On petitionary prayer: pleading with the Unjust Judge?

Christian Century, Jan 29, 1997 by Ronald Goetz

It will not do to diminish God's responsibility based on some imagined limitation in God's power. Jesus' belief in the power of petitionary prayer is based on his faith in the utter freedom of God in and over the created order. Jesus never flinches from the iron logic of petitionary prayer: God can rescue all things, and if all things are not rescued, it is due to God's determination not to do so, not to God's supposed incapacity.

Is it more bearable to believe that God helps no one than to suppose that God helps some but not others? We walk here on very thin ice. At one level the rejection of petitionary prayer might well seem to be a radically egalitarian gesture: I do not wish to plunge myself into an unjust dynamic in which God does not answer all prayers equally. But at another level the rejection of petitionary prayer appears to be not egalitarian but elitist--an implicit judgment on those who undertake petitionary prayer, a judgment made by those with a superior rationalism.

Jesus' daring in likening God to an Unjust Judge reveals how profoundly he took to heart the bitter protest of those who reject petitionary prayer for ethical reasons. Further, Jesus' unsurpassable compassion never degenerated into sentimentality or utopianism. He offered no facile evasions of the brute inequities of existence (see Luke 13:15). Who understood better than Jesus that within the providence of God some flourish while for others life is a day-to-day crucifixion?

The agonizing problem is that, having suggested that God's lordship resembles the jurisdiction of an Unjust Judge, Jesus seems to have painted himself and us into a corner. Yet it appears that for Jesus, though petitionary prayer does indeed open faith up to the question of the seeming injustice of God's reign, at the same time, be it ever so paradoxical, God's responses to prayer--however occasional, however unexpected--are the surest foundation for the uncompromising Christian conviction that God is, all appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, righteous.

Jesus Christ did not come among us in order to be immune to the universal human experience of God's sometimes imperious silence. When Jesus was driven to cry out from the cross, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" he validated in his own agony the distressing power of his choice of the metaphor of the Unjust Judge. Jesus' cry of abandonment by God was also a prayer to God. The depth of Jesus' anguish was intensified by Jesus' conviction that God could have spared him the crucifixion, that the Spirit of God could have whispered assurances in Jesus' ear as he hung from the cross, but God did not elect to do so.

Admittedly, there is darkness here. But we need not read God's silence in history, as did many of our Protestant forebears, as evidence of a dark divine decree preordaining large segments of humanity, who have experienced the silence of God, to damnation. The Apostle Paul offers a reading of the dark side of God's providence which far better reflects what was accomplished by the silence of God at Jesus' crucifixion: "God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all" (Rom. 11:32).