Oct. 21, 2007

By Harry T. Cook

Luke 18: 1-8a

We meet in today’s gospel two characters: one called a widow and the other an unjust judge. Those who would have heard this parable in the First Century C.E. would have seen immediately what the gospeler was driving at.

In the social scheme of things at the time, widows had no rights to speak of and little hope of economic redress if they were left in penury – as frequently happened. So a widow pursuing justice before an unjust judge was the same basic image that caused some poet of ancient Greek mythology to create the figure of Sisyphus whose eternal punishment was to push a huge boulder up a hill only to have it tumble back down every time just before he got it to the top.

The opening line of today’s Luke passage says the story is about the need to pray and not to lose heart. But it is really about pursuing justice, no matter how long it takes and how often one is rebuffed.

A word about the phenomenon of prayer: the Benedictine monastic order’s rule of life is as simple as they life they actually lead. They sum it up in three Latin words: Ora et labora. Pray and work. You might be surprised to learn what a Benedictine abbot once told me about that rule. He said, “Our prayer is our work, and if we aren’t working, our prayers are worthless.” He suggested further that working to help others obtain justice is the kind of incense the god of his imagination would savor.

The gospel writer does not vouchsafe to us what kind of justice the widow in this parable against all odds was demanding, meaning it doesn’t really matter what exactly she was seeking. But given the over-arching economic theme of the gospels, we can imagine that it had something to do with money — as in perhaps she didn’t have enough to live on and needed to get what was her due from some unnamed opponent.

The unjust judge — and there is an anomaly — is not minded to hear her plea. He can’t be bothered, but she keeps at him until he says (and this is a pretty good rendering of the text from its original language): Because this widow vexes me with her continual petitions, I will rule for her before she gives me a poke in the eye. “Poke in the eye” is almost the literal translation of the Greek at that point.

I think Luke meant for his (or her) readers and hearers to understand the unjust judge as the personification of flawed and reluctant system and the widow as representing every individual, group, class and race whose members routinely seek justice and are rebuffed until the one who can dispense justice is overborne by the persistence of the seekers.

That is what we meant during the demonstrations of the era of the civil rights movement we chanted: Justice delayed is justice denied. But why must justice be denied or so slow in coming? Why must widows and other oppressed people have to beg for what is rightly theirs? And why aren’t more people involved in demanding justice for such people? I begrudged not one of any minute, hour or day I spent during the 1960s seeking with and for African-American people the kind of justice I had enjoyed since birth to a white father and white mother.

It wasn’t always a picnic, though, and it was usually a nuisance and inconvenience to do all those things, but I couldn’t be a minister of the gospel and turn away from the challenge. And I don’t know how anyone who claims the identity of “Christian” can.

Who are the biblical widows of this post-biblical era? I will tell you who some of them are. They are the tens of thousands of people who are being impoverished by the drive to what is known as the global economy — which, among other things, means the shipping of jobs to non-unionized regions or offshore to where people will feel rich if they work 12 hours a day for 12 cents an hour.

Of course, such people deserve justice, too. The answer is to demand from the unjust judge, in this case the market economy, that executives and stockholders be required to share an equitable portion of the gains globalization has brought them with people their economic policies have left high and dry.

Maybe that’s the widow’s persistence of this generation, the march into the streets of our time. Persistence in the face of injustice is the kind of prayer Luke was talking about, the kind of determination not to lose heart. If our work is our prayer, let’s get busy. The widow is about to poke the unjust judge in the eye. The fewer seeing eyes, the less seeing there will be. Let’s work for justice and clear sight, then, because two clear-seeing eyes have a better chance to help effect justice than one.

 © Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.