The Parable of the Persistent Widow

A sermon by Beth Downey Sawatzky on: Jeremiah 31:27-34, Luke 18:1-8

May only truth be spoken and only truth received. Amen.

I love the parable of the persistent widow. I love it because I understand her; I like her spunk, her feist, her anger, her you-don’t-scare-me boldness. I love her as an example, in our cannon of Biblical womanhood, of shameless and persistent self-advocacy. Speak up for yourself, don’t roll over, don’t just take it when the world meets out injustice, to you or to others. Don’t stop demanding better just because somebody calls you noisy or disruptive, or demanding or nasty, or—OR—stubborn.

I love this parable also because of it’s ironic flavour. It’s a bit scoldy, on Jesus part, when you read it closely--but in such a warm, loving, “don’t you know me by now?” kind of way. I think a lot of times when we read the conclusion of this parable it can sound like Jesus is comparing God and the unjust judge with similarity?

“Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not [also, likewise] bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night?” As though the take away is, ‘be like this with God. Where out the ear of the Holy Spirit with your insistence of prayer. That’s how you’ll get things done, that’s how you’ll see the deepest most precious desires of your heart brought to pass.’

That’s starting to sound like Genie prayer, isn’t it? Rub the bottle this way, or that way, just so—everybody has their own advice—rub the bottle right and the Genie will appear and grant your deepest wish. That is not how prayer works.

This parable is not a parable of comparison, it’s a parable of contrast! “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not GOD, God who is nothing like the unjust Judge, God who made you and loves you, who is working all things together for the good of all creation, God the most high fountain of all abundance and grace—will not GOD, bring about justice for her chosen ones (read, all of us), who cry out to her day and night?”

God is not like the unjust judge. We’re in Luke 18 here but this is just a reprise of what Jesus spent so much time saying seven chapters ago in Luke 11: people ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. (That’s very important.) So he gives them the framework we now call the Lord’s prayer—and remember, every single week we start by declaring that this is a prayer we pray in boldness. Jesus gives them the Lord’s prayer and then he goes in to the Ask, Seek, Knock, business.

Sometimes a person knocks on a friend’s door, in need of something, Jesus says, but the friend is busy, or having a bad day, or the need is inconvenient, and they turn their friend away, so the friend has to nag and harass to get what they need. Such are human beings. But God will not turn you away or defer you for his own private convenience. Or what about you parents, Jesus says. If your kids ask you for food, do you neglect them, pawn them off? Of course not, you feed them good things—naturally! How much more so the Heavenly Father, perfection of parenthood?

The most important thing my mother ever told me about God, when I was growing up, was that God is much more loving than me.

At the time I was in deep angst about a troubled friend. I knew they didn’t have a relationship with God, and because of that, I wasn’t sure what God’s relationship would be to them. I was terribly afraid that God would reject my friend if push came to shove, or that the cosmic rules of justice would consign them to death and God would have to shrug his shoulders and say, “too bad.” I prayed so hard for that friend, after a while I felt like I had run out of words to bend God’s ear with. So, inspired by the parable of The Persistent Widow, I sometimes took to praying through gesture—just with this [knock, knock.] That was my way of telling God, “so help me, if this is what it takes, I will hassle and nag and wear you down until I see with my own two Simeon eyes that you have taken care of this.”

And while, in my heart, I was misguided in that I was treating God more like the unjust judge, in retrospect I think there was something very faithful about that knock-knock-knocking thing that I was doing.

In his 2016 JJ Thiessen lecture series, Old Testament scholar J. Richard Middleton talks about how “even prayers on the ragged edge, on the boundaries of propriety, have the power to unleash the power of the resurrection and bring about new creation in our lives.” In extension of that, and in connection with the parable of the persistent widow, I’d like to read you a very abridged version of an already very short Jewish story called Bontsha The Silent. This version is written by Isaac Peretz.

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[The story excerpted here is found in the Penguin Book of Jewish Short Stories (1979), edited by Emanuel Litvinoff, currently out of print but sometimes available secondhand.]

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For all of us in the church our life’s pursuit should be a closer walk with Christ. But to really give ourselves to that process, I think we as Christians might occasionally need to be a little bit braver in our desires and bolder in our words with God. I think we might need to pound a little on God’s door, as though we really are not servants but friends. Friends welcome on all days and in all states.

There have been times in my life when, because I was hurting at my worst, I stopped praying. I didn’t stop because I thought God didn’t care or didn’t want to help me—I simply didn’t know what to pray. At those times I sort of mistrusted my own ability to know what was really best for me in the big scheme of things; but I trusted that God knew and would continue to love and care for me according to that insight. But don’t swallow here because all of this makes me sound deceptively virtuous and there’s still a problem:

If we stop praying in the midst of pain for fear that we will pray wrong, that we will lash out or speak incorrectly to God, we take ourselves away from God exactly in the moment when God is ready to do the tenderest, most important work in us.

To conclude, there’s a text in the Book of Common Prayer that has transformed my sense of freedom to lay all my cards on the table with God, uncensored, especially during times of perplexing pain. In a way I think it’s been like an extension, the next layer, of that old impulsive body prayer I started as a teenager. I’d like to pass it on to you as a tool. I’ll read it first, and then I’ll lead it as a shared prayer to end.

Almighty God, fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking: We beseech thee to have compassion upon our infirmities; and vouchsafe to give us those things, which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Note, that bit about our unworthiness—it’s not that we dare not ask for God’s goodness because we are unworthy of it. No no, it’s that in our moments of cowardice we become unworthy of our heritage as God’s children, and it is for that sad reason that we sometimes do not ask. And sometimes it is simply true that we don’t know what to ask for, and so we feel voiceless. In both of those circumstances, I find this prayer helps me. So join with me as we close in prayer:

Almighty God, fountain of all wisdom, who knowest our necessities before we ask, and our ignorance in asking: We beseech thee to have compassion upon our infirmities; and vouchsafe to give us those things, which for our unworthiness we dare not, and for our blindness we cannot ask, for the worthiness of thy Son Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.