Patient Widows
An excerpt from the sermon I gave this morning at St. Matthews’ United Methodist Church in Bowie, MD:
I was asked, today, to speak on the topic of “Seeking Peace in the Middle East.” It’s a topic that Jesus Himself wondered about as he looked down on Jerusalem and wept, decrying a city that “does not know the things that make for peace.”
So what are the things that make for peace?
What I want to propose to you today is that as followers of the Human One, Jesus Christ, we cannot talk about peace without talking about justice. And we cannot talk about justice unless we are willing to take the side of the oppressed, the marginalized, the patient widows who struggle against systems and governments that are stacked against them.
Now by justice I don’t mean vengeance. I mean the restoration of right relationships. I mean a special concern for the stories and struggles of the marginalized and the oppressed. I mean doing God’s work of creating a world that is more merciful, more kind, more uplifting, that provides what everyone needs for life and life abundantly.
The call for justice is integral to the scriptural witness. Just look at Deuteronomy 16:20, when God tells God’s people the following: “Justice, and onlyjustice, you shall pursue, so that you may live in the land that the LORD your God is giving you.” Or look at Psalm 85, where the Psalmist envisions a future in which God “speaks peace to God’s people,” in which “justice and peace will kiss each other; faithfulness will spring up from the ground, and justice will look down from the sky.”
The call for justice is certainly there in the prophetic literature. Micah, for example, paints a beautiful landscape for us by linking a vision of peace in which “nation shall not lift up sword against nation” with a vision of justice in which “all shall sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” And who among us has not heard the words of Micah 6:8, which ask us what the Lord requires of us and answers, simply, “to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with our God?”
Perhaps these words would be a scriptural footnote, if they were not echoed by Jesus in the Gospels, Jesus who in Matthew 23:23 calls the Pharisees to task for giving “mint and dill and cumin” while forgetting “the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith.” “It is these,” says Jesus,” that you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others.” And when we do neglect these things, Jesus says, we are like “blind guides,” who “strain out a gnat and swallow a camel.” Anyone who has ever seen a camel in person will pick up on the satire.
But the text that I want to use to frame our search for peace and justice in Palestine and Israel is from Luke, chapter 18. It goes like this:
“Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, ‘In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, “Grant me justice.” For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming to me.”’ And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to God’s chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will God delay long in helping them? I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Human One comes, will he find faith on Earth?”
When we look and we see the suffering and the injustice and the violence in the Middle East, and especially in Israel and Palestine, it is easy to lose heart. But Jesus has left us with a story about a woman with a strong faith who refused to lose heart. As I’m sure you know, widows in Jesus’ day were protected because they were vulnerable. Cut off from a source of livelihood or familial protection, the widow was supposed to be cared for by the community. But under a situation of harsh Roman occupation—an occupation which, we might speculate, could have cost her her husband and sons and widowed her to begin with—this widow finds justice and protection blocked by an unjust judge—a judge who is satirically described as saying to himself, “I don’t fear God OR have respect for ANYONE.”
Jesus holds the steadfast widow up as an example for us not to lose heart. And he explicitly ties the story in to the quest for justice for marginalized or disenfranchised elements within the community. And so I think a good question to ask, if we are serious about seeking justice and peace and the presence of God in the midst of all that we see in Palestine and Israel, is “Where are the patient widows steadfastly demanding justice?” And if they are there–and I guarantee you, they are–a second question to ask is, “Are we listening to them?” And if we begin to, we will quickly start asking ourselves, “And how do we respond?”
