Text: Luke 18:1-8 Sirach 35:12-26
Unedited transcript
This Sunday we’ve jumped a little. last time we had the account of the healing of 10 people of whom one Samaritan came back and gave thanks. and then we jump to a chunk of chapter 17 of Luke’s gospel which is where Jesus is asked by the Pharisees concerning the coming of the Kingdom. and we jump that because presumably, we’re going to get it closer to Advent towards the last Sundays of the church’s year. so it’s quite important to remember that because at the very end of today’s Gospel we’ll get a reference back to that chunk where the parable says: and yet when the Son of Man comes will he find faith on Earth? which looks back at all the examples where Jesus had given of the Son of Man coming or what the shape of the coming of the kingdom was like in the midst of famously in Luke’s gospel.
anyhow, we then begin this parable which Jesus has told a group of Pharisees and disciples – because it was the Pharisees who’d asked him the question about the coming of the Kingdom. so Jesus tells them a parable about their need to pray always and not lose heart, not become cowardly. apparently, the word means just not becoming cowardly.
and he says: in a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. now we picked up, I pick up that someone who’s more or less deaf and dumb can’t be moved by anybody. but there may be a more technical meaning here because of course in most ancient cities in of the Hebrew world, and much of the world still today, you will very often get two sorts of court: one where customary or religious law is meted out. and that in the case of Jewish people living in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been the Beth din, so a court made up of Pharisees guess what the people who is talking to. They would have dealt with matters from the Torah strictly, they would have been judging matters according to the law of Moses.
and then you would have had the local court. so some variant of secular law is provided by either the Roman authorities or one of their sycophants who would give some kind of secular thought. the person might also be a Jew but the point would be that they were not into Torah, they were into ruling according to the secular authority who ran them at the time – Roman or Greek or whoever, whatever their view of what law ought to be. they were the local civil judge as it were.
remember even in the English-speaking world we’ve had the difference between civil courts and ecclesiastical courts for some time. so there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. this may really mean he was the secular judge. and not only that. apparently, he was rather a good judge because if you’re a judge you are not supposed to have respect for people. you’re supposed to decide things on their merits. you’re not supposed to look and decide according to the favour of the rich or the favour of the poor.
in fact, Jesus appears to be riffing here on a passage from Sirach, the Book of Sirach, which where there is a chunk reading this: do not offer him a bribe, and he will not accept it; and do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice for the Lord is the judge and with him there is no partiality, he will not show partiality to the poor but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged, he will not ignore the supplication of the orphan or the widow when she pours out her complaint. then it goes on in this vein. Jesus is clearly referring to that in his parable here. though his use of the characters is slightly different.
so let’s imagine that our judge is a secular judge, he’s not going to be moved by appeals to Torah, and he’s not going to be moved by rich people trying to ply him with favours to get a good judgment for them, or poor people, being obviously victims, and therefore obviously needing help. but even so, he must keep the law. so let’s give him a chance, this judge. and in that city, there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying: Grant me justice against my opponent. well, actually, vindicate me against my adversaries. it’s quite strong, she’s a tough one.
the interesting thing is that as a widow, of course, she was in a precarious situation because she would need it normally to have had men to do things for her, and she would certainly have needed men to have do things for her in a Torah court. and she would have been dependent on people who might be adverse to her, like sons, daughters, and sons-in-law who would have wanted a greater part of her husband’s inheritance than maybe was their right. so what has she done? She has jumped the religious court, the court of the Pharisees, the people to who Jesus is talking. she’s jumped that. she’s saying: I’m not putting up with this is not any longer, I’m going straight to the secular judge.
and apparently, this is something that people quite frequently do, you know. sometimes if you’re in a country with sharia courts, if you’re in a Muslim country with sharia courts, sometimes you will try to seek to resolve your family issues within the sharia courts, but if you think there’s an advantage for you in going to the civil law in the country, you do. people disagree with you but you do that. and it was the same with Jewish people. they would go, any pious Jewish people would go to the appropriate Torah courts, Beth din, and hope that things will get sorted out there. but if they saw an advantage for themselves in going to the secular court, one which feared neither God nor people, then they would go for it. so here she’s plucky, she’s out of line, and she’s doing something which is borderline with the traditional family values by heading outside the people who ought to have sorted out her issue at the lower level. so here she’s going: grant me justice, vindicate me against my adversary. and the parable doesn’t tell us whether she’s right or wrong, merely that she’s very determined, she really wants to get her way.
and what she wants the judge to do is something actually quite unacceptable, because she’s asking the judge to be her vindicator. and the judge’s job is not to be an indicator, the judge’s job is to judge according to the law. but he’s saying to the judge effectively: you be my indicator, you’ll be my attorney, my prosecuting attorney, my defending attorney. I want you to be on my side. she’s trying to bully him to do what she wants. she may be right, or she may be wrong – we don’t know the issue.
for a while he refused but later he said to himself: though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone… so he’s quite self-conscious about the fact that he is not following Torah law and that part of his reputation – and that’s his good reputation – his reputation is that he doesn’t make an exception of persons; yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will take her side, I will vindicate her – doing something which probably she ordered to do, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.
well apparently there are many many different translations of this, wear me out; I had originally thought that it was from the language of boxing and apparently it’s used in boxing, but apparently behind the notion of wearing me out is actually the notion of someone blackening my face; she would blacken my face, she would cause me to lose prestige by continually coming. why? well supposing that you are in the town, you see this widow, this feisty widow constantly coming to the judge’s chambers, insisting on getting in and having loud exchanges with him. well, a couple of possibilities: either you will begin to suspect that the judge is partial to her and that there is some form of dishonesty going on, or you’ll believe that he is partial to the adversary which is why he’s taking so long to give anything to her; or – this is the other thing – you will think that they’re having an affair, in other words, she just by continually coming is putting him into the position where he’ll lose his reputation.
so he decides that he will go for her, because it’s the least worse, that he will sort her issue out, he will take her aside, because it’s the least bad of all the options available to him. and so then the Lord says: listen to what the unjust judge says. and that’s again our translation fails it because it literally says: listen to what the judge or unrighteousness says. and that may be that he’s referring to the judge now as unjust because the judge has now made a decision on behalf of the woman, which perhaps he shouldn’t have, but simply because he was fed up. maybe the judge has become unjust. but maybe that it’s a good way of referring to the judge who had judgment over non-sacred matters, in other words – over secular matters. that would have been a standard phrase for referring to secular matters. the judge who’s in charge of day-to-day things, nothing holy.
look at how he reacts. and will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? will he delay long in helping? so the image is given by Jesus is that the judge of impeccable reputation over secular matters will eventually be bullied into doing something in favour of those people who pester him enough. and that God is even more like that. in other words, you can bully God effectively to take your side. God is even more greatly, like the judge, than we would think. which is an extraordinary image when you think that it makes it seem as though God is someone who has to be bullied into doing something that may not even be the right thing to do, but it’s just something that someone wants terribly. and that person is feisty and rule-breaking, and terribly insistent.
this seems to be what the image of God that Jesus is giving: I tell you, he will grant justice to them. so he’s saying: yeah, God is the sort of person who precisely will intervene, even when it’s apparently not the right thing to do, in favour of his unjust people. and he will do so quickly. And yet when the Son of Man comes will he find faith on Earth? and that’s this strange final remark: does our pestering are not being cowardly? are we able to avoid being cowards? will he find that we’ve been bullied into submission by our normal expectation of ‘well, religious justice is slow and probably won’t get any’, which certainly speaking is a Catholic priest who’s been into the religious justice system of my own Church, I can tell you, is slow and doesn’t work properly, and very occasionally a judge from unexpected high quarters gets on board and does something about it, but it’s very rare. I’ve been praying for that for a long time. but mostly when the Son of Man comes will he find faith on Earth?
will we be the sort of people who will believe enough that God might even step outside what seems to be right and proper? will we be rather – what’s the word – more than feisty as in the case of the widow, but actually a right old bully? do we have that in our hearts? or will we find that the world makes cowards of us all? the Son of Man coming seems to me to be Jesus indicating that there is a place of slightly crazed bravery and stepping outside boxes, and insisting that God come and do something that apparently isn’t even right. this is a rather extraordinary little parable.