In the name of God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
Amen.
If
you’ve been regular in worship over the past few months, you’ve likely noticed
that the Gospel readings have been a lot of Jesus’ teachings. This season of
the Church Year, known as Ordinary Time or the Season after Pentecost, is the
longest liturgical season of the year. The color that we use is green,
symbolizing the growth of the church throughout the year. The Gospel texts that
we get in this season are focused on the lessons that Jesus offers. In Advent
and Christmas, we focus on the birth of Jesus, in Epiphany we see how Jesus is
made known to the world, in Lent we focus on repentance as we move towards the
Passion in Holy Week, and Easter is, of course, a season that focuses on the
Resurrection. And just as green is a symbol in nature of vitality and growth,
this season is one of the lush hope that Jesus offers in his ministry of
teaching.
The
way that Jesus teaches is through parables. It has been said that parables are
earthly stories with heavenly meanings. A parable isn’t an anecdote, so we
can’t dismiss them as simply stories of old. A parable isn’t an allegory, as
there isn’t always a simple formula to decode the meaning. In the parables,
sometimes the figure of the king is God, and sometimes it’s not. Because
parables tell us about that which is not fully knowable, they should not be
seen as a puzzle to solve, but as a partial glimpse into the Kingdom of God.
Parables are often
subversive, after all, it was Jesus’ teaching that got him killed. But rarely
are we offended when we first hear a parable read, which is a sign that we’ve
domesticated the parables to be nice stories instead of challenging calls to
conversion.
Complicating our
interpretation of parables is that Jesus rarely explains their meaning, and
when Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John add an interpretation to Jesus’ parabolic
teaching, we can see that these Biblical writers seem to be as confused about
the meaning of the parable as we are. And so, often, the explanation given in
the Bible doesn’t seem to match Jesus’ actual words. Today’s parable is just
one example of the challenge of comprehending Jesus’ teaching.
One way that we might
read this parable is to understand it as a teaching about the power of prayer.
Some people interpret this parable to be an admonishment to be faithful and
consistent in prayer. If a judge who neither fears God nor has respect for
people finally gives this widow what she wants, how much more will God, who is
good and does care for people, do for us. So pray always and pray often, and
God will grant you what you desire. But we all know that’s just superstition.
Does that mean that the
people of Haiti and eastern North Carolina just didn’t pray enough before
Hurricane Matthew hit? Does that mean that when you don’t get the job you
wanted, that it’s your fault for not praying enough about it? And does it mean
when someone is cured of cancer that they hit the “magic number” of prayers
that God requires for a miracle? One theologian has written that “When the
consequences of belief are worldly goods, such as health, fixing on these turns
religion into a service station for self-gratification and churches into health
clubs. This is the opposite of religion’s role, which is to decenter the ego,
not pander to its desires.” You don’t need a degree in religion to figure out
that reading this parable as a lesson on the efficaciousness of prayer is
problematic. No, this doesn’t seem to be a parable about the frequency of
prayer.
But maybe it’s a parable
about persistence, and how we should never give up. There’s a story about
Mother Teresa’s trip to visit a very wealthy philanthropist to ask him for
money for an AIDS hospice. Before she arrived, this man consulted with his
business partner and the two of them had agreed to hear her out, after all,
she’s Mother Teresa; but they wouldn’t be making donation, they decided. Well,
Mother Teresa comes in and tells the moving story of the need for this hospice
and how much their gift would be appreciated. They say to her “We’re touched by
your appeal, but no, we don’t feel called to support that work at this time.”
So Mother Teresa says, “Very well; let us pray.” And she prays that God would
soften their hearts to her appeal. After she says “amen,” she immediately makes
her appeal again. And again, the two men politely say no. Mother Teresa nods
and says “Let us pray.” One man then says, “Alright, alright, I’ll get the
checkbook.”
But the moral of the parable
isn’t “Be feisty and be persistent, and eventually God will grant you what you
need.” No, Jesus says that the parable is a lesson about the need to pray
always and not lose heart. One person wrote about this parable saying “The
notion that we must bang on the doors of heaven if we are to catch God’s
attention is hardly an appropriate theology of prayer.” And it’s true, do we
really want to pray to a God who ignores us until we reach the peak level of
being annoying? No, this doesn’t seem to be a parable about persistence in prayer.
Well then, it’s clearly a
parable about the connection between prayer and seeking justice. And what an
appropriate lesson for us as we are just about three weeks away from Election
Day. It’s a heartening notion, that even in a corrupt system with public
officials who are morally bankrupt, that still the little widow gets her
justice. So even if you think that Washington is broken, that politicians are
beholden to big donors and not their constituents, this parable gives us hope
that through prayer, God’s justice can still come through a bad system. It’s a
great message, the problem is that the text doesn’t support it.
If we pay close attention
to the text, it becomes clear that that reading isn’t quite right. For one,
it’s built upon the stereotype that all widows are frail, weak, and powerless.
But that doesn’t seem to be the case here. If we stereotype the widow, we can
ignore the challenge of the parable, and therefore ignore the challenge to our
stereotypes. Some of this is obscured by our English translation.
First of all, the widow
doesn’t come seeking “justice,” which is a holy and righteous sounding
motivation. When the widow says “give me justice,” the Greek actually says
“give me revenge” or “give me vengeance.” This isn’t about fairness, it’s about
retribution. Suddenly, the widow doesn’t seem so innocent and pure. In response
to her pestering, the judge says “I will grant her justice, so that she may not
wear me out by continually coming.” But again, “wearing me out” is a poor
translation. The word that is used is actually a term from boxing, and it means
to “give a black eye.” The meaning is not only is the widow causing pain to the
judge, but that it’s also a public show of shame. People will start to talk –
that judge can’t even control a widow, how can he ever be trusted with a bigger
job? She’s no meek and mild widow, she’s vengeful and not above a little
extortion to get revenge against her opponent. And as the parable ends, there
is no justice, there is no closure, no reconciliation, just what we might call
“politics as normal.” No, this doesn’t seem to be a parable about fighting for
justice, fairness, or equal protection under the law.
The parable defies any
saccharine or simple interpretation. We would do well though to pay attention
to Jesus’ introduction – that this is a parable about the need to pray always
and not lose heart. We pray and yet it seems like what we pray for never comes.
As we all know, it is far too easy to lose heart. Just look at the pews in this
church. The reason why they’re not full isn’t because people have better things
to do. Salisbury is full of people in their pajamas watching Sunday morning news
shows – not exactly a unique opportunity that you can’t stand to miss. It’s not
that people don’t like our style of worship, our theology, or our music. Those
are excuses, not causes. No, the reason why we have empty pews is because it is
oh so easy to lose heart.
The world has a way of
beating us up, of giving us over to despair. There is Hurricane Matthew, there
is a war and refugee crisis in Syria, there is personal suffering in grief and
depression, there is frustration and disgust with the election, there is
concern about our aging parents, our children, and ourselves. And so sometimes
people see God as the judge in this parable – having no respect for people.
This is one of the most common reasons for doubt: if God is God, why does so
much bad stuff happen? When we long for health, healing, and justice and we get
dysfunction, discord, and disease, people lose heart. So some of the pews are
empty because people aren’t interested in worshiping a God who they think is a
little too much like this unjust and corrupt judge.
The thing about parables
is that they always surprise us; there’s always a twist that upends the way we
see the world and invites us into conversion. What if we’re reading this
parable backwards by associating God with the judge or ourselves with the
widow? Most Biblical scholars say that the Bible actually says more about God
than it gives us a set of instructions. What if God is more like the widow than
the judge?
As Jesus’ introduction
says, it’s all about not losing heart. And as we heard in the reading from
Jeremiah, God is quite concerned about our hearts. The prophet records God’s
speech – “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts;
and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they
teach one another, or say to each other, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to
the greatest, says the Lord; for I
will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more.”
The parable shows us the
character of God – that God is relentless and persistent in putting God’s law
in our hearts. And as the Psalm says, these words are sweeter than honey. We
can have confidence because God will keep coming to our corrupt systems, our
systems that do not fear God and do not respect people, and God will put that
law in our hearts. Justice without the heart is just cold and calculating
revenge, about winners and losers. That’s not the sort of justice that God is
after. Rather God is going to keep bothering us, like the widow, until the
great and the small know of God’s mercy in their hearts.
So this isn’t a parable
about what we need to do, namely how we are to pray and it’s not a parable
about how “things will work out in the end,” no it’s about God’s tenaciousness
to convert our hearts. John Calvin said that we cannot separate who God is and
what we are to do. So if this parable says that God is unrelenting, then it
means that we don’t have to be the Messiah. It is not our task to save the
world or to fix other people. No, God is always seeking to write God’s love and
mercy on your heart. No matter how often we ignore God, no matter how many
times we make mistakes, no matter how many doubts and fears we have, God will
continue to be like that scrappy widow, giving us a reason to not lose heart
because God is writing God’s love on your heart.
Spend some time with that
this week. Pay attention to your heart, knowing that God’s forgiveness and love
and hope are written on it. Share what it on your heart from God with those who
are not here today, so they might come next week and be reminded of God’s
steadfast love for them. Ask God to make the words on your heart clear and to
give you the grace to live by them. Strive be true to those words that God has
put on your heart, so that you won’t have to say “I know the Lord,” but so that
people will say of you, “God’s law is on his or on her heart.”
