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Luke 18:1-8
The Parable of the Persistent Widow
1Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. 2He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. 3And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
4“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, 5yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that her coming doesn’t utterly shame me!’ ”
6And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. 7And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? 8I tell you, he will see that they get justice, and quickly. However, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on the earth?”
My suspicion is that lots of people read this parable and find it confusing and off-putting. But since it’s a parable of Jesus, we need to do the work of understanding what he was saying, because anything Jesus said has great value to our lives as his disciples.
Let’s start with the reason this parable is confusing and off-putting, which is that Luke tells us up front that it’s a parable about prayer, so we read it and come to the conclusion that the judge in the parable represents God. And that’s reasonable, because it’s about a judge who receives the petition from a widow, so it makes sense that in a parable about prayer, he would represent God.
But that’s not really what Jesus is suggesting. Actually, Jesus is using a teaching method he uses in other parables and teachings – he’s contrasting sinful human beings with our holy and loving God. And the point Jesus is making is that if even sinful and corrupt humans will sometimes wind up doing the right thing, we can count on our Holy God to do the right thing all the time. Once you see that Jesus is contrasting God and human authorities instead of likening God to a corrupt judge, this parable makes a lot more sense. And it becomes a lot less disturbing.
Of course, it’s also a little uncomfortable for us to read what the judge says about the widow woman ‘bothering’ him. We don’t like the idea that when we pray, God is bothered by our prayers. But the Bible scholars say that the word that’s translated “bother” in this passage is probably a translation of a Hebrew word from the Old Testament that referred to the way the covenant people drove God crazy with their unfaithfulness. So it seems that Jesus was making a reference to the Hebrew scriptures, not a suggesting that our prayers bother God.
There’s another potential misunderstanding about this parable. Jesus almost certainly didn’t mean to say that if you keep praying persistently, all your prayers will be granted. The scholars say Jesus was more likely promising that the specific prayers of his followers for the fulfillment of God’s peaceful kingdom will come to pass. He was talking about the collective voice of the church crying out for justice, not about each of us holding up our individual prayer requests.
The Bible seems consistently to make the point that God invites us to lift up before him the joys and concerns and desires of our heart. But Jesus doesn’t seem to have promised that all of those prayers will be granted – in spite of what some of our brothers and sisters who claim to be “prayer warriors” might say. After all, both Jesus and the apostle Paul prayed for things that were not granted. And it seems silly to claim that those prayers weren’t granted because Jesus and Paul weren’t “prayer warriors.”
The overall teaching on prayer in the New Testament is that its primary purpose is to get our hearts aligned with God’s heart, not to suggest that anything we pray for will be granted if we do it persistently enough or earnestly enough. Both Jesus and Paul eventually ended their prayers by accepting God’s will instead of insisting on their own.
In today’s reading, Jesus seems to say that when we pray for God’s justice and peace to be fulfilled “on earth, as it is in heaven,” we can be confident that those prayers are asking for something that’s already near and dear to the heart of the God we love and serve.
Let’s pray. Lord, we are thankful that you receive our prayers as a loving Father, not as a corrupt and sinful human judge. We trust that you will care for us and provide for us, and we pray that your kingdom of peace and justice will come to fulfillment. Move us to join eagerly in the work of bringing about that kingdom, we pray. In Jesus’ name, amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
(The other readings for today are Psalms 27 and 28; Deuteronomy 16:18-20 and 17:14-20; and II Corinthians 8:1-16. Our readings come from the NIV Bible, as posted on Biblica.com, the website of the International Bible Society.)
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