Br. Lain Wilson

The Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 24C)

Luke 18:1-8
Jeremiah 31:27-34

I remember being told when I was younger that I was my own worst advocate. I could find it difficult to acknowledge what I was good at and argue for myself. I’d like to think that this was an early expression of humility, but it wasn’t, really. It wasn’t, because I didn’t also acknowledge what I was bad at and where I needed help. I was a bad self-advocate, both in terms of trumpeting my accomplishments and owning up to where I needed to grow.

Now, all of this is to say that I really admire the widow in today’s parable. She’s a great self-advocate. I can’t help but imagine that the judge, who “neither feared God nor had respect for people” (Luke 18:2), was successfully hiding that. The widow must know, as one of the lowest of the socially low, that in going to him she is up against an implacable and hostile opponent. She must know that this is an uphill battle. What I admire in her is what I can only imagine is her clarity of purpose and resolve, her bone-deep commitment that her cause was right, and her assurance that her own self-advocacy can effect change.

Clarity, commitment, and assurance – we might simply say “faith.” Her faith, burning in her heart, gives her the courage to persist in her own advocacy, and eventually to overcome her opponent.

But what effect does her faith have on the judge? “For a while he refused” (Luke 18:4), we hear. We don’t hear how long – days, weeks, months, years. We don’t hear how long, but we do hear that he eventually gives in “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming” (Luke 18:5). An alternative sense of the verb translated as “wear out” is “shame”; thus: “so that her coming does not utterly shame me.”[1] We get a sense of the social world evoked here – the judge may have contempt for God and his fellows, but he cannot bear being shamed by the persistence of this widow.

In either case, being worn out or shamed, the judge does not experience a conversion of heart. The parable is not about the unjust judge becoming a better person. Instead, the parable sets up a comparison between humans and God. We read something similar earlier in Luke, in another teaching on prayer: “Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for a fish, will give a snake instead of a fish? Or if the child asks for an egg, will give a scorpion? If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!” (Luke 11:11-13). If even the unjust judge, who “neither feared God nor had respect for people,” grants justice to the widow in response to her persistence, how much more will God grant justice to those who persist in prayer!

In these two episodes from Luke, we have an image of a God from whom we can expect so much. A God who is faithful and generous, not parsimonious and vindictive. A God who is “long-suffering” and patient. A God who is a “righteous judge,” in Paul’s words to Timothy (2 Timothy 4:8), and in contrast to the unjust judge of the parable. A God who is faithful.

This is the faithful God revealed in our reading from Jeremiah. Jerusalem has fallen, the temple has been burned.[2] The worst has come to pass. Into this darkness, God speaks a word of faithfulness: “The days are surely coming . . . when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31). Into the darkness of this time of destruction and exile, God speaks a word of hope: “they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest . . . for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more” (Jeremiah 31:34). In the reality of this dark moment, God reveals, in the words of biblical scholar William Holladay, that “God’s ultimate word is hope, comfort, restoration.”[3]

The parable of the unrighteous judge is Jesus’ own word of hope to his followers. It concludes his response to the Pharisees’ question of when the kingdom of God was coming. As his followers may come to expect ridicule, rejection, and persecution, when can they expect the Son of Man come to vindicate them, to render justice to them?

Jesus’ answer to them is simple, but not easy. What they have to do – what we have to do – is display the perseverance of the widow. To be clear in our desire for justice, to be committed in our purpose in prayer, and to be assured in our hope. In short, to have faith in God’s abiding faithfulness.

We have as a companion in this faith the crucified and risen Lord. We have as a partner in our perseverance the God who took on humanity, who took on all that is most broken and downtrodden and oppressed in our world – took all that on, and meets the broken, the downtrodden, and the oppressed. God’s word of hope spoken to us, the Word-made-flesh in Jesus, is the hope of a world that cries out for justice.

And there is so much that cries out. There are so many that cry out. Those stuck in grinding poverty. Those working multiple jobs and barely staying afloat. Those suffering isolation, loneliness, friendlessness. Those targeted for their political beliefs, nationality, sexuality, or gender identity. The whole of creation groaning under the weight of human imposition and exploitation. There is so much that cries out for justice. How long, O Lord, how long? How long must we wait?

Jesus calls us to perseverance and, in that perseverance, to be advocates, for ourselves and for others. As advocates, he urges us to be clear in recognizing how this world cries out for justice. He urges us to be committed to justice in both our prayer and our work. And he urges us to be assured that God’s justice will not fail us, and will come in God’s time. This word of hope to us urges us to have faith that the crucified and risen Christ waits with us and gives us both the “courage to be,”[4] to persevere and to act in this world, and the vision of what is to come, our promised future: in the words of theologian Jürgen Moltmann, the “kingdom of the triune God which sets all things free and fills them with meaning.”[5]

“When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:8). Will we persevere in faith? Will we have the courage to be for justice in this world?

Amen.

[1] J. Nolland, Luke 9:21-18:34, World Biblical Commentary 35B (Dallas, 1993), 865 (trans.) and 868 (commentary).

[2] William Holladay argues that the context of this passage is two months after the fall of Jerusalem: W. L. Holladay, Jeremiah 2: A Commentary on the Book of the Prophet Jeremiah, Chapters 26—52 (Minneapolis, 1989), 165.

[3] Ibid., 201.

[4] This wording is from J. Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christ as the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology, trans. R. A. Wilson and J. Bowden (New York, 1974), 335.

[5] Ibid., 338.