God’s people and the faithfulness of God; like Jacob wrestling with the
stranger in hope of their blessing; and like Timothy wrestling to apply
scripture to the lives of a congregation who had thrown off such moral constraints;
so, also, we wrestled together.
One of the key ideas we grappled with was virtue. A virtue
is a stable character trait that leads to an outcome. Someone who possesses the
virtue of generosity is reliably generous in a range of circumstances;
likewise, someone who possesses the virtue of courage can be relied upon to be
courageous in the face of circumstances. And unlike values, virtues are not
neutral. There was a time when the Church spoke of virtues—prudence, justice,
fortitude, temperance, hope, faith, and charity—and their corresponding vices.
Might we profitably revisit such virtues today?
In our Gospel reading, we listen in as Jesus tells a
parable to his disciples, a provocative fiction that, alongside his actions,
reveals something about him. In this case, the revelation concerns the life of
prayer, something the disciples have observed in Jesus and will continue to
observe all the way to the Garden of Gethsemane and even on the cross. There is
something about character here, Jesus’ character, which, in turn, shows us what
it means both to be (fully) God and to be (fully) human.
A widow has an adversary. We know nothing about the
circumstances. It may concern her late husband’s land. She could be a poor
widow, whose adversary seeks to swallow up her patch of earth; or a wealthy
widow, whose adversary envies her assets. It could be that she is refusing to
pay her husband’s debts, that her adversary has a genuine case. We should
assume nothing about the circumstances, except that she has an adversary, and
no husband to defend her. In the Hebrew scriptures, God is known as Israel’s
husband, and so we might even see this widow as the people of God in whose
lived experience God feels absent, dead; perhaps they turn elsewhere for
justice, to some other god, and find a judge who neither fears God nor is a
respecter of humans. Parables present us with a super-abundance of meaning.
This widow seeks justice. Justice is a virtue, possessed
by those who are just, who live in right relationship with their neighbours, as
far as it is in their gift to do so. Of course, we need not view justice as a
virtue, we can demand justice when it serves us and not when it serves others;
but the principle of justice is widely recognised as a key facet of goodness,
even by those who see goodness as a flaw. The judge, whose role it is to defend
the widow, the orphan, and the alien living among God’s people, clearly does
not possess the character trait of justice, even as he upholds the minimum
letter of the law. But, in truth, we are not presented with the case: we cannot
say, for certain, that the widow is in the right, that her idea of justice is just.
The judge is not inclined to respond. Yet, eventually
he does so, not out of any obligation, to a shared moral code that has shaped
the life of the community, but out of personal consideration: this widow
refuses to go away, and he fears that it will not end well for him. While he
has the institutional agency, she is not without agency enough to counter his
position. And so, he grants her demand.
And Jesus then draws a line between the unrighteous
judge and God, the righteous judge, saying, if even the unjust can act justly,
if even unjust motives can result in just actions, how much more so will a just
God motivated by a stable character-trait of justice, work to bring about
justice for his chosen ones, even in the face of great injustice? But as the
Son of Man enters these earthly situations, will he find faith? Will he
discover a people shaped by persevering prayer, or a people who have given up
hope?
The three theological virtues are faith, hope, and
charity. They describe a way of being in the world that is faithful, hopeful, and
self-sacrificially giving of loving-kindness. The kind of person God is. The
kind of person humans are created to be, and the Church is redeemed to be. These
three virtues, and most of all charity, give meaning and purpose to every other
virtue. And over again in scripture we see women and men wrestle with what it
is to be virtuous. For it is in wrestling, with adversity or with an adversary,
that we grow, in faithfulness, hopefulness, loving-kindness. It is in wrestling
that our vices—our avarice or our laziness, our deceit, our lust or our fear,
our gluttony, our pride, our anger, our envy—are overthrown. This is, surely,
at least in part why God, who answers prayer speedily, does not answer straight
away. We are formed in the wrestling.
Last night I sat in the Ship Isis talking with two
other men staring down our sixth decade. We spoke, openly, of how the pandemic
had defeated us, one unable to go about his work, the other overwhelmed by too
much work, and how that forced us to re-evaluate who we were as grandsons and sons,
husbands, and fathers, neither dependent—which denies our dignity—nor
independent—which denies our humanity—but inter-dependent. Neither heroes nor
failures. We spoke of the things we had done, or sought to do, for our
children, to lay down foundations for them: one, wanting for them a better
life; one, that they should be happy; me, that whatever my children face, good
or evil, they would be equipped to respond for good not evil. We spoke, in
other words, of faith, hope, and charity. Of how we had been unmade and given a
new start. And, whether they would name it this way or not, our conversation,
in the hearing of God who listens attentively to our pain and who responds for
our good, was a night of prayer.
