17th Sunday 2025
Genesis 18:20-32; Colossians 2:12-14; Luke 11:1-13
I love that account of Abraham carrying out a Dutch auction with God, trying to persuade God to spare the people of Sodom. Unfortunately, God couldn’t find a single righteous person in Sodom, and the city was destroyed.
In truth, there are no righteous people anywhere, if we are depending on our own righteousness. As the Letter to the Colossians implies, and as St. Paul states explicitly elsewhere, we have no righteousness of our own: all our righteousness comes from Christ, who has cancelled our sins through His Cross. Even the secular world condemns people who are self-righteous, yet it is a fault to which religious people may be particularly prone, regarding themselves as virtuous and everyone else as sinful. It is a fault against which we must be on guard.
Turning to the Gospel, I have to tell again the story of Terry. It is a story which the Sisters have heard ad infinitum, but it bears re-telling, especially if you haven’t heard it.
Terry was a sad character, dirty and unkempt, who used to do the rounds of the Preston churches—and may still do so for aught I know—always with the same demand: “Some tea—in a cup!” Sometimes he would pay for the tea by putting a few coppers through the letter box; at other times, he would leave a present, often in the form of a heap of soil, though on one occasion I found myself the puzzled owner of a wheel trim.
I suspect that he had been a patient displaced by the closure of the big mental hospitals, and, like so many, had fallen through the net of care in the community. Where he slept, I have no idea, though clearly he was fed somewhere.
One night, I had gone to bed and, after reading for a while, had switched off my light and retired to the land of Nod. I was awakened by the shrilling of the doorbell. Light back on; glance at watch; it was half past eleven. Shrugging into my dressing gown, I made my way somewhat reluctantly downstairs and opened the door.
There stood Terry. His demand was the same as ever: “Some tea—in a cup!”
Half past eleven in the morning is one thing. I tend to the view that half past eleven at night is something entirely different.
“Terry,” I said, as patiently as I could manage, “It’s half past eleven. I am not making tea at this hour.”
“Some tea—in a cup!”
“Terry, you have woken me up. I want to go back to bed. You can’t expect tea at this hour.”
“Some tea—in a cup!”
“Terry….”
“Some tea—in a cup!”
Terry got his tea—in a cup—and I returned to bed, if not disgruntled, then at least rather less than gruntled, as PG Wodehouse might have said. Next morning, I made my way across to the church to prepare for Mass. I opened the Lectionary, and what should be the Gospel of the day but “Which of you has a friend who will go to him at midnight….?” Ah well, at least Terry had been half an hour early.
Thus, I proved to myself that at least one of the parables works in practical terms, and I have often wondered how I should have felt, reading those words, had I turned down Terry’s request. There is surely a moral there, that we have to be willing to take that extra, perhaps unwelcome, step to meet the needs of our brothers and sisters.
But what of the central message of the parable? Certainly, Terry proved that persistence, yes even impudence, can prevail in a human context. But is it, as Jesus declares, equally true of God? I suspect that most, if not all, of us will have prayed for something, and apparently failed to have our prayers answered.
Have we been persistent enough? Probably. Have we been praying for the wrong thing? Possibly, but not necessarily. Does God see the whole of the picture, of which we see only a part? Yes, and so it is not impossible, in the greater scheme of things, that apparent non-answers will have been for the best. Is it true that, whilst not giving us what we wanted, God may actually have been giving us what we needed? Again, it is possible. Any of you who are parents will know that it is sometimes better if you do not give in to a child’s requests, yes even demands.
All of these thoughts are valid, but we must be careful not to be too glib in answering the distress of those whose prayers have apparently not been answered. In the last analysis, we do not know, we do not fully understand. All that we can do is to maintain our trust in God, and to support and comfort as best we can those who may feel that God has let them down.
