Luke 18:1-8
October 5, 2025
Rev. Amy P. McCullough, PhD
Then Jesus told them a parable about the need to pray always and not lose heart.
What moments in this week required you to pray constantly and guard yourself from losing hope?
Did your prayer come with the governmental shut down, and its cascading impact on federal workers and the public? The dysfunctional rancor it reveals? Was it the death of Jane Goodall, whose extraordinary life brought joy and new discoveries to the world, through a journey that was its own story of persistence, curiosity and patience? Was it in the escalating immigrant raids, continuing wars in Gaza and Ukraine, or the attack at a synagogue on Yom Kippur? Did prayer emerge alongside private pain, a crisis in the smaller circle of your life?
Jesus, along with his disciples, are nearing Jerusalem, when he tells this parable. Later generations of Christians, while navigating the “nowness” of his presence with the “not-yet-ness” of God’s final victory, wondered themselves “how long will we wait for ultimate justice?” also read this story about “the need to pray always, so as not to lose heart.”
If his aim is encouragement, Jesus’s parable is an odd choice. Every parable Jesus tells begins with the familiar and ends with the surprising. An injured man is aided by his enemy, the Samaritan. A wayward child is given a party rather than a punishment. The twist in the story intends to reveal something of God. Here, though, there is no shift in the main characters, no recognition of wrong in need of grace. There is simply an unscrupulous, uninterested-in-anything-but-himself judge, who is bested by a widow unyielding in her quest for a just ruling.
The widow’s plight would have been familiar to the listeners. A woman whose spouse has died did not receive any share of the estate, nor was she granted ownership of a family home. Without an economic safety net, or legal status of full personhood in front of the law, she was vulnerable to the whims of extended family members, as well as exploitation by those who might profit from a family business or family home. That the widow comes alone to argue her case before the judge suggests no other family members were rising to her aid. They might well have been the opposition. The widow is seeking justice says Jesus. And the fact that she went day after day, week after week, gathering herself together even after being told “No” repeatedly, suggests she knows in her gut the rightness of her plea.
The rightness of her request did not halt the wrongness of the judge’s response. Surely, as she watched everything she’d worked for be taken away, without cause or apology, as she saw her life be limited by unequal status, which threatened her very survival, surely as she heard a cruel verdict handed down with indifference by a judge devoid of respect or reverence, there came a day when she wondered “how will I go on?” If the story had ended as listeners would have anticipated the widow, after exhausting her energy, resources, and resolve, would disappear into the night, her whereabouts unknown, her fate deemed unimportant by the powerful around her. Instead, she perseveres until the judge is the exhausted one, granting her justice because he is ready to be relieved of her case. It is a curious end to a parable. No party for the repentant. No healing because another has reached across difference. There is only an impatient, unrepentant judge, who is not moved by her plight or open to correcting his earlier decision, but simply wants to be done.
For those most acquainted with injustice, I wonder, if this a more accurate portrayal of how a moral recalibration is achieved. The settlement check arrives not because the corporation admits wrongdoing but because they don’t want the cost of a trial. The regime topples not because the powerful repent of their cruelty, killings, or corruption but because the masses in the street have overwhelmed them, and it is obvious their end has come. In the widow’s world, the laws were against her, the judge acted alone, without a jury of her peers, and she was at the mercy of the whims of others. The only resources she had were twin truths: her conviction that justice was due to her and her willingness to stay in the struggle, to keep making her plea.
“If even an unjust judge can be an instrument of justice, then how much more so will God act to right what is wrong for those who cry out day and night?” This is Jesus’s assurance. If a little light can appear in this world, think how much more will be granted by the Creator of all things and the One who wrestled life from the grave. We are witnessing injustices these days, injustices done to the vulnerable, voiceless, and those without much recourse in the hallways of power. We also may be far too familiar with the agony of pleading our case before God, whose silence can feel deafening and whose timing does not match ours. When we are tempted to give in to despair, or relinquish our faith in God’s good tomorrow, the widow’s twin truths become our guide. She shows us the sturdy conviction of what we know is right in our gut. And she demonstrates persistence, a striving for realignment to righteousness, despite the defeats, the dismissals, and ridicule that meet her appearing. No part of such conviction or commitment is ever wasted in God’s economy of care.
In this parable about persistence, Jesus relies upon the old familiar truth; what is true in small measure in our broken world will burst into its fullness in God’s final victory. The small justices we get in this life will be overwhelmed, in the end, by a divine insistence, not only for justice, but also for mercy. It is the task of the faithful to grasp the glimpses of God we are granted and build from them a bigger window into that grand, gospel story. This is what we do at Jesus’s table; for with a tiny portion of bread and small sip of juice we are transported to that place where everyone is welcome, where every wound find healing where, where the deep injustices of the world are demolished for an overflowing of righteousness. See if you can sense it, today, amid the feasting. Here is God’s kin-dom humming around us, ready to carry us forward into the hard work of righting the wrongs, befriending the stranger, living with the courage of our convictions and a commitment to stay in the struggle, insisting there is a better way to live and to love. Amen.