Faith Is Persistence of the Powerless
THE NINETEENTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Genesis 32:22-31 • 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 • Luke 18:1-8
Just outside of the metropolis of Lineville, Alabama, halfway between Ashland and Wedowee and just north of Ofelia, is an institute for reverse missionary work known as SIFAT—Servants in Faith and Technology. Instead of sending people overseas to help those in need, SIFAT hosts community leaders from around the world—leaders who bring their particular problems all the way to Lineville, where, with the help of scientists, engineers, teachers, and agronomists, they explore what it will take to improve the lives of their own people back home.
Because SIFAT hosts so many people from around the world, they also serve as a place where independent missionaries and mission teams from nearby churches and organizations can come and experience a little taste of what life might be like in another culture. And I can tell you firsthand how jarring and bitter that taste can be.
A few years after I was ordained, I helped chaperone a group of youth at SIFAT for a spring break retreat. We weren’t going on a mission trip, but we wanted to broaden our understanding of what missionary work could be. One afternoon we were led to the Global Village—a tiny, makeshift hamlet in the middle of the woods, complete with a dirt road, tin-roofed lean-tos, a tiny market, several villagers, and a rather cantankerous policeman. We were split up into teams and told that our dinner that night would consist only of whatever our team could acquire from the actors in the village.
At first, this seemed like a fun game—a test that would challenge our ingenuity, pride, and persistence. Quickly, though, things became far more difficult than I anticipated. At one point, while our team was offering to do some manual labor in exchange for a few tortillas, some of the staff, who were posing as residents, stole our sleeping bags, leaving us without protection through the March night. When I complained to the policeman, he locked me up in jail for questioning his authority.
When he wasn’t looking, I snuck out of jail, but I was dismayed to find that our youth, who hadn’t been given the tortillas they were promised, were now pretending to sell drugs to scrounge together enough food for the night. Then, one of them stole the backpack of a staff member, who thought she had tucked it away in a safe place, but, when the youth tried to trade the bag for food, we were told that the staff bags were off limits. I complained that our sleeping bags should have been off limits, too, but I must have raised my voice in an inappropriately confrontational way because I was then rearrested and given a stern warning by the policeman, who I honestly couldn’t tell whether he was speaking to me as a character from the village or a staff member at SIFAT who was worried I might take matters into my own hands.
The whole episode was designed to teach the youth that, in other parts of the world, people don’t get justice the way we do—that sometimes good, hard-working, honest people don’t get what they deserve—but the rage I felt meant that I was the person who needed to learn that lesson most. I understood how the game was supposed to work, but, when it was the youth on my team, whose welfare I was responsible for, who weren’t going to get anything to eat or any sleeping bag to sleep in that night, I lost it. There was nothing I could do to get what was right for my team—to get what should have belonged to us—and I snapped. It was truly a first-world, privileged response, and all it got me was thrown in jail.
You don’t have to go overseas or even to Lineville, Alabama, to find people whose cries for justice fall upon deaf ears. They are all around us. They are our neighbors. They work hard and follow the rules and do their best, and, still, they don’t get what they deserve. They’ve asked for help. They’ve filed complaints. They’ve done everything they’ve been asked to do. And nothing. They have no earthly reason to believe that anything will ever change, but they keep trying. And their experience and identity help us understand this parable of Jesus.
Despite Luke’s editorial introduction, the story of the widow and the unjust judge has less to do with always praying and more to do with not losing heart. To Jesus’ hearers, this parable would have been laughably cartoonish. “In a certain city, there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” You couldn’t make it any more ridiculous than that—to describe a judge, the arbiter of justice, as one who had no concern for human laws or divine statutes.
And in his court is a widow who just doesn’t know how to quit. She’s a widow, which means that she is completely powerless—totally dependent upon others for her survival. Her late husband’s property would not have passed to her but, if she were lucky enough to have a son, she might be cared for in that son’s household. And, if she didn’t have a generous and compassionate son, she might return to her father’s family but only if her late husband’s relatives were willing to return her dowry to provide for her care. Otherwise, she would subsist only on the charity of those who might throw the beggar-woman a coin or two out of pity. And the fact that the widow was standing before the unjust judge lets us know that she has no other options.
“Grant me justice against my opponent!” the widow said to the unjust judge over and over and over again. He was her only hope, and yet hope was something he would not give. There was no one to plead her case—no one to stand up for her. Only a faithful judge—one who cared about what God would want or what the community would recognize as just—would have granted her request, but Jesus’ exaggerated representation of callousness had no intention of giving into the widow’s demands.
As the story stands, there is no reason to expect anything to change. The widow has no power, and the judge has no pity. There is nothing anyone can do to make a difference. But then Jesus surprises his listeners with an even more absurd twist. Just when the audience knows that the story cannot have a happy ending, Jesus gives the helpless woman the strange power of annoyance. And the judge, using a word that literally means “strike me under the eye,” says something like, “I will give her justice or else she might annoy me to death.” And, in that powerless widow, we suddenly discover a new sort of subversive power that depends not on her physical strength or influence but on her refusal to give up.
“Hear what the unjust judge says,” Jesus tells us. Even when no one could see it coming—even when everyone was sure that the judge would never give into the widow’s request—her persistence—her refusal to give up—worked. How much more, therefore, should we expect our gracious God, who is just and who does hear the cries of God’s people who lift their voices to God day and night, to save those in distress? Our God is nothing like the unjust judge, yet how quickly do we lose hope when the justice we seek is delayed?
Jesus asks us to remember what those around us cannot afford to forget. Even when it feels like nothing will ever change, we have a reason to hope because we belong to God. The persistence of the powerless shows us what it means to have faith—not in the institutions of this world but in the God whose justice and righteousness will triumph over those institutions. Their unbroken and unbreakable witness teaches us not to lose heart.
Do we believe in the one who brought God’s people out of slavery in Egypt? Do we believe in the one who raised Jesus Christ from the dead? If that is our God, we cannot lose hope. If that is our God, we know what the future will hold. And, if that is our God, we must press on for the sake of those who are denied justice in this world—not because we have the power to pull down the mighty from their thrones all on our own but because we belong to the one who does.
© 2022 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas