The Widow Wins: Luke 18:1-8

This blog post is in response to the Rev. Evan D. Garner's (a long way from home) blog post entitled, "I Don't Get the Unjust Judge", which deals with this coming Sunday's gospel.

The Rev. Dr. Jane Patterson told my Luke class one day that the words “parable” and “parabola” share a root word, which she interpreted to mean that for us to understand the deeper implications of Jesus’ story we have to move. Like the Rev. Evan D. Garner, I do not like the method that Jesus employs in this coming Sunday’s gospel. If I could I would like to just extract a message, something like keep the faith, keep praying, the Son of Man is coming, but to throw away the method Jesus uses is to the throw away a gift from God. While my sinful heart sometimes leads me astray, I believe willfully throwing away God’s gift is problematic at best and at worst leads to a life of sin, vice, and nothingness. So, what are we to do?

As I see it, we cannot just extract the message (keep the faith, keep praying, the Son of Man is coming!), as the characters (the unjust judge and the faithful widow) help to employ that message, and without them we lose a message altogether. We only get a glimpse of the importance of prayer by exploring who these two characters are within the culture of Jesus’ day. The unjust judge, one who would ignore the plight of a widow, certainly “neither feared God, nor had respect for people,” and in fact, ignored also the commandments of God, which were so important to the people of Israel and made them different from the Romans who would just throw beggars to the wolves. In brief, this judge is one unrighteous dude. 

In contrast, our other character, a benevolent widow, is the poster-woman of the Faith. She, along with orphaned children, are the persons that God's chosen people are bound to take care of no matter what. And yet...no one is taking care of her. She cannot even get a judge to rule in her favor. In a society where a judge is not able to rule in favor of an innocent widow who has nothing something is going wrong. Unfortunately, this inequality hits too close to home, as I think of all the unjust ways that the poor and outcast are misrepresented within our judicial system. The bright spot in all of this, is that the widow keeps at it. She stays true to her conviction. She fights the good fight, she fights the system and you know what?… SHE WINS! If that doesn’t get us fired up about our Faith, it’s hard to see something that will.

And, for the last few chapters in Luke, Jesus has been building this whole strange argument about Faith and what it really looks like to be faithful (Luke 15 was about God’s faithfulness, Luke 16 was about the shrewdness of faith and the lessons of Dives and Lazarus, Luke 17 was about being open to the miraculous power of Faith), and this is the culmination of his Faith argument. It's weird for sure, but maybe Jesus is not saying, “Wow, look at this unjust judge, boy our God is just like him,” as he has already shown us clearly what God’s faithfulness looks like (the Good Shepherd, the Seeking Widow, the Accepting Father). Instead, Jesus perhaps says, look at this woman who is so determined in getting what she wants that it consumes her every fiber. Jesus is saying, "This is what I’ve been trying to say about our Faith. It is persistent. So now you be persistent." Now, I am certain that I, Seth Olson, am not God, nor will any of us ever be God, so we cannot strive for becoming a judge, whether just or unjust. Instead, our focus is on what we do have, the power of prayer and the power of Faith. God is faithful to us always, now reciprocate that gift, don’t just throw it away.