a homily for Proper 24C
Text: Luke 18:1-8

This parable contains two characters: a widow and a judge. We aren’t given the circumstances that bring this woman before a judge, but we are given enough clues. Or really, the only two clues that are necessary: that she is a widow and that she is seeking justice. We don’t actually need any more than this because we know from Scripture why widows come before a court seeking justice.

In Jesus’s culture, when a woman’s husband dies, the widow is thrown into political limbo. She isn’t treated as a person, but as property, so she needs a new owner. The custom, the law actually, was that the man’s brother would marry her. If he didn’t have a brother and she had a son, then, he would be responsible.

It is a matter of justice because there is a man depriving her of her rights under the law. This isn’t brought up in the parable, but we know this from Scripture. Whenever the Bible refers to a widow, it is because a man who is to be responsible for her has either died and left her with no recourse or he refuses to take responsibility as obligated under the law.

And in our parable, the unjust judge was going to let the man get away with it.

We normally read this parable as if it were about persistence and not about justice. We try to pretend that Jesus’s story is about praying more and GOD will grant us what we ask for like a divine butler or wish-fulfilling genie. We hear preachers claim that if you pray for money every day, GOD will give it to you. A million bucks cash, right in your bank account. Or if you get cancer, just pray it away! And just like that, you’ll be healed! That we don’t have a million bucks in the bank or haven’t kicked cancer must mean that we haven’t prayed right. It’s our fault.

But Jesus doesn’t set this parable in the comfort of your living room, or the site of a random doctor’s visit. It is a courtroom. A court in which a widow, with no power or standing in society has been promised safety and security and she isn’t getting it. It has been stolen from her. This is less like a check for a million dollars magically showing up in our mailbox, and more like a $200 court-ordered paternity check that will pay for a month’s food, formula, and diapers.

It is about a woman deprived of justice. She, like the ten with leprosy from last week, fall through the cracks of indifference and live in the margins of society and she is merely trying to find what is promised, what is hers. And more over, we aren’t talking luxury, we’re talking freedom and survival. Food, shelter, clothing, the safety of a city.

This unjust judge isn’t GOD. Because GOD doesn’t side with wealthy and the indifferent, though it sometimes may feel like it.

Jesus tells them this parable, it says “about their need to pray always and not to lose heart.” It is about the evil and the injustice that is around us and it names it. It names the abuse and the injustice. It names the judge, who is there, to not merely uphold civil law, but GOD’s law and yet he doesn’t respect or fear GOD or the people. It is about the systems of injustice in our world that cause so much pain, that allow people to go to bed without eating and without clean clothes and without any protections. The slave trade that is more successful now than at any time in human history.

This isn’t about bank accounts or cancer, but justice. And Jesus says this that we might pray and not lose heart. It is about faith in the midst of unjust adversity. In response to the sickness and evil of the world, of our world, we pray and we keep our hope alive, like a candle in the deepest darkness, because GOD will find us, GOD will be with us, GOD will care for us in the dark.

Some of you will remember this, but in the years right after Mother Teresa died, they released her memoirs. [I wrote about this a while ago.] The media didn’t know what to make of them. She revealed that she hadn’t felt GOD’s presence with her in many years. That she had when she was younger, but not in a long time. And still she persisted, serving people living along or fallen through the crack of the world in Calcutta, among those deeply broken and dealing with grim realities of our unjust world and she wasn’t deterred.

That is what Jesus means when he talks persisting in prayer. Day and night. Not so that we can get something, but that we might help heal the broken in our world. That we are part of this as bringers of hope and in a world that seeks to overwhelm us with fear. That we bear the light of Christ in the depths of darkness.

When He ends with: “And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” He isn’t looking at the rooftops and for spires and big, fancy churches with crosses on the roof or us in our Sunday best or whether or not we stand or sit or kneel at the right times or if we keep silent at the right times or if we hush the children that might break our precious concentration, he is looking to see if we are persisting in our prayer, day and night with any faith at all, because Jesus isn’t sure He will find any!

Remember the mustard seed. Remember your heart. And remember your hope. These are the roots of faith.