In
the Godly Play room, where our children are right now, hearing about the
Exodus, the storytelling materials for the parables of Jesus are on their own
special set of shelves. And while the
other materials are out in the open, in uncovered baskets or displayed on
little racks, or just sitting there on the shelf for anyone to see and pick up
as she wishes, the parables are each hidden away in a box. With a lid.
The boxes and their lids are painted a shiny gold color, and we tell the
children that this is because there is something precious inside, something
more precious than gold. But the box has
to be opened, like a gift. And unlike a
present wrapped in paper at a child’s birthday party, the gift of a parable is
often hard to open. It takes time, and a
certain inner readiness, to wait and watch and be present to the gift until it
opens of itself.
Now
that can be frustrating, because the language of Jesus’ parables is so
deceptively simple, it seems they should be easy to understand. They describe everyday things or people in
situations not very different from the ones in our own lives. So if they are closed to us it is not because
of specialized technical vocabulary, or because they don’t make sense on their
own terms. They are closed to us because
it is hard to see sometimes what these stories could possibly be telling us
about God. And in that sense, the
parables open from inside of us, if they open for us at all, because they make
us examine what we think we know about who God is, and how God acts, and where
God is showing up in the story. Jesus teaches
in parables so that we will do our homework, and not just take someone else’s
word for it when it comes to questions of faith.
Which
can be a problem if you’re trying to explain those teachings to someone
else. Today’s epistle reading counsels
Timothy to be persistent in proclaiming the message, whether the time is
favorable or unfavorable, and to teach with utmost patience, because people tend
to prefer religious instruction that is comfortably tailored to fit what they
already believe. They aren’t necessarily
interested in opening for reexamination their basic religious assumptions. This may be why the authors of the Gospels,
while they sometimes simply give us Jesus’ parables as-is, often will take
pains to set them in an interpretive frame, as if we won’t be able to open the
gift without a key. In the case of
today’s Gospel story, the author of Luke gives us what he thinks is the key, by
introducing it in this manner: “Jesus told his
disciples a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose
heart.” Which is fair enough, and we’ll
come back to it later, but first we have to see what’s going on in the parable
itself.
It
is the story of a judge, self-admittedly a hard-hearted and arrogant man, who eventually
gives in to the persistent badgering of a widow—not because he is persuaded of
the justice of her cause, but in order to stop her from hounding him. Now, our
translation actually takes a little bit of the edge off the story when it has
the judge say that he fears the widow will “wear him out”. Because what the Greek text literally says is
that she will “give him a black eye.” Now,
I don’t think this means he’s afraid she will show up in his courtroom one day
with a rolling pin and give him a good one upside the head. But in English we sometimes use the figure of
speech “to give so-and-so a black eye” to talk about shaming that person
publicly, or doing damage to his reputation.
And I wonder if the popular speech of Jesus’ day had a similar
expression.
And
let me tell you why I think the story actually makes more sense if we read it
that way. You see, widows are often
cited in the Bible as a class of persons who need special social and legal
protections, because they are particularly vulnerable to exploitation. One reason for this is that a widow has no
husband to help her with the hard work of earning subsistence in an agrarian
society. But a less obvious reason why a
widow is vulnerable is that she has no one to advocate for her interests in the
public square. Under Jewish law, women did
have certain legal rights, such as being able to own property. But a right that exists on paper is not
effective if you don’t have the means to defend it.
And,
as in many conservative societies even in today’s world, women in ancient
Israel were supposed to confine their activities to the domestic sphere. While the widow in Jesus’ story would have
been entirely within her rights to go to the public court, it would have been
unseemly for her to do so, to stand in the middle of a crowd of strange men and
argue her case. So she doesn’t only have
to deal with the callous disdain of our judge; she also risks the scorn of her
neighbors. But she goes anyway, again
and again, and, over time, she begins to appear less and less like a figure of
ridicule, and more and more like one of valiant persistence in the face of
justice denied. The taint of shame that
follows her begins to bleed over onto the judge, who eventually comes to see
that he may be the one to end up with a black eye.
All
of this reminds me of a marvelous documentary film that came out some years
ago, called “Pray the Devil Back to Hell.”
It is about the mass movement of women in Liberia, originating in the Christian
churches, but growing to intentionally include Muslim women as well, that unseated
a tyrannical president and put an end to that country’s 14-year civil war. The decisive scene in the film comes after
the women’s nonviolent protests have forced the government and rebel factions
to engage in UN-sponsored peace talks in Accra, the capital of Ghana. But the negotiations have stalled. And so the women raise funds to buy a group
of their senior leaders tickets for the three-day journey by bus to Accra. When they get there they find the young men
of the so-called peace delegations happily whiling away the days in UN-provided
hotels, drinking the UN’s liquor, and making boastful and defiant speeches to
each other vowing never to compromise.
So
the women again take matters into their own hands. They surround the exits to the building where
the peace conference is taking place and tell the men inside that if they try
to leave the building before reaching an accord the women will take off their
clothes. Because in their culture it is
a shameful thing for a woman to be seen naked by a man not her husband. But it is, if anything, even more shameful
for a man to see a woman naked, especially one the age of his mother. Two weeks later President Charles Taylor was
exiled to Nigeria, UN peacekeeping forces entered the Liberian capital of Monrovia,
and a transitional government was formed, leading to democratic elections. On November 23, 2005, Liberia elected Ellen
Johnson Sirleaf the African continent’s first woman president.
This
victory, as the title of the film, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” suggests, came
about through prayer. And Jesus suggests
the same of vindication of the widow in the Gospel. In both cases, it is prayer founded on faith,
a faith in the justice of God so powerful that it moves these women to courageous
and persistent action. Theirs is prayer
for God’s justice, made right in the face of those who deny that there is any
such thing as justice, those who have no fear of God and no respect for people. It is prayer founded on a faith that is ridiculous
in the eyes of those who have lost heart, those who don’t bother to pray for
such things anymore. It is the prayer,
and the faith, of Jesus himself.
This
parable of the widow and the judge is one of the last that Jesus gives before
he enters Jerusalem. It begins the same chapter
where he says “he will be handed over to the Gentiles; and he will be mocked
and insulted and spat upon. After they have flogged him, they will kill him,
and on the third day he will rise again.’ And Luke says that when he said this,
his twelve disciples understood “nothing about all these things; in fact, what
he said was hidden from them, and they did not grasp what was said.” Which makes it sound like they’d been given a
parable.
