Who neither feared God nor had respect for people

This morning, Fr. Rock Higgins reminded us that sometimes the parables are negative examples of behavior, and that the "figure" in the parables is not always God. So it would be easy to read this parable and think: God is like an unjust judge but nicer. It would be easy to read this and surmise that God also doesn't want to be bothered, but will relent if asked, or perhaps relent after asking only six or seven times rather than fifteen or twenty. But rather this parable is an example of who God is not, and perhaps who we are not meant to be either.

The single description we have of the judge is that he neither feared God nor had respect for people, which in its own way feels like an inverse of the greatest commandment. The top commandment we are given in scripture- in Mark, in Matthew, in Luke- is that we are to love God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and love our neighbors as ourselves. And this judge we are told is doing neither of those things. He does not love- or fear- or revere- or experience AWE- at God, and he does not respect or care for people. He only cares for himself. And as my students have started saying: "Many such cases."

I suppose it matters to say that it feels more and more like we are living in an anti-social and irreverent society, with more and more people, more and more leaders who have taken the unjust judge as a positive example for how to live one's life. The sentiments are rampant, decisions made about who is "worthy" or "deserving" of care or well-being, advice given and received about how "you don't owe anybody anything, all you have is yourself" and pleas for help met not with relenting but with derision. We have become or at the very least are becoming a society of unjust judgments.

The gospel flips this line of thinking on its head- we should have, if not fear, awe of who God is and what God asks of us, of Gods design and plan for the world. We not only owe each other a lot but we owe each other everything. We owe one another the coats on our backs and the last coins in our purses. It's not enough just to be kind or generous, we owe one another everything, and Gods vision of how the world is meant to be casts not a shadow but bathes in light, everything around us.

The question is meant to be resolved- both in our minds and in God's so so much sooner than the point of begging or the point of relenting. What kind of a world would it be if help was not simply relented but pre-empted. If we weren't dragged reluctantly into God's vision of the world but ran joyfully towards it. What would it ask of us to be people who not just relent but give, freely, generously, pre-emptively, complete? And how would we act differently if that is who we believed God is too?