TWENTY NINTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
Lk 18:1-8
Dear Friends, We, as a faith community, have journeyed with Luke on our way to Jerusalem for sixteen weeks. After today, we have just two short weeks on this passage to the engulfing mystery of the Crucified and Risen Christ. This mythical road has seen Jesus’ challenging the depths of our human heart. He has been seeking to draw us out of the darkness into the light, a light radiating faith on the Gospel message. We have received the relentless call to move away from the self-centered False Self to our singular call to the True Self in the footsteps of Jesus. Our spiritual formation continues today in the delightful and bold story of the very determined and pugnacious widow.
We need to make a couple of points right at the beginning of our reflection. THE PARABLE OF THE JUDGE and widow does not teach us that we can eventually win God over to our side by our strong-minded resolve. On the contrary, the real lesson for us in the story is this: not to lose hope in spite of all the hardships and injustices that confront us daily in our personal life and in the avalanche of injustices engulfing our world. The parable is inviting us to a persistence that is rooted in loving trust in the basic truth of our faith: God is good now and always no matter how it may seem to our limited view. We need not worry about God’s perseverance. It is our faithfulness that is the issue.
One of the delightful aspects of the story is missing in English where it says that the judge finally gives way to the widow because he fears she may strike him. In the original language, it says he fears that she will give him a black eye.
The main point of the parable is contrasting the self-absorbed and crooked judge with a loving and merciful God. If the poor widow received her due from the corrupt minister of the law, how much more will be the loving response of the God of mercy, compassion and limitless love. We are called to place trust in our prayer to a God who sent his Son to take flesh in the chaos of our world so as to transform it in the end with a reign of love and justice. Luke’s message is one of exhortation to the disciples and us: be relentless in our prayer no matter what because God is relentless in his love for us and our broken world.
We can easily see ourselves in the widow, a woman forsaken by society and locked into poverty that seemed ruthless in its destructive power. We may not be caught in the urgency of her immediate economic survival but poverty attacks us in many ways. Our human condition is always caught in a sense of futility and mortality. We suffer the consequences of the neglect of our environment and, now, we even have governmental denial of this reality. The on-coming horrors of climate change seem totally overwhelming. We are confronted daily by the divisive horror of ICE’s arbitrary onslaught on so many innocent and beautiful people who contribute so much to our common well-being. The issue of sexual harassment in the Church, society and, more often than we might imagine, in the family, often renders us longing for the liberation of a new day. The continual struggle of a fair and compassionate acceptance of sexual orientation begs for a sign of hope from the Church and society. Then there is the engulfing conflict in government where we see the politicians further and further removed from the common good by the parallelizing partisanship that is devoid of compromise. It locks everyone into a senseless stagnation. These are just a few examples of how we all share some of the widow’s’ desperation whether we are aware of it or not.
The widow shows us that for the person of faith and trust, prayer is not the last resort. It is the first resort and always joined to our personal effort to make a difference. Prayer exposes a sense of God’s loving allegiance to all. In the end, God will have the last word. That word is uttered in the victory of Jesus over evil and death in the Pascal Mystery of his death and resurrection.
Like the widow, we are urged to both pray and act for the justice of God. When we are faithful in our commitment to prayer and action, the Son of Man will truly find faith on earth when he comes again. (Lk 18:8)
