This is the edited text of the homily given by Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP on the 29th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C + for Life, Marriage and Family Sunday at St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 19 October 2025.
It’s a bit of a headscratcher. Today’s Gospel parable seems to present God as an unjust judge, hard of hearing or self-absorbed. Prayer seems to be about wearing Him down with whingeing or driving Him nuts with loud demands like the protesters we’ve had near our cathedral most Sundays for the past two years (Lk 18:1-8)! It almost reads like a parody of prayer, what sceptics call ‘God-bothering’.
A closer reading reveals something more. First, the judge is clearly not God at all, not even godlike: Christ calls him ‘unjust’ and we are told twice that he ‘neither feared God nor respected men’. Christ’s point in this parable is that if even unjust, self-interested human judges sometimes do the right thing—if for the wrong reasons—how much more can we expect of a perfectly just divine Judge?
Now, if the judge in our story is no model, what about the importunate widow? Luke says the moral of the story is “pray continually and never lose heart.” So, it seems we can learn from the woman’s regularity and perseverance in prayer through thick and thin, even when it seemed unanswered. Does that mean we should just keep pestering God, like she did the judge, till He gives us what we want?
Well, both faith and reason make this clear: no end of whingeing will change God. God is eternal, impassable, unchanging, not a God whose mood is affected by our words or carry-on, not a God to be bullied or bargained with, try as we might. Prayer changes us, not Him, making us more receptive, more likely to seek the right things, more able to see graces when they come.
Of course, there are stories from our tradition of patriarchs, prophets and saints bargaining with God. Sometimes it seemed to work for these holy hagglers, as when Abraham pleaded for Sodom, or Moses negotiated his mission, or Mary pressed Jesus to help at Cana, or blind Bartimeus called out from the crowd. In another parable, Jesus has a guy banging on his friend’s door at midnight to get supplies. Yet at other times we’re told not to test God, or haggle with Him, or multiply needless words to wear Him down.
So, what are we to make of the oft-repeated command to pray ceaselessly? Surely Jesus isn’t asking us to give up family life, education, work, meals, leisure, even sleep, so we can pray all day like hermits or nuns. Lay people can afford a few minutes a day for God-talk, sure, and a full hour at least once a week, but after that they have other responsibilities! Jesus seems to be asking too much.
Mother Teresa once counselled a busy church bureaucrat to make a daily holy hour. The man responded that he was “busy about many things”—good things, Church things, important and urgent things; an hour a day would, he said, be impossible. “Oh,” she said, “I hadn’t realised how busy you were and how important your work. In that case you must do two holy hours every day!” Just the kind of confronting advice saints give! But behind it was her personal experience: that every other good thing we do springs from the wellspring of prayer.
St Thomas Aquinas, himself a great pray-er, explained what ceaseless prayer means. First, he said, it’s about praying at the appointed times. For priests and religious there are particular prayers to be said at set times. For all Christians there’s the year-long liturgical cycle and the weekly Sunday Mass, morning offering, daily rosary, midday angelus, grace at meals, Friday penance, evening examens—lots of options. Even busy lay people can make prayer so habitual that, like brushing your teeth, you couldn’t go to sleep without it! One way or another we consecrate our whole day, week and year to God.
Secondly, St Thomas explained, we pray all the time by desiring God and the things of God all the time, whatever we are doing. So we must cultivate that holy longing.
And thirdly, we can offer our many good deeds, our corporal and spiritual works of mercy, throughout the day as prayers. You don’t have to be a monk for any of this!
Of course, constant prayer requires discipline and effort on our part, and guidance and support from others. That’s a big part of what the Church is for: a house of prayer, a school of prayer, a factory for prayer. All the time, 24/7, the Church is awake somewhere and praying with us and for us. It teaches us prayer, first in the ‘domestic church’ of our homes, where we see our grandparents, parents and siblings talking to God, showing us how, teaching us it is important. When Paul tells young Timothy today to “remain faithful to what you have learnt because of who taught you” (2 Tim 3:14-4:2), he knew Timothy had received his childhood instruction from his grandma Lois and mother Eunice (2 Tim 1:5). Then, as now, the family was the first seminary in praying: learning to know, love and serve God through talking to Him.
In our first reading today (Ex 17:8-13), Moses stands on a hill with crozier in hand, arms raised in prayer, while Joshua battles the Amalekites below. As long as he keeps his hands raised, Israel prevails; but when his old arms grow weary and droop, the enemy gains the advantage. Moses might seem the hero of this story, yet without his brother Aaron and nephew Hur alongside him, holding up his arms until sunset, there would have been no victory. He needed to be held up in prayer by a family, if he was to do God’s bidding and serve his wider community.
Such an image highlights something important on this Life, Marriage and Family Sunday: that there will be testing times, weary moments, when victory seems out of our reach and we might be inclined to give up. But if we persevere in prayer, supported by loved ones, we discover anew the grace of Christ working in our family, friends, Church.
Thirty years ago, in his encyclical the Gospel of Life (Evangelium Vitae), John Paul the Great referred to the family as the “sanctuary of life”. A sanctuary is a holy place, set apart, where people may encounter the sacred and be protected. Of course, not everyone experiences that at home. But the Christian aspiration, at least, is that this first structure of the human ecology is where we will learn to love and be loved, to value truth and goodness, to absorb what it means to give ourselves to God and others.
In a world that often devalues human life and relationships, the sanctuary of the family is a privileged witness to the dignity of human life and the nurture each one deserves. Here we learn that every life is precious, that sacrificial love is possible, and that the grace of prayer can transform us. To the couples here today celebrating special jubilees of their marriages, to their family members, and to all the rest of us who participate in the goods of life, marriage and family by honouring and supporting you I say: thanks be to God for you! May you continue your vital mission of holding up each other’s arms in love and raising each other up to God in prayer.
