Pentecost 20

May my words and my thoughts be acceptable to you, O Lord, my refuge and my redeemer. (Psalm 19:14)

SEASON: Pentecost 20
PROPER: 24 C
PLACE: St. John's Parish, Kingsville
DATE: October 18, 1998

TEXT: Luke18:1-8a - The Parable of the Unjust Judge

"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."

ISSUE: The parable argues from the lesser to the greater. If a scandalous shameless judge can ultimately be persuaded to give just, how much more will a sensitive, caring, and compassionate God respond to his people's cries for help? Luke leads us to believe that we must be persistent in prayer, i.e. relationship with God. It may well mean to be continuously loyal in our belief. Still another point to be made is that God will reclaim the lost and dying, which the old widow lady represents, in the same way the lost prodigal son, the lost sheep and coin are all reclaimed.
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The Gospel of Luke tells us that that Jesus told a parable about an old widow lady and a very unjust or shameless judge. Luke says that the parable is about the need to pray, and not to lose heart. As Luke was addressing a very new and probably pretty shabby early church in a time when this feeble movement did not have much strength or respect in the powerful Roman world, the call for persistent prayer and faithfulness was quite relevant and needed. It would have been easy for early followers of the way, new Christians, to give up, and return to old ways and lesser pagan religions. Hold on in the face of seeming injustice, Luke is saying, be persistent in prayer and the people of faith will survive. It was no doubt a needed sermon for that time, and in the face of the encroaching secular world upon our time, it has its relevance for the church and its people today.
The parable itself uses some interesting images, that are best understood in the context of the period. In the parable, Jesus says that an old widow woman who comes before a judge demanding justice. The Hebrew word for "widow" actually means "the silent ones" or "one unable to speak." A widow in this period, having no husband, or son, would be quite vulnerable to injustice, exploitation, and being oppressed. In Judaism there were many laws and teachings in the prophets that were meant to protect helpless (i.e. silenced) widows and orphans. But human nature being what it is, the widows were still often quite susceptible to being taken advantage of. In the early church, the Epistle of James makes reference to the fact that "true religion of God is to care for widows and orphans. In this story the widow comes before a judge with considerable desperation, having no one to speak for her.
She comes before a very difficult magistrate. He is said to be a judge who has no shame, and cares for neither God or other people. He was shameless. He does not give her the justice that she thinks she deserves. She cannot win the case. Insistent for justice and the need to win, the woman keeps returning for a proper judgment. Eventually the judge gives in and awards her a winning judgment. He says that she is wearing him out. The literal translation of "wearing him out" comes from a Greek boxing term, which means she will blacken his face, or give him a black eye. While he may have no shame, and no respect of God and man, trials were public. The very idea that an old widow lady (a woman!) would blacken the eye of the judge would be met with such shame and humiliation before the whole community that the judge gives in to the widow. He could not live that down in a million years.
The parable then argues from the lesser to the greater. If a shameless and corrupt judge can be ultimately convinced to give justice, then how much more will a God who cares respond to the needs of his people in a world where they often meet with injustice. So the parable calls for persistence and loyal trust that God will provide the jultimate justice for human need. Be persistent in prayer. This prayerfulness is a matter keeping up and in a close relationship with God. Inspite of the powerlessness that the early Christians may have felt in their world, there was the belief and trust that God would prevail. Persistent prayer is that steady conversational relationship with God that his will and justice will prevail. Considering the history of the time, we might say that the persistence of the saints through persecutions, and the faith of men like St. Paul, the church of God continued to prevail and comes to us even today.
In our own time we see ourselves living in what appears to be a shameless world. Monica and Bill seem to have no shame and seem to be vivid symbols of a culture that really doesn't seem to care. The conduct of so many these days indicate a loss of shamefulness. Yet we struggle as a church and as Christians to prevail in such prayerful way that appropriate morality and justice may continue to prevail. One profound example is that of Rosa Parks, who some years ago, simply refused to give up her seat on a bus in a southern state. She like a "silent one" persisted in justice, and was the cause of a revolution that rocked and changed the most powerful nation in the world. In subsequent protests a whole community took to walking to work instead of riding on busses. Rosa Parks and a community of poor powerless people shamed a shameless nation into respecting the dignity of every human being. Through that prayerful and persistent action, the powerless released the justice of God. Our persistent prayer in our on going relationship with God must be that we can remain persistent in the face of our enemies, our opponents.
Today a community of Christians must stand firm in their opposition to hate crimes. We must stand persistently in our resistance to terrorisms and acts of revenge, to crime in our streets, and be persistently involved in our fights against cancer, AIDs, poverty, homelessness. It's appropriate that we worship with a regularity that conveys our persistence in prayer to the world and the community that we in relationship with God desire to be the channels and servants of grace through which the justice of God may flow.
It is not easy to be persistent in faith in a culture that often challenges the premises of our faith. Shamefulness in our time is not a significant problem. The judge in the parable in our time is pretty much what we expect of a judge that he be totally impartial and have no respect of God or of religion. He's a self-made man with power and success. The old lady who persists with her case in our culture is seen as merely a trouble maker and an aggressive old bitch challenging the status-quo. Challenging the culture and the powers of our time in community, it's government and even in a heirarchical church is not easy. We can be impatient, becaust that is also one of the aspects of our culture. We like things to happen right now, and we like "instant" lotteries. The message in the parable is continuing loyalty, faithfulness, persistence in being the people of God.
Now that we think we know what is at the heart of this parable and think that we are responsible for helping out poor old God, lets approach it from another point of view. Presumably we see this parable as one about being prayerful. And that is, in fact, what Luke says the parable is about. Being prayerful and diligent in prayer is one of the Luke's themes. Remember as well that Luke tells us that Jesus tells the parable of the man who awakens his neighbor in the middle of the night to provide bread for a visitor. "Ask, seek, knock," the parable concludes: the door will be opened. You don't give your son a scorpion when he asks for an egg, or a snake when he asks for a fish. "How much more, then, will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" God inevitably responds to those who seek the Spirit in prayers.
Yet if we remove the moralizing from the parable and the idea that it is about prayer, which may have been more the emphasis of the early church than of Jesus and deal with the parable all by itself and alone you may come up with another understanding that reveals a profound Good News.
There is a scandalous shameless judge and an old widow. The old widow is is powerless, and without a husband and adult son she is all but dead. The future for a widow in this period was pretty grim. She is as bad off as the lost prodigal son in the pig pen, and the lost sheep in the wilderness surrounded by a pack of wolves, and as hidden in the darkness as a lost coin. She's dead. As a result of and in her dying she confronts a scandalous judge and demands to be saved, reconciled, put right. She implores him for her life. Ultimately the scandalous judge gives in to her demands. One might well wonder if the the old widow lady is something of a symbol or representation of a dying humanity that by itself is totally week and alone. It stands as an image of the weak, the lost, the least, and the dead appealing desperately. They are appealing desperately to a scandalous Judge, a scandalous judge. And for Jesus God was in fact scandalous, and Jesus' presentation of God in his time was very scandalous. For the righteous and for the hard hearted, for the pharisees in Jesus' time it was scandalous to think that God would bend to the longings of the outcast, the poor, and the dying. But he does! It was scandalous to think that the Father of the prodigal son would put a robe on his back, a ring on his finger, sandals on his feet even before the son asks for forgiveness. The father acts shamelessly in his time. The shepherd, a man of little honor, goes looking for one stray sheep in a flock of 100 has lost his mind. But he does. The woman goes searching for her lost coin and searches until she finds it. It is scandalous to think of God in Jesus' time as a woman! If however, a crazy old man will forgive an ungrateful selfish brat son, . . . . if a shepherd with a exhorbitantly large flock will search for one lost sheep, . . . . . if a an old lady will search diligently for a lost coin, if a lost dying old lady goes searching for new hope, . . . . . then How much more will a God scandalously extravagant in this love, scandalously extravagant in his forgiveness, scandalously loving the lost, the last, the least, the dying, reach out to all who pursue him in faith! For Jesus God is scandalous and his teaching about God was scandalous in his time, but then Jesus was intending to reclaim the real and genuine honor of God as the God who ultimately lifts up the fallen, the dying, the least, the outcast, the powerless who turn to him in faith. God will rule in favor of his sinful and fallen and shameless people and have mercy on them, and raise them up. Scandalously God pronounces acquital upon an entire race of unrepentant people, people who are terrible nuisances, pitiful jerks and nerds.
Are we supposed to be diligent in our prayerfulness? Of course we are. Are we supposed to be loyal to God? But of course. Are we supposed to be channels of grace and servants of the Lord? Most certainly. Are we supposed to be diligent in our worship, our generous and abundant giving. Yes, of course. Are we supposed to seek perfection? Indeed. Are we? Are we any of these things on any regular basis? Of course we are not. Yet a scandalous God comes to wrestle with us as the divine figure wrestles with the deceiving Jacob in the Old Testament lesson today. Jesus gives a scandalous God a whole new kind of honor. He loves the unloveable, the least, the last, the lost, and the dying, and that is the good news.
Note: The concluding parts of this sermon are taken from and inspired by Robert Capon's book, The Parables of Grace, 1995 reprinted, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., Grand Rapids, Michigan.