Scripture: Luke 18:1-8
This summer, living in Rhode Island again for the first time in many years, I’ve enjoyed regularly going to the beach again.
As a kid growing up in East Providence, for whatever reason, I only ever went to East Bay beaches and Newport beaches, with the infrequent trip out to Westerly beaches every few years.
My own discovery of Narragansett and Matunuck and Charlestown beaches has been its own kind of revelation, of places that I must have known existed, in theory, but getting to go to these places and explore and enjoy them in reality has been a wonderful experience.
The ocean is an aspect of creation that is full of meaning and symbol. In the place where water meets land and land meets water there is an ever-changing ebb and flow of waves and sand that is both beautiful and powerful at the same time — especially this week with Hurricane Erin intensifying surf and riptides.
Horseshoe crabs clop their way across the sand; jellyfish wash ashore and wait for the next high tide to pick them back up; ospreys dive at the surface of the water and fly away carrying a fish; opportunistic seagulls bide their time.
You can go to the beach and enjoy letting the world wash over you without being mindful of every miracle of creation in your midst, knowing that you are in the presence of special and sacred things.
The parables of Jesus work the same way.
Knowledge of the Kingdom of God lives inside of all of us, or so Jesus tells us. It’s always there, but we are not always directly aware of it. Our aspiration is to increase our awareness of the sacred imprint of God inside and around us so that we can help others see it and live in it as well.
Three of the parables that we’ve talked about so far this summer have been about this Kingdom of God. But the parable that we’re working on today is a lesson about how to pray.
In Luke’s Gospel, the parables of Jesus are all invitations to see a different reality, one where marginalized people are main characters and bearers of Good News. And so this parable about a vulnerable woman and an unjust judge is intended to help us think about a different reality.
Let’s take stock of what we know:
In a certain city there is a judge who wasn’t in relationship with God and who didn’t care about people — so this is a judge who is disconnected and not beholden to the commitments that typically undergird concepts of justice and righteousness in our world.
And in this city, there is also a woman who has lost members of her family who comes to the judge asking for some intervention against an unnamed someone whom she is in conflict with. But we aren’t given any details — it’s such a basic description that we’re not really able to empathize with this woman, except to the degree that we see someone who has less social power appealing to someone with more social power.
The judge initially refuses to intercede for her in any way. But after a time the judge, with humorous self-awareness says, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this woman keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice so that she will not wear me out by continually coming to me.”
The judge’s ruling feels off to me. There seems to be nothing noble or thoughtful or inspiring about the judge’s action. There is no appeal to a higher power or an impartial standard of righteousness; rather, it appears to be a simple act of self-preservation. The judge is tired and feels threatened and so makes a ruling for the woman so that she will go away and not wear him down anymore.
Is justice that is arbitrary still justice?
And where does this parable leave us as students of the Gospel and followers of Jesus, the one who is using this story to teach his followers about prayer?
One biblical commentator says, “I consider this one of the more difficult parables . . . the parable itself is brief (only four verses), and without its explanation [in the final two verses] there is little indication of its intent.”
The explanation Jesus offers for his story is this: “will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will God delay long in helping them? I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them.”
Is Jesus telling us all to become squeaky wheels or prayer and to pour forth our petitions to God at all hours of the day and night so that we might be given attention at some point? That doesn’t ring true to the rest of the gospel message.
In our own time we have known arbitrary justice, where one judge or court will make a ruling that another judge or court will reject or overturn. We feel the injustice when the application of law feels dictated by powerful interests, personal whim, or personal preference. And yet there is no easy alternative to the system of trying to keep people safe from the evil and vengeance that reverberates down the halls of history in our world.
We are all caught up in this imperfect search for justice, and perhaps this parable of unjust judge and woman with an undefined petition is meant to draw our attention to how hard and perhaps impossible this pursuit for justice is.
As Amy Jill Levine says, there is no easy closure to this parable; there is no closure at all. We cannot root for the woman or the judge, and we do not have enough information to speak about the woman’s accuser or adversary. Since we cannot find justice in this story, we need to look elsewhere.
Jesus was invested in fairness, reconciliation, and compassion — three things that we don’t find in this story. Perhaps we are meant to learn about them through their absence. The justice that the unjust judge offers is not the justice of God — we have to find a different moral compass, and perhaps that realization is what will lead us in the directions of prayer unceasing to God.
Maybe that’s why our summer trips to the beach are such helpful reminders. Day to day we might not be mindful of the horizon and the vastness of creation. But like a parable that gives us the long view, at the ocean we look off into the horizon and know that it extends even further than we can see, and we trust that there is more to this creation just outside of our perception — that God who dwells within us is also extending beyond us and holding creation together in relationship, reminding us all of our connection with all that is and encouraging us to stay engaged, imperfect though it is, with the pursuit of compassion and reconciliation.
May it be so. Amen.