The Parable Of The Persistent Widow
THE PARABLE OF THE PERSISTENT WIDOW
LUKE 18:1-8
Have you become discouraged in prayer? Then this reading is just for you. Keep on praying!
Here is another of the forceful stories which Luke discovered and preserved. Yet again it illustrates the need, in the interpretation of parables, to keep the central meaning in view, and to recognize the details which have no doctrinal significance. The story is manifestly from life. Here, perhaps, is the godless and arrogant petty magistrate of some Galilean community denying a widow woman the simple benefits of justice. The widow is chosen as the victim of the scoundrel’s callous disregard because the widow was the weakest and the most pitiably helpless unit of that sad society.
She was a dogged woman who worked upon one simple conviction. The magistrate’s duty was to dispense justice with impartiality and to all. She was determined to hold him to his task, and so besieged his court day by day. Preoccupied with more profitable cases—those which, on the evidence of the papyri, were rich in the profits of bribery and corruption—the judge adjourned the widow’s case, until at last her very importunity forced him to act.
God is no unjust judge, but for other reasons he appears to delay, and to leave his children to suffer the injustices of the world. If a village woman in some local court can be sufficiently convinced of ultimate action and final justice to go against all discouragement to final success, how much more should Christians persevere in faithful petition! They at least can be assured that the delay which seems so often to confront their desire is not the delay of selfishness and corruption, but of wisdom and beneficent purpose (read Romans 8:28 in Phillips’ rendering).
Review, at this point, the series of illustrative stories which Luke has recorded. Note their characteristics, their realism, their characters. Observe how the characters talk to themselves (the prodigal, the steward, the judge). It is part of the dramatic machinery. And out of the evil of common life the Lord draws a lesson of good.
Notes 18:2: the judge breaks both the great commandments. 18:3: note RSV, “kept coming.” 18:5: Gk. lit. “gives me a black eye.” 18:8: “speedily”—not “soon,” but “by a decisive intervention.” The reference to faith indicates that this parable is not concerned with God allowing himself to be bullied into answering prayer; he is encouraging us to hold on by faith in times of adversity.