Lectionary Reflection for Proper 24C on Luke 18:1-8

REAL-ISING GOD’S REIGN

You can be forgiven for feeling a sense of déjà vu as you read the Gospel passage for this week. If you’ve been following the Lectionary, it wasn’t that long ago that we meditated on Jesus’ parable of the man who pestered his neighbour for bread to serve to an unexpected guest.^¹ Now, in Luke 18:1, we read that, “Jesus was telling them a parable about their need to pray continuously and not to be discouraged.” Why would the writer of Luke’s Gospel include two parables that seem so similar within just a few chapters of each other in his travel narrative? As is usually the case when reading Scripture, the answer can be found in the contexts of the two parables.

Leading up to the first parable, the writer shows Jesus constantly talking about radical hospitality as a primary expression of God’s reign. The parable that follows, then, portrays prayer as the practice of seeking God’s hospitality so that we can become shamelessly hospitable to those around us. But in the last few chapters of Luke, we have seen the tone of Jesus’ message change. After his increasingly urgent challenge for the religious leaders to embrace God’s Jubilee reign of hospitality, he begins to confront the social and economic hierarchies of Jewish society, bringing the theme of justice into clearer focus. Then, as if to drive home the point that God’s reign is about bringing justice into human affairs, Luke inserts the story of the ten men with skin diseases who are healed²—reminding his readers that Jesus included the cleansing of skin diseases among his signs of God’s reign when he responded to John the Baptiser’s message (Luke 7:18-23). It is this shift to the justice-bringing nature of God’s reign that forms the context for the parable of the persistent widow and its meaning for prayer.

The Lectionary skips over the last few verses of Luke 17, but we can’t hear the message of the parable without taking this section into account. It begins with the Pharisees asking Jesus when God’s reign would arrive. Jesus responds that God’s reign is “already among you”. As Eric Barreto paraphrases it:

It cannot be pointed out. It is not even something to be seen. The kingdom is to be felt and experienced. Jesus concludes, “The kingdom of God is among you” (New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition). The kingdom can be discerned where the faithful gather.

Another translation is that Jesus promises that the kingdom will be “within you,” that the kingdom reigns in the hearts of believers who, in their sojourn through this tattered world, bring God’s life in their wake.³

Jesus then proceeded to describe the “days of the Human One” (CEB) or the arrival of God’s reign as a “flash of lightning” that “lights up the sky from one end to the other”. He compared it to times of great turmoil, like the days of Noah or of Lot, when great evil brought destruction on the world. This is not so much that Jesus was speaking about a specific future event when he would return in glory, as we suppose. While Luke may have had the sacking of Jerusalem in mind, as with Jesus’ apocalyptic discourse in Luke 21:5-38, it seems that here, the focus is rather on the reign of God, which is already among us and within us, becoming visible in how we respond to times of great distress and turbulence. Essentially, the message is that, when great injustice and suffering happen in human society, Christ is revealed (17:30) in the responses of those in and among whom God’s reign has taken hold. Or to put it in Joel Green’s words, “Read against the horizon of 17:22–37, Jesus’ teaching here is particularly oriented toward the necessity of tenacious, hopeful faith in the midst of present ordeal”.⁴

So, while the parable of the persistent widow is introduced as a story about continuous prayer, the context in which that prayer must be practised is the injustice and chaos of the world. And the prayer we offer within this context is to empower us to real-ise God’s reign of justice in the midst of the turmoil.

THE POWER OF PERSISTENCE

Jesus’ story of a poor widow being denied justice by a callous and faithless judge was both simple and familiar. On the one hand, the judge’s apathy toward this woman’s cause would have been offensive to many in Jesus’ audience. In the Hebrew Scriptures, and in Jewish society as a result, widows were counted among the poorest and most vulnerable members of society, and they were to be especially protected from abuse and exploitation.⁵ But Jesus’ parable likely resonated with his hearers because, for them as for us, such disregard for laws that were meant to care for the least was distressingly common. The widow’s precarious position was further highlighted by the fact that she had to argue her case on her own. As Joel Green notes, the ancient court system was the domain of men, and so the widow in Jesus’ story had no man to fight on her behalf, and she lacked the financial resources to “offer the appropriate bribe necessary for a swift settlement”.⁶

The scenario that Jesus described, then, was a profound illustration of the power imbalances of the time—the widow was the helpless, hopeless victim of injustice,⁷ while the judge was powerful, aloof, cold, and in control. But, as always, Jesus brought a twist into the story. The widow may have had none of the usual sources of power to influence her society, but the power she did have was her persistence.⁸ Ignoring any irritation she may have caused, she “kept coming to” the judge (v.3) and asking for justice. Eventually, the judge acceded to her request, not because of any sense of ethics or compassion, but because her ‘harassment’ was becoming unbearable. As Brittany Wilson explains, in the original Greek, ”the judge says: ‘because this widow causes trouble for me, I will give her justice, so that she may not, in the end, give me a black eye by her coming’ (verse 5)…We are probably meant to laugh at this topsy-turvy picture of a lowly widow pummeling a recalcitrant arbiter of justice”.⁹ In this choice of words, Jesus removed the stereotype of the helpless widow and depicted her as strong and influential beyond her station.¹⁰

This widow is a symbol, a representation of a person in whom the reign of God which Jesus spoke about in 17:20-37 has been real-ised. Faced with injustice and struggle, she did not give up or become meekly compliant with social expectations. Rather, she continued until justice was won. Her victory in the parable, then, was an illustration of what it means to manifest God’s reign; it was a moment when Christ, the “Human One” (CEB), appeared like a flash of lightning, and God’s presence, which uplifts the least, was revealed.