The Parable of the Persistent Widow

Luke 18:1-8:

Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. ² He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. ³ And 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, ⁵ yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
 ⁶ And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. ⁷ And will not God bring about justice for his chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Will he keep putting them off? ⁸ I 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?”

¹⁵ People were also bringing babies to Jesus for him to place his hands on them. When the disciples saw this, they rebuked them. ¹⁶ But Jesus called the children to him and said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. ¹⁷ Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”

This parable means, a lot of preachers would say, that if we want something from God, we just need to pray. Not getting any results? Pray harder! Still nothing? Must not be praying hard enough, so try again. Try and try and try—keep trying—until God finally gives in and gets you what you want, if only to make you shut up. This sounds a little too blunt, I know, but if you want to put some really nice, spiritual language around the point, you can easily use Luke’s words: “Don’t lose heart! Keep praying! God will answer your prayer!”

Three distinct possibilities present themselves that, while drawing on similar elements, yet differ enough from each other that the preacher will need to exercise homilitical and pastoral judgment in determining which route to pursue.

 

God the Good Judge

The point is not that God is like an unjust judge who will, eventually relent to the persistent petitions of the widow. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!" (11:13). We might read today's comparison similarly: "If even the most unjust of judges will finally relent to the ceaseless petitions of a defenseless widow, then how much more will God -- who is, after all, a good judg
He -- answer your prayers!"
The focus of this interpretation is on God's goodness and eagerness to bless. Therefore, the sermon offers believers who are perhaps reluctant to address almighty God with their petitions both an invitation and encouragement to pray without ceasing, confident of God's desire to respond.

God the Just Judge

A second and related path would be to give primary attention not only to Luke's introductory note but also to the choice of the unjust judge as a major character. Might the parable give voice to some of the discouragement of early believers, whether caused by the delay of Jesus' return or the difficult or unjust circumstances they were enduring? If so, the parable might be saying, "While I know that God may seem like an unjust judge, God's actions are just and God will deliver justice in due time."
The focus in this case is on the interpretation of the parable in the latter verses of the pericope. Correspondingly, the rhetorical force of the sermon is not so much invitation as it is comfort for those in distress and encouragement to persevere in faith and prayer. Believers, like the widow, should pray and petition without ceasing and not lose heart, confident that God's justice will in time prevail.

The Widow as Pursuer of Justice

A third interpretive route shifts our attention from the judge to the widow. Widows in the ancient world were incredibly vulnerable, regularly listed with orphans and aliens as those persons deserving special protection. The fact that this particular widow must beseech a judge unattended by any family highlights her extreme vulnerability. Yet she not only beseeches the judge, but also persists in her pleas for justice to the point of creating sufficient pressure to influence his actions.
The focus in this reading is on the judge's description of his own motivation for settling the widow's claim. He asserts (as the narrator already had) that he neither fears God nor respects people, thereby testifying that his unsavory character has not changed during the course of the parable. When he explains why he relents, however, he utters a description of the effect of the widow's ceaseless complaints on him that most translations dilute. A more literal translation of the judge's grievance (18:5) is that the woman "is giving me a black eye."

Like all black eyes, the one the widow's complaints threaten to inflict have a double effect, representing both physical and social distress. That is, the judge complains that the widow's relentless badgering not only causes him physical harm but also risks publically embarrassing him. For this reason, he says -- perhaps justifying his actions to his wounded sense of self? -- that he relents not because he has changed his mind but simply to shut up this dangerous widow. In this case, insolent, obnoxious, even intolerable behavior results in justice.

Read this way, the parable serves to encourage those suffering injustice to continue their complaints and calls for justice. A sermon following this path will encourage believers in their efforts, noting that sometimes it takes extreme, even socially unacceptable behavior to effect change. God, the Bible has persistently insisted, gives special attention to those who are most vulnerable; therefore, we should persist in our complaints, even to the point of embarrassing the powers that be in order to induce change.

The Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard

Matthew 20:1-16:

 

To illustrate this point, Jesus told the story of the workers in the vineyard. Some of the details in this story seem very strange to us, but in fact this is just the kind of thing that could happen regularly during the grape harvest in Israel. Storms could easily ruin the crop and it was important to get the harvest in as quickly as possible. So for a time, anyone who wanted a job could have one. The work was hard; working hours were from dawn to sunset, which in a Mediterranean country means a twelve-hour day. The wage was a standard one, a ‘denarius’ or silver coin. A denarius was the average daily wage for a worker, but it’s important to know that it was also the average cost of surviving per day for the masses of poor families in Israel. It didn’t allow any room to manoeuvre; a denarius would buy your family what they needed to stay alive, no more and no less. It would get you basic food on the table, but not Shaw cable or Internet service!

 

During the grape harvest, men who wanted to work would go to the marketplace and stand around; it was like going to an employment centre in the morning to look for a job for the day. They would work the twelve hours, and then they would be paid at the end of the day so that each man could go home with money to buy food for his family. If a man was unable to find work on a particular day, then his family would not eat. If he found work for only a part of the day, and thus was unable to earn a whole denarius, his family would eat, but not enough to stave off hunger pangs.

 

Thus far, there are no surprises in Jesus’ story. But now come a couple of unexpected twists, and these are the details that would have stood out for the people who first heard the parable. So let’s spend a few minutes looking at these unexpected features in the story.

First surprise: It was not the custom for the owner of a vineyard to go himself into the marketplace to hire workers. The usual practice would be for the owner to send his manager or some other employee. In fact later on in the story, when the time comes to pay the workers, we do see the owner working through his manager in this way; if you look in verse 8 we read ‘When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, “Call the labourers and give them their pay”’’. But when it came to the actual hiring, he went out into the marketplace and looked after it himself.

 

So what we have here is a very unusual boss. He actually cares about the down-and-outs in the marketplace who are desperate to earn a silver coin so that they can feed their families for the day! He cares about them so much that he goes out, not once, but five times during the day to see if there is anyone there standing around looking for work.

 

What is this telling us about God? The gospel teaches us that God doesn’t stay safely in heaven, insulated from the pain and sin of a broken world. Jesus told us that God is like a shepherd who leaves the ninety-nine sheep who are safe in the fold and goes out into the wilds to look for the lost one. And of course in that story Jesus is describing himself. In Jesus, God has come among us to search for the lost. He cares about every human being in this world, and so he has come among us to live and die so that we can come home to him.

 

Here’s the second surprise: Everyone, even the latecomers, gets a full day’s pay. Of course, that was what the contract said. They’d all agreed to work for a denarius. But when the ones who had worked all day long saw the eleventh-hour types getting a denarius, they naturally thought that they themselves would get a lot more. After all, they’d worked twelve times longer!

 

Their problem was that they were understanding the money in terms of wages. But a landowner who pays a full day’s wage to someone who has only worked for one hour is obviously not paying a wage; he’s giving a gift. Paying them all at prime rate was not an economic decision; it was an act of grace.

 

And it’s the same with our place in the Kingdom of God. We are citizens of the Kingdom of God today, not because of anything good we have done, but because of God’s free gift of grace to us. It was secured for us long before we were born, when Jesus gave his life on the Cross for our sins. What he did there for us was a perfect work, to which nothing needs to be added. We don’t have to earn it; in fact, nothing I could do in my entire life would ever be enough to earn it.