2 Timothy 3.14-4.5, Luke 18.1-8
The Eighteenth Sunday after Trinity, 16 October 2022
Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth
Jesus said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, "Grant me justice against my opponent.”’
This is a story about what is popularly called ‘pester power’. Usually that’s when children wear down their parents by pestering them into eventually buying them that puppy, or shiny electronic device they really want; so when I shared this story with the children of Austwick School they seemed to get it straightaway, and to warm to the widow with her persistence.
Might it be, I asked them, that the widow was in court to resolve a dispute with her landlord; a man who had doubled her rent overnight, which she couldn’t afford to pay, and had given her just one week to cough up the extra money or she would be thrown out onto the streets. The widow knew that the law said the landlord couldn’t do this.
The children enjoyed my suggestion that having been thrown out of court the widow then followed the judge to the golf course; they were intrigued and scandalised when I told them that the judge’s golf partner that day was none other than the widow’s iniquitous landlord; and they loved the bit about the widow, having earlier had the judge’s front door slammed in her face, magically appearing in his bathroom the following morning to repeat her appeal for justice to be done. That was the last straw - later that day in court the reluctant judge granted her appeal and the landlord’s threat was dropped.
So this is a parable about the pester power of the widow who protested. Read that way it becomes a call to us all to never give up trying to put something right, if you know it is wrong. If a mean, cruel judge like this could eventually give in to a widow’s persistence, Jesus encourages his followers to imagine how other wrongs in the world can be put right if people are courageous enough to keep trying.
Again, the children got this straightaway. And they quickly gave me lessons about people they’d heard of who had seen a wrong and kept on bothering the powers-that-be until they changed the world as a result of their persistence. People like William Wilberforce the slave trade abolitionist, and the suffragettes campaigning for women to vote. Nelson Mandela; even Mohandas Ghandi came up in our discussion.
And they told me about people today who are trying to put wrong things right in the world - and although these things carry on, they are courageous enough to keep trying. People like Greta Thunberg and other environmental campaigners; and Malala Yousafzai the Pakistani activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate who bravely battles for girls to have the same education as boys, in a world where this is often denied.
The message of this Parable is that when ordinary people exercise pester power then the world can become a better place.
The Parable of the Persistent Widow is about the legitimacy and the power of protest; sustained protest which may take years before it effects change, but is no less valid for that.
When I think of the persistent widows in our day and time, a person who comes to mind is Anne Williams, whose 15-year-old son Kevin died in the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989 and who
… dedicated her life to challenging flawed medical evidence accepted at the inquest, and its verdict of accidental death. With other families of the 96 people who died at Hillsborough, she was refused a judicial review of the coroner's rulings in 1993, then had three applications to the attorney general and an application to the European court of human rights turned down. But finally, in 2012, Anne Williams saw the truth about the disaster fully established, with the report of the Hillsborough independent panel, chaired by James Jones, the bishop of Liverpool. It confirmed the facts she had known all along and refused to see denied. [2]
Now, you may be thinking, doesn’t Luke tell us that this is a parable about persisting not in protest, but in prayer? Let's be careful to notice what happens if we make the judge in the story represent God, for if we do so then God becomes a tyrant who has no respect for people, will not listen to their cries for help, and will withhold justice from them. Look again, for that’s precisely the opposite of what God is like, and of what is actually happening here, according to Jesus. For he is contrasting God with the Judge, not comparing him to him. [3]
I think he’s telling us that this is a parable about persisting both in protest and in prayer, and that the two things are inseparable.
For when a widow who has been wronged confronts a judge who does not fear God, that very God himself is at her side.
And when a mother who has lost her son in an avoidable tragedy and for years has repeatedly confronted ‘the patronising disposition of unaccountable power’ [4] in trying to set the record straight, then as Bishop James suggests, she also has had God for her help.
When the widow confronts a judge who has no respect for people, she finds the strength to protest because she understands that God has the utmost respect for her, so that she should not accept any treatment which would deny her humanity, her dignity, her ability to flourish in life. This widow, in faith sustained by prayer, has a God-given confidence to struggle and keep on struggling against the powerful forces set against her, until she sees justice done.
Anne Williams sadly died of cancer just months after the independent Hillsborough report was published, aged just 62. Not long before she died Bishop James visited her at her home. He brought her a gift, a marble pietà of Jesus being taken down from the cross and held by his mother. James’ own mother had given it to him years earlier after a trip to Rome. When Anne unwrapped it she looked at the bishop and asked, ‘How did you know?’ ‘How did I know what?’ he gently replied. ‘How did you know that the last gift Kevin gave me before he died was a miniature pietà he’d brought back from Rome?’
As Bishop James writes in his memoir, ‘Anne never lived to hear the jury return the determination of ‘unlawful killing’, but in her soul she already knew the truth. And the publication of the Panel’s report had set her free.’ [5]
Notes
[1] For more on this parable see also my earlier sermon Luke 18 - Our relationship with Scripture, preached in Croxteth, 2010.
[2] David Conn, Hillsborough campaigner Anne Williams dies aged 62. Guardian, 18 Apr 2013.
[3] See William Herzog, ‘Justice at the Gate?' in Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed pp.215-232 for an expansion on this perspective.
[4] James Jones, Justice for Christ's sake: a personal journey around justice through the eyes of faith, p.10.
[5] James Jones, Justice for Christ's sake: a personal journey around justice through the eyes of faith, p.17-18.
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