Pleas, Pleas Me
Luke 18:1-8
A torn garment, a sower of seed, a good Samaritan, a rich fool, an unfaithful servant, a barren fig tree, a mustard seed, yeast, a wedding banquet, a lost sheep, a lost coin, a prodigal son, a dishonest manager. These are all metaphors that Jesus uses to describe God’s judgment, God’s grace, or God’s kingdom. In the parables he tells, Jesus draws from everyday images that people of his time would have readily understood—seeds and trees, sheep and shepherds, servants and sons. There is nothing abstract here. Jesus doesn’t speak in generalities or present hard-to-grasp philosophical concepts; he paints pictures of eternal truths using concrete images from everyday life.
And yet, despite his use of familiar imagery, Jesus often manages to turn images on their head, using them in unexpected ways that surprise, confuse, or even upset the hearer. For example, one might expect, if Jesus were to draw from nature, that he would liken the kingdom of God to a majestic mountain, a limitless ocean, or a mighty whirlwind. You know, something powerful and impressive. But out of all the natural world, the image that Jesus uses to capture the essence of the kingdom of God is a minuscule mustard seed.
Or take the parable of the Good Samaritan. Jesus tells the parable in response to a question from an expert in the law of Moses. The man asks Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?” That is, “Where do I draw the boundary of my moral obligations? How do I identify who’s in and who’s out? To whom do I have a moral obligation and whom can I simply ignore?”
Jesus answers by telling a parable about a victim of robbery who was treated with compassion by a Samaritan of all people, a reviled outsider. This would have been scandalous to Jews of Jesus’ day. To put it in our context, it would be like Jesus speaking of the good MAGA Republican to an audience of Democrats or the good undocumented immigrant to a group of young Republicans. That’s right, Jesus has something to offend everyone.
When not engendering surprise or rage in his audience, Jesus sometimes opts to leave them scratching their heads, struggling to make sense of what he’s just told them. Such is the case, I suspect, with the parable that Jesus tells in today’s reading, in which he likens God to an unjust judge. Yep, that’s what he does! A few weeks ago we heard him speak of a dishonest manager, so why not an unjust judge?
Perhaps because the metaphor of an unjust judge might seem ill befitting of the creator of the universe, Luke gives away the goods by telling us at the outset how he wants us to interpret the parable. “Jesus told them a story showing that it was necessary for them to pray consistently and never quit.” That’s all well and good, but I’d prefer to take off the guardrails and let Jesus drive this metaphor off road. Buckle up. It’s going to get bumpy!
Jesus begins the parable, “There was once a judge in some city who never gave God a thought and cared nothing for people.” That’s quite the combination. This judge seems to wear a black hat to match his black robe. Power corrupts, so the saying goes, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. This judge appears to have no limits on his power. He can therefore be as arbitrary and as corrupt as he pleases.
One day he encounters in his courtroom a widow who demands justice. We’re not told the nature of the case. We don’t know what is at issue or whether she is the plaintiff or the defendant. However, we are told that she is a widow, and we know that widows were among the most vulnerable members of society in first-century Judea.
Long before James Brown sang it, the women of Judea knew that theirs was a man’s world. Without the protection of a husband, a widow could fall prey to unscrupulous opportunists. This is precisely what Jesus warns about later on in Luke’s Gospel. “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes and who love respectful greetings in the marketplaces and the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses” (Lk. 20:46-47).
They devour widows’ houses. I’m not saying that this is necessarily what has happened, that a man in a position of power, whose position grants him an elevated status in society, has rapaciously tried to seize a widow’s assets, but it is just the sort of thing that Jesus warns about, and that therefore must have occurred with some frequency.
Whatever the widow’s case may be, the judge is unmoved. “He never gave her the time of day,” Jesus tells us. Imagine knowing that you’ve been wronged, and that when you seek recourse from the legal system a corrupt judge dismisses your case for no valid reason. “That will be all. Next!”
What would you do in the face of such unbridled corruption, such cynical contempt for justice? How would you respond to a leader of society, someone entrusted with enormous responsibility, whose decisions affect the lives of many people but whose only interest is serving himself, who doesn’t care what God thinks, who doesn’t care what people think, who cares for nothing and no one other than himself? What would you do?
Many of us, myself included, might simply throw up our hands and say, “It’s a corrupt system. What can you do?” Give up. Stew in bitterness. Descend into despair.
Or persist. Show up. Raise your voice. Demand justice. Again, and again, and again. Be unrelenting. Wear out the corrupt authorities with your persistence. In the Bible translation that we normally read, the NRSV, the unjust judge relents under the widow’s unwavering perseverance, “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”
“Alright, lady, enough! I can’t take it anymore! You win!”
But the Bible translation that I chose for today, The Message, translates that line quite a bit differently. The judge isn’t concerned that the widow will wear him out. Listen again to what he says: “I’d better do something and see that she gets justice, otherwise I’m going to end up beaten black-and-blue by her pounding.”
When I first read that translation, especially the part about the judge being concerned that the widow would beat him black and blue, I thought, “Oh, come on! That’s a bit much. The original Greek can’t possibly say that.” Turns out, it can and does. Now, I’m no Greek scholar, but I do have software that allows me to examine every word of the original Greek in which Luke wrote. This line about being beaten black and blue is a literal rendering of the Greek. It would be like someone saying in English, “I was so angry I could have killed him,” when what they really mean is they were furious, not that they were planning murder.
[O]ftentimes it does seem that God is an unjust judge, or at the very least, an indifferent one.
I like the idea of this widow, who doesn’t seem to have an advocate, advocating for herself to such an extent that the judge feels like he is being assaulted. That is how God wants us to pray, as if God were an unjust judge who will give us justice, if only to stop the verbal barrage that is our unrelenting prayer.
I have to say, as Presbyterians, we’re not known for our persistence in prayer or for prayer in general. The few times that I’ve asked someone to pray spontaneously, such as in a session meeting, I get a look that says, “Oh my gosh! Is he serious? Doesn’t he know we’re Presbyterian? We don’t do that sort of thing!”
Maybe our love of organization and councils and doing everything decently and in order gets in the way of praying as though our lives depend on it. Maybe we think that God doesn’t want to be bothered with our petty pleadings. Maybe we think that once is enough and that if the answer didn’t come immediately, then the answer was “no.” Or maybe we just aren’t desperate enough. Maybe we haven’t been to a place where we couldn’t afford to take “no” for an answer. Maybe we’ve never entertained the thought of God as an unjust judge because it seems disrespectful (it didn’t faze Jesus).
But in the interest of keeping it real, let me say that oftentimes it does seem that God is an unjust judge, or at the very least, an indifferent one. It’s a story as old as the Bible. Remember what we heard the prophet Habakkuk say just a few weeks ago:
2 O Lord, how long shall I cry for help,
and you will not listen?
Or cry to you “Violence!”
and you will not save?
3 Why do you make me see wrongdoing
and look at trouble?
Destruction and violence are before me;
strife and contention arise.
4 So the law becomes slack,
and justice never prevails.
The wicked surround the righteous;
therefore judgment comes forth perverted.
People have been pleading with God to make things right long before you or I appeared on the scene and long before Jesus told this parable of an unjust judge and a persistent widow. Interestingly, in this parable Jesus lifts up for us as an exemplar of prayer not a member of the religious establishment—a priest, rabbi, Pharisee, or scribe—but a widow, someone who in the social hierarchy of her day was near the bottom. But to quote that prophet from of old, although not the Old Testament, “When you ain’t got nothing / you got nothing to lose.”
And as much as Jesus grabs our attention and offends our religious sensibilities by asking us to imagine God as an unjust judge, it is merely a metaphor. What Jesus is really saying is, If even a corrupt judge will grant justice in the face of persistent pleading, then how much more will God do the same for God’s people? “Do you hear what that judge, corrupt as he is, is saying?” Jesus asks. “So what makes you think God won’t step in and work justice for his chosen people, who continue to cry out for help? Won’t he stick up for them? I assure you, he will.”
And to that I would add, and he did. The one who hears our plea is not a corrupt judge but our crucified Savior. He is not sitting behind a bench; he was nailed to a cross. And he went to the cross advocating on our behalf. Each step Jesus took upon the road to the cross he took with you in mind. Far from indifferent to our cause, Jesus took up the cause of our forgiveness, our redemption, our reconciliation into his own body. Therefore raise your voice, make your plea, cry out to God—again and again and again. Make a scene, you Presbyterians! For doing so is not an annoyance or an offense to God, it is the very faith to which we’ve been called.