This morning’s gospel reading from Luke is tremendously difficult and would be so much better dealt with in a classroom or a formal bible study. And even in those spaces we’d be in for a hard slog. Many biblical commentators consider it one of the most difficult parables. My clergy friends say, “this gospel doesn’t preach.”
So today we, like Jacob, are going to really wrestle with the Holy One. We will probably all walk out limping. But if we let the parable do its work, we might leave with a blessing, too.
Parables were Jesus’ way of “teaching” – or perhaps better to say that it was his way of drawing out of his followers the inner wisdom they already carried inside – the wisdom that comes from wrestling with paradox and ambiguity, wisdom that emerges from intuition and deep listening. Jesus was powerful and threatening because he taught in parables. When seriously engaged, parables challenge and provoke – and they empower people with insight and with truth.
Jesus never explained his parables. They were prophetic in that they called his first listeners – as they call us – to a searching and fearless honesty about who we are, who we want to be, who God designs us to be. And, being prophetic, his parables were very often critiques of the political, social, and economic structures of his day.
Biblical commentators have tended to mute these critiques. They’ve often given us what we might consider more “spiritual” interpretations – presuming that, because they’re from Jesus, every parable must be about God or the reign of God or the spiritual life. Interpreters propose neat and tidy morals for the stories; or they suggest clever allegories where the figures in the parable stand for something higher – the judge is God, the widow stands for all the poor and oppressed, and knocking on a door is a prayer.
It is a very human inclination to want to make meaning, to find resolution, to master the specific lesson we assume Jesus wants us to learn. But, it’s also inclination that perhaps betrays our deeper desire to tame the stories that were designed to provoke something in us.
It was apparently Luke’s inclination. He introduces the parable with his own interpretive key: “Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart” – Immediately then the widow becomes an exemplar of persistence, and her demands are allegorized as prayer. Luke closes the parable with Jesus saying, “Will not God grant justice to God’s own elect who cry out day and night?” But scholars almost unanimously agree that Jesus didn’t say this – because Jesus teaches in parables and the minute you explain a parable it stops being a parable. “Will God delay long in helping them?” is Luke’s attempt to authorize his interpretation by putting it on the lips of Jesus.
Luke’s is an awkward effort to manage an unmanageable parable; his interpretation of it being about prayer doesn’t really even work.
For one thing, do we really think Jesus’ theology of prayer is that we have to beat down the doors of heaven before God will will pay any attention to us?
And do we really think that with all the images of God available to Jesus, all the ways Jesus knew God, that an unjust judge with no fear of the divine and no respect for people would be what Jesus wants us to discover about his abba?
Luke said it was about prayer, and generations of biblical scholars have worked to make that square peg fit a round hole. They’ve said Jesus argued from lesser to greater to make a point – if an unjust judge gives a widow what she needs, how much more will our loving God give us what we need. They’ve leaned on biblical stereotypes of the widows of Israel as destitute, oppressed, and poor, so she becomes a sympathetic figure before the parable has even had a chance to provoke.
Translators have aided and abetted Luke’s taming of the parable. We heard the widow ask the judge to “grant her justice” against her opponent. And if we see widows as victims then a request for “justice” fits. Except that the more accurate translation of that request is that she is asking to be avenged against her opponent, she is literally asking for vengeance.
We heard that the judge grants her “justice,” but again, the more accurate reading is that he will avenge her, he will allow the vengeance she demands.
Are you feeling a little more disturbed yet?
How about now – the judge says he will avenge her so that she will not” wear him out by continually coming at him.” Now that sounds like a parent who gives in to a child’s pleading because they just can’t take the whining anymore. But no, that phrase, “wear me out” is actually a boxing term – with all the connotations of being beaten up, being struck in the face, being given a black eye. The judge gives in to her because she threatens him – his decision is a matter of expedience, not of justice.
New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine suggested that the parable proper – without Luke’s framing about prayer – would be more accurately called the parable of the “Vengeful Widow and the Co-opted Judge” because the parable, as Jesus told it, is really about how a widow’s desire for vengeance prompts violence against a judge, and how the judge perpetuates a system of vengeance by allowing a violent action against her opponent. It’s a story about violence and vengefulness – and their corrosive effect on justice. Neither widow nor judge are moral exemplars and real justice is not rendered. There is no closure – only the space opening for deep listening to our intuitions, for our courageous openness to insight, for fearless honesty about the truth.
I think we see this parable being played out every single day – we are seeing systemic evil revealed and we struggle either with or against the human desire for vengeance that fuels it. The “widow” shows us it is not specific to gender or class – the questions are ours to ask of ourselves. The “judge” challenges our complicity. Then and now, it was Jesus’ critique and his invitation.
What do we say about the drive for vengeance? Why do we want one person or group to succeed and another to fail? How do we think success or failure should look? Does an end ever justify a means? Do we let widows off the hook because desperate times call for desperate measures? What do we really want for our opponents? What is the justice of God compared to the justice humans are inclined to seek?
Now, here’s the irony, right? It turns out this parable might just be about the need to pray always and not lose heart – just not in the way Luke intended.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer said, “If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.”
Tilden Edwards said, “Prayer is aimed at our deepest problem: our tendency to forget our liberating connectedness with God… From a narrow outside-of-God place rise our worst fears, cravings, restlessness, and personal and social sinfulness. . . .[but] Prayer also arises from our deepest hope: for the abundance of life that comes when we abide in our deepest home, our widest consciousness.”
We don’t need to rescue this parable with some overly spiritualized interpretation about prayer. We need to pray as an act of resistance against this parable – because our hope and our compassion are less corrupting to God’s justice than vengeance.
Because I didn’t want to give my own closure to the parable, I didn’t really know how to give closure to his homily – so I’ll close with some words from poet Nikita Gill that came to me just yesterday that I received as a blessing – and I hope you will too:
“The rage you are feeling comes from the same place inside your heart as the love. This is why you refuse to accept a world where cruelty reigns and the fire consumes all. You have known hope and joy and kindness like you have known water. And justice is a river that demands you do not give up on it.”