Text: Luke 18:1-8

The parable of the persistent widow or the unjust judge, depending on whom you place the emphasis, can be linked to a preceding parable in Luke’s gospel - that of the friend who asked his friend for help in the middle of the night - and the one that follows immediately about the Pharisee and tax collector who go to the temple to pray. In each of these tales, Jesus tries to teach the disciples something about persistence, prayer and power. We will consider the Pharisee and the tax collector next week; today we will focus on the persistent widow with a nod to the midnight visitor.

In order to understand Jesus’ message contained in these ancient texts, we need to understand something of the context. Immediately following his account of the Jesus Prayer, the writer of Luke has Jesus sharing this parable: “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs” (Luke 11:5-8.)

Like the widow in today’s text, it’s the persistence of the one who pleads at midnight that gets results, though the appeal is based on the rightness or justice of the request. It may be, in the process, the one with power is somehow shamed into doing the right or just thing. At least part of the message in these two tales is that persistence in calling for justice, willingness to bear faithful witness, even in the face of hostility and disrespect, of selfishness and victimizing blame, has the potential power to change one’s circumstances and even transform one’s life.

Jesus tells these tales in the midst of teaching his followers about prayer. New Testament scholar, John Donohue says of these parables they “depict in imaginative form distinctive attitudes that should characterize Christian prayer. It is to be bold and courageous whether arising from the need to help a friend or to seek justice in the face of evil. Prayer is to be persistent in the face of opposition, without losing heart, and with the confidence that [God] will grant the Holy Spirit” (John R. Donohue, The Gospel in Parables, p. 187.) “Take heart,” Jesus says, encouraging his followers to keep on keeping on, in spite of adversity. When he comes again he wants to find them faithful - not just professing faith, assenting to some set of beliefs - but living faithfully, whole heartedly steeped in prayer and a persistent quest for justice and righteousness.

Now we could play the widow’s tale for laughs. There is some possibility that Jesus’ listeners might have found humor here. The judge is clearly a reprobate and a rascal – dishonest, disinterested and disrespectful. We could play this as a reality show, like People’s Court or Judge Judy or Judge Hatchett, with a flamboyant, self-absorbed, ego-inflated judge just ripe for the picking in his arrogance and pomposity. Maybe Gale Gordon or William Shatner could play the judge; the widow, played by Fran Drescher or Cloris Leachman, could be shrewd and shrill, clever and annoying, as she worked the judge’s last nerve and sabotaged the system to get her judgment. The poor, deflated judge, outwitted and exposed, would finally give in in order to avoid further humiliation and to save what little face he had left.

But, ultimately, the widow in the parable is not a comic figure, if we look beneath the surface of the story and hear hers as a voice intimately related to the voices in the contemporary word. Victims of domestic violence and other forms of abuse are hardly material for stand-up. No one was laughing at the litany drafted by the World Student Christian Federation for International Women’s Day. Widows in biblical texts, both in the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, represent the poor and the disenfranchised. They not only suffer the indignity of being women; they are women without husbands, without men to justify their existence, to protect and support them, to plead their case.

Our widow’s scene was probably more like this: she was exhausted, but she was also desperate. What else could she do? Where else could she turn? If she couldn’t get the judge to rule in her favor, she would be reduced to begging or…well, you get the picture. Shuddering at the alternative, she defiantly asserted that there was no way she would let her children starve. She would go once more before the judge and plead her case. Surely he would see the justice of her claim, could see how her brother-in-law was cheating her children out of their inheritance. The judge only had to see the injustice to grant her petition. And so, once more, she dressed in her shabby best and headed for court.

Now she was most likely not pleading her case within the Jewish community. There her case would have been heard by a tribunal of elders – one representing the plaintiff, one the defendant and one neutral. Jesus’ listeners would have understood the single judge system, then, as being the work of Herod or the Romans who hired magistrates to run public courts. These courts were notoriously unjust. One’s case was typically won by the size of the bribe one offered to the judge.

H. B. Tristram offers this vivid account of such a court in the Middle East of the late nineteenth century: “Opposite the entrance sat the Cadi, half buried in cushions, and surrounded by secretaries. The front of the hall was crowded with people, each demanding that his case should be heard first. The wiser ones whispered to the secretaries and slipped bribes across to them, and had their business dispatched quickly. In the meantime, a poor woman broke through the orderly proceedings with loud cries for justice. She was sternly bidden to be quiet, and reproachfully told that she came every day. ‘And so I will do,’ she loudly exclaimed, ‘until the Cadi hears my case.’ At length, at the end of the session, the Cadi impatiently asked, ‘What does the woman want?’ Her story was soon told. The tax-collector was demanding payment from her, although her only son was on military service. The case was quickly decided, and her patience was rewarded. If she had had money to pay the clerk, she would have obtained justice much sooner. It is an exact analogy to Luke 18,” Tristram argues. (H. B. Tristram, Eastern Customs in Bible Lands, p. 228, quoted in Joachim Jeremias, Rediscovering the Parables, pp. 122-123, n.)

The widow of our parable is not typical of the times. Robert Tannehill calls her a “demanding, ‘uppity’ woman” (Robert Tannehill, Luke, p.263.) We have established that widows in this cultural setting would have been seen as powerless victims of injustice and exploitation. What is shocking about Jesus’ widow, what is attention-grabbing for Jesus’ listeners, is that she does not behave as expected. For whatever reasons – perhaps from desperation, perhaps from an innate sense of the power contained in seeing clearly what is just, perhaps from a strong sense of her own self-worth, perhaps from all this and more – she stands up to the unjust judge, challenges the corruption of the system and actually wins her case. For whatever reasons, the judge is affected and a crack is made in the unjust system. Here power comes from a surprising source, from an unexpected direction, from a faithful and persistent witness to the truth.

Donohue, again, asserts that “The widow who…evokes the image of the powerless and vulnerable victim of more powerful people, while here a subject of injustice, is hardly powerless and vulnerable. She shatters convention by going alone to directly confront the judge; she is publicly persistent in demanding her rights; and the imagery from one of the more violent athletic contests (boxing) shatters the stereotype of the vulnerable widow. [That is, when the judge gives into her, his response is quite literally something like, ‘because this widow is ‘working me over’ I will recognize her rights, so she doesn’t give me a black eye by her unwillingness to give up.] The hearers are confronted with a new vision of reality, inaugurated by God’s reign, where victims claim their rights and seek justice – often in an unsettling manner” (Donohue, p. 184.)

The writer of Luke places this parable in the context of Jesus’ encouraging his disciples to “pray always and not to lose heart.” He wants them – and us – to understand that God’s realm is here and now, even when it may not seem so. He wants us to know that God is present among us, here and now, bringing justice and doing good. Through prayer and witness and work we partner with God to make God’s way known and God’s realm ever more apparent. Walter Wink says of prayer that “We have long accepted that God is limited by our freedom…Our prayers are the necessary opening that allows God to act without violating our freedom. Prayer is the ultimate act of relationship with God” (Walter Wink, Engaging the Powers.) And Donohue, once more points out that “Only through prayer can fidelity (faith) be assured. By inserting the parable of the Widow and the Judge between the exhortation to prayer and an admonition to fidelity (18:8), Luke understands continual prayer not simply as passively waiting but as the active quest for justice” (Donohue, p. 185.) Walter Wink puts it this way, “The act of praying is itself one of the indispensable means by which we engage the Powers. It is, in fact, that engagement at its most fundamental level, where their secret spell over us is broken and we are reestablished in a bit more of that freedom which is our birthright and our potential.”

In both the parable of the friend at midnight and that of the pleading widow, Jesus makes the point that, if your irritated, surly friend, awakened from sound sleep in the middle of the night, will do the right thing; if an unjust judge, who has neither fear of God or respect for people, will enact justice, how much more will God, who is all about love and compassion, bring righteousness and justice into the midst of our lives.

In a comment consonant with the widow’s behavior, Rudolph Bultmann defines prayer in a way that challenges our more traditional images. He says, “…prayer is not to bring the petitioner’s will into submission to the unchanging will of God, but prayer is to move God to do something He otherwise would not do” (Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word, p. 185.) In fact, he goes so far as to say, “Praying is rattling God’s cage and waking God up and setting God free and giving this famished God water and cutting the ropes off God’s hands and the manacles off God’s feet and the caked sweat from God’s eyes and then watching God.”

Perhaps this is dramatic overstatement on Bultmann’s part, for we have been taught to kneel humbly and pray, “Thy will be done.” Still, like Jesus, Bultmann, Donohue and Wink may be encouraging us to take heart and pray always, because, in that persistent activity, we might actually unleash amazing power into our lives and into the world, power that can transform the Powers and bring justice to the earth. If we link Bultmann’s notion of the power to wake God up, to change God’s mind to what Walter Wink said about “Our prayers [being] the necessary opening that allows God to act without violating our freedom” and that “Prayer is the ultimate act of partnership with God,” it may be that this parable is really about our relationship with God. It may be saying something about bringing ourselves into alignment God through constant prayer, about a shared changing of minds, about a mutual waking up, as we find ourselves working together to bring about a day of justice in which there will be no more victims – of greed and extortion, of disrespect and prejudice and hatred, of domestic violence and abuse of children, of wars and rumors of wars, of neglected widows and orphans and refugees, of apathy and carelessness. Listen to this persistent, prayerful and powerful widow; take heart from her testimony and pray that she may help to lead us home to the realm of justice and right-living. Amen.