Faith Keeps Limping Towards the Dawn
What if your doubt, and anger, is actually prayer? What if your exhaustion is faithfulness? What if the church’s decline doesn’t mean that we’ve failed?
This Sunday’s lectionary readings tackle two unsettling texts: Jacob wrestling all night with a mysterious figure at the Jabbok River, and a widow who batters an unjust judge’s door until she gets justice. Neither story is comfortable. Neither offers easy answers. And that’s precisely why they matter.
Jacob emerges from his night of wrestling wounded and with a permanent limp, but also blessed and renamed. The text isn’t clear about who he wrestled with. God? An angel? Something else? Perhaps though, the ambiguity is the point, that hint of incarnation, rather than a problem to solve. Sometimes faith means staying engaged with mystery without needing it resolved.
The widow has no power, no resources, no influence. What she has is a refusal to go quietly. The Greek word Luke uses points to something less polite and less comfortable than we might expect. There is no doubt that she is making herself a holy nuisance. She is the Julie Bailey and the Paulette Wilson of her world (google them!) and Jesus says, “Learn from her. This is what prayer looks like.”
Transformation doesn’t erase our wounds. Jacob still limps. Julie Bailey still grieves. The risen Christ still bears the marks of the crucifixion. But wounds become testimony. Scars become identity. Persistence becomes prayer.
Jesus asks a haunting question at the parable’s end: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Not perfect faith. Not certain faith. But persistent faith. Widow-like faith. The kind that keeps wrestling in the dark until dawn.
Here is the call to be stubbornly faithful in Jesus’ things – doing justice, loving mercy, healing service and speaking truth to power, amidst the persistent gospel challenge to prioritise that above everything else.
I love that in Eugène Delacroix’s painting you’re not quite sure if they’re dancing or wrestling, because, perhaps, for disciples, it doesn’t really matter.
You’re still here. Still learning the moves. Still wrestling.
That’s not failure. That’s faithfulness.
#Genesis 32 v22-31
#Luke 18 v1-8
