Luke 18:1-8
I was asked in Bible Study this past Wednesday why our Bible is so long, why we don’t just have a text made up entirely of Jesus’s own words. I wish I’d had the presence of mind at the time to bring up today’s Gospel text, but perhaps I was just saving that teaching moment for this morning. The answer I gave was unplanned, but I mentioned the truth that the context of Jesus’s teachings matters greatly in how we understand his message, and how we know who and what he was and is to us. Without knowledge of who Jesus is in conversation with, we cannot see the nuance, or the thoughtfulness, or the sass in Jesus’s responses. Without knowledge of where Jesus came from and the kind of family and faith community he was raised in, many of his references and sermons on the prophets would mean little to us. And without the little contradictions and interpretive choices made by the authors of the four Gospels, we would have a very two-dimensional picture of how Jesus went from carpenter to crucified. We need the voices of our storytellers just as much as we need their subject matter.
In the first line of our Gospel passage this morning, we get a very direct narrator moment from our storyteller, Luke. Before telling us Jesus’s parable, Luke first gives us a title page, a sneak peek into what we are about to hear. “Jesus told his disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” These words are not attributed to Jesus, they are their own preliminary interpretation. We are biased to listen for one particular point about prayer by this editorial note, and we cannot unsee it.
The parable follows a judge, a man of status who is in a position to arbitrate in matters of interpersonal conflict. A particular widow, a woman who is without the protections of a husband, must advocate on her own behalf to this judge. Eventually, the judge gets irritable and bored with the bothersome complainant, and grants her demands so that she will stop pestering him. Jesus lifts up the example of these two characters and contrasts the motivations of the unjust judge against the loving kindness of God. If the broken moral compass of the grumpy judge can accomplish justice for the vulnerable, imagine how much more will God grant justice to God’s people, and quickly.
Now, because Luke has preemptively interpreted this parable for us, we should get it easily now, right? Obviously the woman who persists is an example of someone who does not lose heart, someone who prays always and eventually receives the justice and mercy of God. But is that really obvious? Does it not feel a bit… icky? There are those who believe wholeheartedly that unanswered prayer is a sign of unfaithfulness, that if you pray hard enough and sin as little as possible, God will grant you whatever you ask like a very judgmental genie. There are those that believe and teach that answered prayer is a sign of God’s favor, that counting your blessings is as straightforward as checking your bank account- the higher the number, the more favored you must be in the eyes of God. And there are those, perhaps many of us at different times in our lives, that have faced the heartbreaking silence that sometimes answers our most desperate and fervent prayers. We may have been as persistent and bothersome and downright annoying as that widow to her judge, and never saw the result we wanted or needed. The God we need, the God Jesus shows us, is not a God that requires convincing that illness or pain or suffering or injustice is wrong. Jesus shows us over and over again that the Way of Life is one of justice and healing and community. So what is the lesson in this parable?
What if, for a moment, we took a step back and did some recasting? Because of Luke’s interpretive note, we want to see this as a lesson about persistence and prayer, which leads us to place ourselves in the shoes of the persistently interceding widow. But what if we’re actually meant to find God in the vulnerable position? What if Jesus is telling a story about a God who persists?
So let’s try it. Let’s say God is the widow, the vulnerable woman in pursuit of justice from the judge. That places us in the hotseat, or rather, the judge’s bench. For the sake of this experiment, we are the unjust judges- we do not prioritize God or the needs of others, so consumed with our own needs and fears and the closest people in our orbit. We look at the plights of others and we ask why they’re not employed when every business claims to be hiring. We assume we know better than others how to parent their children or care for their marriages or aging parents. We make decisions every day that may or may not bring justice to those who need it most, whether it be where we spend our money or how we cast our vote or whose voices we listen to and lift up. Sometimes, we are simply indifferent. If we’re honest with ourselves, this might be an unflattering but honest picture of our hearts on our bad days, at least collectively. At the very least, for the sake of the parable, these are the shoes we will fill in this story.
So we are in the place of the unjust judge, capable of effecting change and working toward justice if we choose; capable of isolating the vulnerable and casting aside the needy if we do nothing. God is in the place of the supplicant, the widow who dons her cloak and scarf every morning and walks to the town center faithfully to open her heart and pour herself out at the feet of the judge. God never loses heart; God always seeks us out and reaches for us with wounded hands. Even knowing the darkest corners of our hearts and the doubts that plague us, God comes to us with pleading and persistence, every moment an opportunity for us to reach back as God reaches for us.
Perhaps the lesson really is about praying always and never losing heart, but not in the way we thought. Perhaps Jesus is teaching us to never lose heart in prayer, because God is already there with open arms to receive our supplications and offerings. Perhaps we are called to pray always because this is the kind of prayer that makes justice possible, the kind of prayer that strengthens us for the heart work of advocacy and reconciliation. This is the kind of faith that wrestles, that strives and struggles and keeps showing up, knowing that there is no place we can go where God is not already present and active. May we always be the just judge. And on the days we are not, may we be reminded that God will keep showing up anyway.
Mother A Writes 