Saturday of the Thirty-second Week in Ordinary Time
One way, a common way, of reading the parable from Luke’s Gospel today is as instruction about God and how God responds to injustice. And that makes sense, given that the parable ends with Jesus telling the disciples that, unlike the dishonest judge, God will respond quickly to his chosen ones who cry out for justice.
But notice that Jesus also implores the disciples to “pay attention to what the dishonest judge says.” And what he says is that he has grown weary of this widow who keeps showing up and demanding justice. Moreover, he’s convinced that his refusals have frustrated her to the point that she is likely next time to “give him a black eye” if he refuses her. Note: According to my Bible commentary, that is the more accurate translation of the Greek verb that often gets translated as “strike.”
Interesting. By directing us to what the judge says, Jesus is also pointing us to the widow. She is, after all, the focus of what the judge has to say. So, what are we to make of her? And how does she help us understand Jesus’s teaching?
For starters, she’s not your typical widow who appears in one of Jesus’s lists of who his followers should especially care for: the orphan, the alien, the widow. In a list like that, the widow is someone who needs our help. And given the time, chances are good that many (most?) widows, because they often had no men to protect them in their patriarchal culture, needed a whole lot of help. So, like children without parents or aliens without a home, widows were people in great need, waiting for others to assist them.
That is not the widow Jesus directs our attention to in this parable. She is a woman with a cause, and it is just. She is a woman of great determination. She will not be ignored. While the dishonest judge has all the political-juridical power in this situation, she is not without her own kind of power. If a dishonest judge seriously fears that this widow will give him a black eye, she must be formidable and pack a serious punch.
So, what’s the lesson here? Is Jesus trying to teach us that if a dishonest judge refuses to give us the ruling we rightly deserve, we should give them a black eye? Hmm. Given Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount and his whole “love your enemy” theme, that’s probably not it.
Maybe her location in relationship to power, her determination, her persistent pursuit of justice, and her strength are important here. She simply refuses, despite the fact that she clearly has no institutional power, to give up on justice. And she apparently believes that she will get justice one day.
She makes me think of men and women throughout the ages who have insisted that their case for justice be heard, that the wrongs done to them be redressed, that their plight be seen and resolved. Not surprisingly, many of them persisted because they believed that, like this woman, they would one day be heard.
It was well over 200 years into the struggle to end slavery when abolitionist Theodore Parker (a Unitarian) confronted the horrifying persistence of that institution. Desperately desiring its end, yet recognizing its intransigence, he wrote: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”
I do not pretend to understand the moral universe either. Sometimes that’s frustrating. I don’t want to hope. I want to know that things will come out right. But that’s not following Jesus.
Persistence without assurance. Hope without knowledge. Faith without guarantees. That, it would seem, is the widow’s three punch knock-out (metaphorically speaking, of course).
Lord, grant me the wisdom of this widow and this 19th-century minister that I may, like both of them, persist in the pursuit of justice with hope and faith that God will keep bending that arc. Amen.
-Susan Trollinger