 | The New England Church PulpitNew England Congregational Church UCC |
"Persistent Petitioner or Pest?" | Luke 18: 1-8 | October 17, 2004 |
Perhaps this deceptively simple story has more layers of meaning than at first glance.
The first item to note is the oddity of the character, the judge, who might be the stand in for God (as is the father in the parable of the prodigal son). This judge is not a nice character, totally unlike we think God to be. This judge is a completely self centered anti-hero. He gives little or no thought to God in the course of his work. Nor does he care much for other people. Proud and arrogant, he, by his own admission, has no fear of God or respect for anyone. Maybe he thinks that makes him a better judge–more impartial and all that– or maybe he has sat on the bench long enough to know how complicated justice really is, or maybe he is just self-centered. However it happened, he has built up a wall of thick skin: God does not get to him and people do not get to him. But the other character in the story does.
That other character is a widow with a complaint, an allegation, a legal case for the court. Luke does not say what her case is but it is likely about money or property concerning her dead husband’s estate. As a widow under Jewish law she cannot inherit it–it goes straight to her sons or her brothers-in-law–but she is allowed to live off of it. So, whether someone has cheated her at business, or she has had her livelihood snatched away like a defunct retirement fund, or someone has used her vulnerability in order to take advantage of her, she takes her case to this judge. He obviously tells her to get lost. What hope does this poor widow have? She surely does not have a male member of her family on her side for they would not let her make a spectacle of herself like this. She lacks political protection, she is totally powerless–what hope does she have against this indifferent judge? This one thing is her hope: she has the ability to pester the unjust judge. She won’t give up or give in. She is persistent. Some commentators speculate that after a while she did not content herself with standing in line in front of the judge’s formal bench at the courthouse. She essentially started to stalk the man, approaching him in the marketplace as he was trying to buy his morning bagel, waiting for him outside his health club yelling at him the minute he stepped out of the building, following him into restaurants and shouting, “Do your job!
Answer me now or answer me later, but I am coming back every day and every night–forever– until you give me justice!” And so she persists.
The judge finally says that even though he doesn’t worry about God and even though he doesn’t respect humans very much he will give this woman what she wants just to get rid of her. The original language uses a boxing term which goes something like “just so she will no longer give me a black eye.”
So, what is the message? Hang in there no matter what. Don’t give up. Persevere. Be persistent.
I fear if you push the parable a bit it can be read as saying, “Just keep pestering God until you get what you want.” Keep praying and send your $20 for our special prayer cloth and you will get that job, or get well or have success. But of course Jesus uses the “how much more so” phrase so that we don’t see God as an indifferent judge. How much more so -- the way he says that if our children asked us for bread we would not give them a scorpion so how much more so would God give good gifts to God’s children. There is a risk with this parable that we will begin to think of all those times when we wanted something and didn’t get it. How are we to think about God when we pray for peace Sunday after Sunday only to open the papers every day to stories of more and more conflict and violence? Luke writes this story to a fledgling Christian community where believers expected the end of the world would happen in their life time and things seemed to be going from bad to worse. So he asks whether the followers of Jesus have the widow’s staying power and persistence so that they do not lose heart.
Suppose that we turn this parable on its head? Suppose that we just look at the story without Luke’s intro. What if we think of the widow with her persistent demands for justice as representing God while the unjust judge who neither fears God nor has respect for people represents us. Imagine that it is God who continually calls us, who continually asks for something from us, who just won’t let us alone until we participate in creating a more just world.
The Biblical literature is filled with stories like that of Jonah where God is the persistent pursuer. The history of the Church is filled with stories of people who have caught a vision of what God wants in the world and have had that vision nag at them until they devoted their lives to helping achieve it. This community of faith continues to present to us year after year with stories of people in need of our Christian love. We continue to feel the urging of the divine to explore new insights; we hear the call to new service; we hear and see examples of and invitations to continued faithfulness to God.
We begin a new stewardship campaign today. There will be some of us who, when we are contacted to review our support for what this church does, will feel we are being pestered. Think of the widow who was so persistent in her petitioning that she appeared to be a pest. I am proud of the openness of this church. I am proud of the long tradition of this denomination and this community of faith for their commitment to justice. We have here an example of the persistence of God becoming the persistence of Christians to see the world change into a more just place.
God’s call is persistent and so long as we live, it will continue. We will never arrive at the place where we can say, “There, now I’ve done it all. God will ask no more of me.” We worship together to hear God call us to become more the person we are intended to be. We pray with the poet John Donne
Batter my heart, three person’d God, for you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
The Tom Hanks film Philadelphia, (1993) was the first Hollywood studio to feature a person dying from AIDS. It helped mainstream audiences at the time to make the emotional connection that prejudice against homosexual persons is just as reprehensible as racial prejudice. Hanks plays lawyer Andrew Beckett who is unjustly fired from a top Philadelphia law firm when it is learned he has AIDS. The law firm traditionalists are as unrepentant as the Unjust Judge in today’s lectionary reading. It is not their kindness or a change of heart that finally wins the day of justice for Beckett, but his dogged persistence and his deep faith that the objectivity of the law will prevail in the end. In one courtroom exchange Beckett’s attorney, played brilliantly by Denzel Washington, asks the dying Beckett “What do you love about the law, Andrew?” The response finally comes, “It’s that every now and again–not often, but occasionally– you get to be a part of justice being done. That really is quite a thrill when that happens.”
Listen to the persistent petition of God to do justice. Amen.
Joe Dunham
| Copyright © 2004 by Joe Dunham. All rights reserved. |