I’d Have Two Nickels

Scripture — Luke 18:1-8 (NRSV)

Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Devotion

I don’t know if you’ve seen the meme or heard the saying about an unlikely thing that has been repeated: “Wow, if I had a nickel for every time [whatever the thing is that has happened again], I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s weird that it happened twice.” Well, what we’ve got here in Luke 18 is the second nickel—in this case, if we had a nickel for every time Jesus tells someone to pester someone in a parable, we’d have two nickels. A few weeks ago, we had a parable about a man who goes and bothers his neighbor for food so that he can perform the important social duty of hospitality when an unexpected guest shows up (Luke 11:5-8). Today we have a parable usually called the Parable of the Persistent Widow, about a woman who won’t leave an unjust judge alone until she gets her case heard.

In both cases:

1. Jesus tells the parable to illustrate the need to be persistent in prayer.
2. The person who is persistent is in real need (for bread in one story and justice in the other).
3. The person who answers the persistent seeker does not do so out of kindness, but to get them to shut up and go away.
4. Jesus says that this is how humans behave when pestered, but God will behave better; God will respond to us out of love when we are persistent in prayer.

See? Two nickels.

Despite what Jesus says in my fourth point above, I often looked at these parables as a sort of cause and effect. If we wheedle God persistently, I thought, then we get what we are asking for. Even though Jesus clearly differentiates God’s response from human responses here, I have to admit the picture I had in my head of God was of someone who was sort of grouchy and really wanted me to go away, but would grudgingly help anyway.

And then suddenly, one day, all at once, I got it.

Why does Jesus make this insistence—twice, one nickel at a time—on being persistent in prayer? Not because we need to convince God. God already loves us. Because we need to know God can take whatever we say to him. 

Sometimes when we pray, everything seems beautiful. We have our cup of tea and our prayer journal and our Bible and we sit on the front porch in the morning and we calm ourselves before the Creator and listen for whispers of insight on the wind.

And sometimes we scream at God. We cry. We argue. We pace the floor. We have no words. And I would note that we have, in fact, a whole Psalter in the divinely inspired Bible that is full of people screaming, crying, arguing, and even cursing God as they persevere in prayer.

And God takes it.
And God still loves us, no matter how much we scream.
And God will give us bread. And God will give us justice.

Find all Life for Leaders devotions here. Explore what the Bible has to say about work at the unique website of our partners, the Theology of Work Project. Reflection on today’s Life for Leaders theme can be found here: Persistence: The Parable of the Persistent Widow (Luke 18:1-8).