Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost
Year C, RCL
October 20, 2019
North Fork Ministries
Gospel
Luke 18:1-8
Jesus told his disciples 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 opponent.' 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.'" 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?"
The prayer of the widow is a prayer of persistence. Other times Jesus talks of prayer as a private affair, a quieter resting in the presence of God. But when Jesus told his disciples about their need to pray always and not to lose heart, he illustrated his point with a parable that was characterized by unrelenting action. It is the story of a widow who kept coming back to an unjust judge, bothering him, pleading for justice, wearing him out with her incessant nagging. It is a prayer of resistance against injustice in the world.
The judge eventually relents to the unceasing demands of the widow, “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”. Elsewhere the judge’s statement of acquiescence is translated, “so that she may not finally come and slap me in the face”.
Jesus’ listeners would have recognized this judge as the epitome of injustice, itself. Luke tells us that he neither feared God nor respected the people. At the time, public service was not recognized as a profession. Judges were appointed by the Romans - the oppressive, occupying power. A judge received no remuneration and thus was rewarded by arriving at judgments that would eventually line his own pockets. As a representative of the Imperium, with few laws to guide his judgments, he used his own discretion to interpret and execute the law. It was a system that was ripe for corruption and this particular judge took full advantage of the system.
In sharp contrast we have the widow. Everyone in Jesus’ day would have recognized the widow as the symbol of the powerlessness. A woman’s status in society was tied to that of her husband, and with the death of a husband, all position, power, and income was lost as well. Jewish law held that widows had the right to be maintained in their houses by their heirs. However, an unjust judge had the power, and might have the motive, to deny to the widow what was rightfully hers.
And so we have the powerless widow, pitted against the powerful magistrate, the representative of Roman domination. But the widow, emblematic of the underdog, steps into the courtroom swinging. And she keeps on jabbing with the only weapon she has, a persistent punch to the head. With the English translation, we’ve lost a little of the graphic sense of this encounter. After the verbal pounding he receives, the judge relents and agrees to grant the widow justice, “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”. In the original Greek the word used to describe the widow’s relentlessness is hupopiazo – “to beat black and blue, to smite so as to cause bruises and livid spots under the eyes.” If not a knock out punch, the widow was about to give the judge a shiner. And like all people in positions of power. the judge didn’t want to be seen sporting a black eye, and so he gave in to the demand for justice.
The persistence in prayer that Jesus urges here is not simply prayer that transports the pray-er to a state of spiritual ecstasy, or even the prayer that leaves the pray-er with knees bloodied from a night of kneeling at the bedside, but an unceasing prayer of action on behalf of those who suffer from injustice. It is not simply enough to pray for the oppressed. Prayer of this sort requires that we fight, with the widow’s persistence, on their behalf as well. The stubborn and enduring widow’s example points us toward a prayer, not just of persistence, but of resistance as well – resistance against injustice and oppression.
It is important to recognize that the pleading of the persistent widow is not just for what she desires. The parable isn’t about using God to get what we want. Preachers of a prosperity gospel might treat this parable allegorically and insist that if only we pray hard enough, God will fill our baskets of desire with whatever strikes our fancy. Our prayers are heard when we find our desires in alignment with the goodness and justice that God wants for the world. Jesus told his disciples that this parable was about their need to pray always and not lose heart. And unceasing prayer is only accomplished by living a life of prayer; not simply by haranguing God to give us the symbols of an over-privileged life.
There’s a Sufi story about a seeker who was tramping around the world looking to find the true God. He was examining all religions and all communities and all manifestations of religion in order to discover that perfect manifestation of God in life. In one of his trips, he stopped at a monastery and said to the monastic, “Tell me, does your God work miracles?” And the elder said, “Well, it all depends on how you define a miracle. Some people think that it is a miracle if God does the will of people. But here in this community, we think a miracle is when people do the will of God.”
I can’t let today’s lesson from Genesis go by without a mention. The image of Jacob’s wrestling with God until daybreak, persisting in the battle with a broken hip, until God relents and gives him a blessing, is one of the most powerful portrayals of the nature of a man’s encounter with the Divine found in all of literature. Jacob is told, "You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with humans, and have prevailed." Setting up his camp that night at the ford of the Jabbok, Jacob was prepared for a prayerful night alone under the stars, but his prayerful solitude was unexpectedly changed into an action-filled encounter that was to transform not only his future, but the future of the people of Israel, and all of human kind. Jacob offered God no whimpering plea to restore what he and his family had lost, but instead he engaged God with all the life force that was within him. And God’s will, containing a future more magnificent than Jacob could have ever imagined or prayed, prevailed.
Each change we experience in our lives presents an opportunity for transformation of the self. Every new job, every move, every new relationship, birth, death… is a chance to be made over, to live into what God has in store for us. God wants to bless us – every bit as much as he wanted Jacob to receive his blessing. But if we are to receive that blessing in the fullness with which it is intended, we can’t ignore God’s presence among us. Praise God, sing hallelujahs, pray persistent prayers, or wrestle your God to the ground, but engage God with your entire body, mind, spirit; and the promise is that you, like Jacob, will be blessed.