To Not Lose Heart: The Persistent Widow
A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark on the Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost by the Rev. Holly Huff.
I’ll admit it: comparing God to an unjust judge makes me the slightest bit uncomfortable. But Jesus is not afraid to use shady actors to show us something about God in his parables. The judge he describes in this passage is something of a scoundrel: he “neither fears god nor has respect for any person.” This judge is not committed to any principles of justice or mercy, he is in it for himself and that’s it. In this parable he is not motivated by the religious injunction that weaves all through the Hebrew Bible to give special care to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land. He is not concerned with his duty to uphold the law impartially, nor is he moved by pity for this particular person in front of him, calling on him day after day. This mess of a judge gives a just decision in this woman’s case only because of the inconvenience of her persistent demands for justice places on him. “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.” Like swatting a mosquito—shoo fly, don’t bother me.
This man is a sad excuse for a judge, rebelling against God and trampling on other people. Yet even he, impious and unkind, unmoved by justice or mercy, can be annoyed into doing the right thing in the face of the woman who knows her cause is just and refuses to lose heart. "If this judge, crooked as he is, can be convinced to act justly,” Jesus is saying, “how much more will your Father in heaven quickly grant justice to those who ask!” After all, God, unlike this judge, is merciful and kind. And God loves justice. God loves righteousness and longs to set the world right. It takes no convincing at all—God will quickly grant justice, Jesus tells us.
No, Jesus is not afraid to show us God’s character refracted through these crooked figures. Last month we heard the parable of the cheating bookkeeper, who starts striking through people’s debts in self-preservation, in hopes they will welcome him into their homes after he’s fired. That unjust steward becomes a figure of Jesus’s own self-offering, leaving his position to dwell among us, effecting a grace that wipes away any accounting of what we’ve earned or what we owe. God is cooking the books, it turns out, in our favor! And aren’t we grateful for that. God is like an unjust judge, not like this cruel self-serving fellow, deaf to the plight of orphans and widows, but in the sense that God declines to throw the book at us. God isn’t interested in prosecuting to the fullest extent of the law. Grace shakes free of the courtroom framework of determining guilt and meting out punishment and ushers us out of the halls of justice into something new. Out into that field where the father sees his prodigal son still far off and runs out to meet him and embrace him, skirts flying. The older brother, you may remember, complains about the injustice of this reckless love. But the father is beautifully unconcerned with what’s seemly or with what’s fair. These are petty complaints, and justice in the broadest sense is equivalent with what love requires: “We had to celebrate and rejoice, because this brother of yours was dead and has come to life; he was lost and has been found” (Luke 15:32). What could be more fitting, more just?
God loves each of us like that: prodigally, recklessly, wonderfully. We can be confident in God’s goodness—"in God there is no darkness at all,” “not a shadow of turning.” Faith in God’s goodness is what strengthens us to pray always and not lose heart. Trust that God is for us is the heart of the relationship, the singular mustard seed of faith that is all we need. With this trust, we can face up to the many horrors and injustices that surround us in this world, and bring them before God in prayer with the patience of Job. Job, even after losing everything and being repeatedly lectured by his self-righteous friends about how he must have brought it on himself—after all this, Job was certain that God was for him, confident that God was his intimate friend and not a punishing stranger, that God would ultimately turn up on his side and vindicate him. And God did, though not at all in the way he’d expected! God appeared out of a whirlwind, destabilizing everything Job and his friends thought they knew about God. They didn’t get any neat and tidy answers about what causes suffering like they’d been hoping for. Conceptual questions of theodicy, about the existence of evil and suffering and injustice, were swept away in God’s overwhelming, assuring presence. Answer came not in words but in accompaniment, as if to say: Suffering is part of life in this created world in all its contingency, and I am with you in it. I am working all things together for good, and nothing in life nor death can separate you from my love.
Job’s cries for justice were heard and held and answered, though not as he’d expected. Prayer is not a crowbar we can leverage to get what we think we want. This parable of the persistent widow is not about praying hard enough and insistently enough to convince a capricious and unfeeling God to finally relent and give you what you want. The living God is not a particularly finicky vending machine that when cajoled in just the right way will finally shake loose the Cheez-Its I ordered up. Approaching prayer this way makes God an idol to serve our own ego: the prosperity gospel is what the letter to Timothy would call a myth to suit our own desires.
No, this widow’s petition is about justice. Justice is the expression love takes in the world on the societal level, and the absence of justice is a failure of love. A persistent longing for justice is a form of faith in God’s goodness, hope for the coming kingdom of God, and love for all creation. The widow’s persistent prayer is not a matter of convincing God to hear us by multiplying words—Jesus reminds us that our Father in Heaven knows what we need before we ask. Praying always doesn’t require grand speech-making before God. It’s a way of holding every piece of our life before God in hopeful expectation, not losing heart, faithfully returning to our trust that God will care for us in this, too. We might voice this widow’s prayer in those three words we pray together over and over: “Thy kingdom come!”
Prayer is no excuse for inaction. “Thoughts and prayers” have become a tired complacency in public discourse, one that particularly stings when offered by lawmakers and others who might act to align the world a little more with justice and mercy. Still, prayer is the Christian response to tragedy and grief, holding steady in our persistent yearning for God’s justice and the enactment of love in the world. This prayer is the essential undercurrent from which right action can flow. When not undergirded by prayer our well-meaning action often perpetuates violence in its frenzied compulsion. Lord, save us from good intentions! The Lord is our righteousness, One only is holy, we have no power in ourselves to help ourselves, and it is God’s justice we yearn for. God grant us the grace not to lose heart in this prayer.
“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” I think of the widow Anna, praying in the temple day and night, waiting for the revelation of the one who will redeem Israel, set God’s people free, set the world right. She longs for God’s mercy and justice brought to fruition as perfect love, and she does not lose heart. One day after a lifetime spent in patient attending to this hope, she is there when Mary and Joseph bring the child Jesus to the temple. And she holds him and praises God. Jesus is the revelation of God’s justice, love embodied. Human sin and faithlessness, callousness and betrayal are all nailed to his cross, and he delights to share the fruits of his victory with us.
There is another way to read this parable, and that is to see God as the widow outside our door, vulnerable and undefended in her desire for us, unwilling to abandon us to our crooked, unjust ways. No matter how we resist, she is persistently calling us to embody love and justice, disrupting our sour grapes economy, leading us to fruition. God is calling us to let the law be written on our hearts: hearts of stone finally relenting, cracking open, and giving way to the heart of flesh Jesus gives us, so that we become the hands and feet of Christ in this world as Jesus lives his life in us: doing justice, loving mercy, walking humbly with our God. And as we become little and trust God to care for us, praying always, not losing heart, our own crookedness gets woven into the story of grace God is telling through all our lives, setting the world right.
Thy kingdom come, O Lord.
Amen.