29th Sunday 2019
Exodus 17:8-13; 2Tim 3:14-4:2; Luke 18:1-8
“I want justice from you against my enemy.” From how many hundreds of thousands of people throughout the world, and even in our own country, must that cry rise daily? Unjust judges, unjust juries, unjust regimes, unjust religious authorities abound, and the innocent fall victim to them in numbers beyond reckoning.
We can think of the victims of ISIS and other terrorist groups, of the Iranian/British woman Mrs.Ratcliffe in prison in Iran on trumped up charges, of the Uighurs in “re-education camps” in China, of the prisoners in the USA, often wrongly convicted, who remain on Death Row for decades, of priests and others falsely accused, wrongly convicted, or sidelined by the authorities. All of these and many more are crying out for justice, yet their prayers seem to strike a brazen heaven, to quote Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Why does this happen, and where is God for the millions who are oppressed throughout the world? The simple answer, which may appear simplistic, yet which is in reality profound in its implications, is that He is there with them, as He is not with their oppressors. In the prison cells, in the torture centres, among the people who lack the necessities of life, is the suffering Christ, bearing the torment with them, working in and through them, giving them the courage and hope to survive, fulfilling Gethsemane and Calvary for the redemption of the world.
Some years ago, I was lent a book written by a priest who had been arrested by the Soviet authorities and sent to Siberia. In the apparent hopelessness of his situation, he gradually became aware of the presence of Christ, and of opportunities of living out his priesthood in new, unconventional and yet deeply Christ-like and effective ways. In retrospect, he would probably consider this to have been the most fruitful period of his life, despite the physical and mental scars with which he was left.
Eventually, his cries for justice were heard and he was released, but this is not always the case. There is a danger that we can use stories like this for cheap consolation, telling ourselves that good will come out of them, excusing ourselves from taking them sufficiently to heart.
Jesus promises that God “will see justice done, and done speedily”. If and when this is not happening, it is up to us to redouble our efforts on behalf of the victims of injustice, doing whatever we can in practical ways, by lobbying, writing letters, signing petitions, and above all by praying, by pestering God, by making a nuisance of ourselves by our constant prayer to the Father and our invocation of Our Lady and the saints.
We are the chosen, to whom Our Lord refers as crying to God day and night. Like Moses, we must intercede constantly, and when our arms grow weary, as Moses’ arms grew weary, we must enlist the support of others.
And we must not lose faith. “When the Son of Man comes, will He find any faith on earth?” asks Jesus. That question kept drumming in my head in the early 80s, during my brief spell carrying out parish missions, as I knocked on the doors of nominal Catholics fifty times a day, finding faith behind perhaps four or five of those doors. Almost forty years on, as we are all aware, the situation is much worse, Jesus’ question still more urgent. Perhaps it is no surprise that, as faith weakens, justice becomes more difficult to obtain.
So we must never lose heart, as St.Luke comments at the beginning of today’s Gospel. We at least must remain faithful—faithful to God, and faithful to all the victims of injustice, crying ceaselessly to God on their behalf, and crying too to their oppressors, that the justice of God may prevail, not only in eternity, but also on this earth.
