Scripture Luke 18:1-8
Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’ ” [‘so that she may not come and slap me in the face’] And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Meditation
As we meet Jesus today, he is nearing Jerusalem—a journey that has taken fully nine chapters of Luke’s gospel. One author notes, “In Bible times, a journey was a big deal and an ordeal,”[i] usually taken on foot. If you were lucky, maybe a donkey would give you a ride, but that doesn’t seem to be the case for Jesus. His journey is long, filled with stops for teaching and healing, and also filled with tense anticipation of what is coming: the cross. The journey to Jerusalem is the journey to the cross, and at times, the emotional content of that for Jesus breaks through. The previous chapter ends with an apocalyptic speech, in which Jesus says, among other things “On the day that Lot left Sodom it rained fire and sulfur from heaven and destroyed all of them; it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed,” and, by “Son of Man,” Jesus means, himself (Luke 17:30-31). Jesus warns of people being taken away, which the community Luke is preaching to experienced in the sacking of Jerusalem. Jesus talks about the end of all things at the time he is drawing closer to the end of his own life.
Jesus is on edge. But Jesus also wants to offer words of reassurance.
So, at the beginning of chapter 18, not only does Jesus share a parable with us; Luke provides an interpretation of the parable, right up front. “Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart” (Luke 18:1).
Parables can be so frustrating. Personally, I want all the characters in a parable to be easily identified…this one is Jesus, this one is God, and so forth. So, really, I want an allegory, not a parable. Much simpler. Parables, on the other hand, are slippery. It’s not necessarily easy to understand the point Jesus is making. It’s not always easy to identify who is who. Case in point: The parable of the widow and the unjust judge. On the surface, here’s what we have: a woman, a widow—is she a stand-in for us?—and she is among the three classic categories of people whom the law of scripture tells us to care for: widows, orphans, and foreigners. The most vulnerable in ancient society, and therefore, the ones to whom everyone had a responsibility to treat them with compassion, and to help them find justice. For someone so vulnerable, though, she’s a powerhouse. An unrelenting powerhouse, who is pressing a judge for justice. (Most likely it’s a property dispute.) And as the parable shows us, she really gets to the judge.
And the judge—the character who, maybe, represents God? He’s a caricature of a bad judge. He says so himself. “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” That’s a cleaned-up version of the Greek; it actually says, so that she may not come and slap me in the face.
So, the person we expect to be vulnerable is the powerhouse, it turns out, when it comes to justice. And the one who doesn’t give a fig about justice applies it anyway, to avoid the risk of being publicly slapped by this woman.
Justice can be a powerful motivator. Not long ago, Sherry and I watched a British miniseries called, “Anne.” Anne Williams was the mother of Kevin, a 15-year-old boy who was an avid fan of the Liverpool Football Club (that’s soccer to us Yanks). On April 15, 1989, Anne hugged her boy goodbye and sent him to see Liverpool play an FA Cup semi-final game against Nottingham. She never saw him alive again; he was one of 96 people killed because of a fatal crush of fans in the Hillsborough Stadium. That event became known as the Hillsborough Disaster.
From the beginning, Anne and many other loved ones of victims came to believe they weren’t hearing the whole story of how her son and others died. In Kevin’s case, an EMT said he saw the boy breathing at a time when the coroner said he must have been dead. A volunteer at the stadium told Anne her son had spoken one word: “Mum.” Again, the authorities denied this was possible, claiming that Kevin had died instantly in the crush.
Anne, together with the Hillsborough Family Support Group, lobbied, applied pressure, went on TV, assembled massive amounts of evidence, including video footage and testimonies by witnesses, including one police officer. Anne did this for years. She persisted in this effort, even though, again, and again, roadblocks went up and requests for new inquests and review by the courts were denied, or gave the same answers as the initial investigation. The British newspaper, the Mirror, writes:
Eventually, in 2012, the truth came out after the Hillsborough Independent Panel Report produced evidence that at least 41 victims may have survived had they received treatment once they were pulled from the [crush], including Kevin.[ii]
In April 2013, though she was gravely ill with cancer, Anne attended a Memorial Service, on what was the 24th anniversary of the Hillsborough Disaster. After the service was over, she gave an impassioned speech, in which she said, “It is very, very important that the fight for justice does go on…”[iii]
Anne Williams died three days later, 25 years into the fight for justice on behalf of her son and others. It was another three years before the final inquest for all the victims declared that they had been unlawfully killed due to negligence involving police, emergency services, and Hillsborough Stadium management.
She persisted, much like the widow in her claim before the unjust judge. It is very, very important, that the fight for justice goes on.
Jesus tells a parable about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. After he has finished with the parable, he goes on to say,
And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them.
~Luke 18:7-8a
I wonder, though. The purpose of the parable to encourage the people not to lose heart. Isn’t it possible that the people are already well-acquainted with the slow grinding of the wheels of justice? Isn’t it likely that Jesus has witnessed how people can lose heart? I believe he calls them, “the poor in spirit,” people who are at the end of their ropes.
Scholar Francisco Garcia, calls prayer an “act of faith,” something that even those who don’t consider themselves believers can be drawn to do when they find themselves losing heart. Jesus has just described, in the previous chapter, how very bad things may get in the not too distant future, and he follows up his unsettling warnings with a reminder that persistent prayer is the way to remain connected with God through troubling times. In fact, communion with God in prayer does something miraculous, amazing. Theologian Dorothy Soelle tells us that communion with God in prayer doesn’t lead “to a new vision of God but a different relationship to the world—one that has borrowed the eyes of God.” For those who are able to borrow the eyes of God, justice will become their passion.
I think I’ve gotten this parable backwards in the past. I even said to the Bible Study this week how odd it was, how off it seemed, that the terrible, awful judge was somehow God’s stand-in, and this morning, I don’t think that at all. If anyone in the parable is God, it is the widow, whose cries for justice—whose prayers for justice—persist until justice is, somewhat reluctantly, given.
And if the widow is God, crying out for justice, then, I guess the judge is us—maybe listening, maybe not. Maybe caring, maybe not. But God’s prayers get through to us eventually. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” MLK Jr. told us, “but it bends toward justice.”
Prayer is the heart of this parable. Prayer is powerful. Prayer offers us connection with God, to whom we bring our joys and sorrows, our fears and fury. Prayer offers us a way to not lose heart when we are going through the worst of it. But prayer is also the vehicle through which we can come to know God better—come to know God’s desires for us, for this world, and for this life. Prayer is a powerful tool for listening—listening to the prayers God sends back to us, and to see how borrowing God’s eyes can refocus our own lenses as we look upon the world. Seeing through the eyes of God, we see the need for justice everywhere.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
[i] Mark Abbott, “Beginning the Journey to Jerusalem: Luke 9:51-12:9,” Lectio: Guided Bible Reading, Seattle Pacific University. https://lectio.spu.edu/beginning-the-journey-to-jerusalem/
[ii] Kyle O’Sullivan, “Anne Williams suffered cruel final tragedy that stopped her seeing Hillsborough justice,” The Mirror UK, Jan. 5, 2022. https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/anne-williams-suffered-cruel-final-25861340.
[iii] Ibid.