Word to the Wise
Saturday, November 14, 2009 - Saturday in the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
[Wisdom 18:14-16; 19:6-9 and Luke 18:1-8]Jesus told his disciples a parable about the necessity for them to pray always without becoming weary...[Luke]
The story of the widow nagging the unjust judge carries echos of such Old Testament ladies like Ruth and Tamar who showed wisdom in acting on their own behalf! The Gospel of Luke has Jesus warning that his return is not something that can be predicted in terms of exact dates and times. Nevertheless the community should pray and live in the light of that promised event and that God will keep that promise! There is an element of humor that Jesus' audience would have recognized. In a society where "honor and shame" are a powerful social force, the widow was "shaming" the judge in public! If such a dishonest character can be shamed into giving justice, should not we be confident that a good and loving God will do so! We in the western world tend to think of time in terms of minutes, hours, days, months and years. The Greeks called this notion of time, chronos (think of chronology). But there is another way of looking at time, which the Greeks called kairos. Our nearest notion of that is expressed in the word timing or the appropriate time. The Book of Wisdom, in the first scripture today, hints at this in the first lines: When peaceful stillness compassed everything and the night in its swift course was half spent.... It's very easy to get into a sort of "half sleep" and get lazy about Christian life. That is why the gospel today ends with the question,"But when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? The answer to that question is up to us!!! AMEN
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