Sermon for Sunday, October 19, 2025

October 19, 2025

By Kristin Berkey-Abbott



Luke 18: 1-8

We have heard this story, and variations of this story, so many times that it carries a certain danger. We may be so sure that we know what it says that we may not fully appreciate all that is actually happening here.


When we see a widow in a parable, we immediately think we know all about her. We assume that a widow is poor, and while that’s certainly true of many widows, both in the time of Jesus and today, there’s nothing in this text that says she’s poor.

The widow demands justice, and we assume that she’s been ill-treated. That might be true, but we don’t know. We’re told that she cries out for justice, but we don’t know the nature of her claim. New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine cautions us to remember that we assume the widow has been treated unjustly because she says she has; but as we know from sad experience, many people think they’ve been treated unjustly when they really haven’t.

Past parables train us to see a judge figure as God. But clearly, this judge isn’t supposed to be God, since this judge is unjust and respects no one, including God, which says he’s not a stand in for God. He finally does the right thing because he’s tired of the persistent demands—much the way that many injustices finally are addressed.

Parables almost never have a tidy message, which makes me wonder if Jesus really said this explanation at the beginning. It doesn’t even sound like Jesus, Jesus who so often wants to leave us puzzling over the parable. Many Biblical scholars say that it’s more likely to be an explanation tacked on later, most likely by the writer of the Gospel of Luke. In fact, if we look at both the book of Luke and the book of Acts, books written by the same person, we see this theme threading its way through, about the need to pray without ceasing.

The end of today’s reading is even more odd. Jesus tells us that we’re not to confuse the judge with God. And then, we get an explanation for the parable. We’re supposed to be persistent, just like the widow is persistent. But then Jesus tells us that God will act swiftly when we demand justice.

Really? We demand justice, and God delivers? Really? Anyone with a knowledge of human history might beg to differ. We can point to any number of oppressed populations who have been praying for justice, demanding justice, generation after generation. This is true of our time, just as it was during Christ’s time, just as it was before Jesus walked the earth. Justice rarely comes quickly, in a human timeline, because it requires powerful people giving up their power.


In fact, if we look at the Bible as a whole, we don’t see much to reassure us of the truth to the ending to the today’s Gospel. Much of the rest of the Bible doesn’t suggest that God acts quickly, at least not in the span of a common lifetime. Forty years of wandering in the wilderness is not immediate, Assyrian and Babylonian exiles don’t see immediate justice, and centuries of Roman rule undercut the idea of God acting swiftly.

But let’s consider the parable from a different angle, and come away with a different explanation for why justice takes so long. If parables exist to help us learn about the nature of God and God’s rule, which is one of the main reasons that Jesus uses them, what can we learn from this parable? If God is not the judge, who is left?

I’ve spent a lot of decades thinking about the feminine face of God, but it’s only recently that I’ve thought about this particular passage as giving us some interesting insight into God. If we think of God as the widow crying out for justice, the nature of the parable shifts radically. It becomes a much more powerful exploration of that old question about how a just and all powerful God can allow injustice in the world. It doesn’t explain why God doesn’t just leap in and fix things with just a word or a gesture. But perhaps it gives us insight into God’s process, showing the how of God’s process in creating a more just world, if not explaining the why of the process.

If we look at our lectionary readings week after week, if we consider the whole of them, from the Old Testament to the Psalms to the Gospels and other New Testament readings, we’ll see that like the widow, God does cry out for justice. Most months, at least one Old Testament reading comes out of the prophets. Hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, through the voice of these prophets, God has called out for justice. Humans have free will—we don’t have to respond to God’s demand for justice. But God will not stop crying out for justice.

In preaching and teaching, Jesus, too, demands justice. Jesus tells us of a different world that God has envisioned for us. And in the letters to the first Christian communities, we see a vision of a just world that doesn’t mirror the larger empire.

If God is the widow demanding justice, then who is the judge who turns a deaf ear again and again? One possible explanation: Humans. And it’s one that fits with the message delivered by prophets both ancient and modern, and the message that Jesus delivers. It’s humanity that has fallen short, and it’s humans that need to act to bring society into a closer alignment with what God intends for us. It is humanity that must insist that even while justice is being delayed, it will not ultimately be denied.

The widow demands justice, which is different from charity. She doesn’t want a hand out. Likewise, God demands not only charity of humans, but justice. Our world is not just when the people who make the food for restaurants and hospitals have to be on food stamps. Our world is not just when the salary of a teacher cannot afford housing, a situation that is common across the U.S. Our world is not just when the people who work 40 or more hours a week at stores like Wal-Mart aren’t paid enough to be able to buy necessities for their families. Sadly, our world has no shortage of situations that might move us to petition hard-hearted judges for justice.

It's not just money that is needed. Make no mistake, it is important to help people with short term solutions of food or money to cover the rent for a month. But it’s even more essential to change the systems that keep people needing us to operate food pantries and other forms of charity. We should be working towards a society where food pantries close because no one needs them anymore, not because there is so much need that they can’t keep the shelves stocked.

This parable tells us so much, in so few words, about why justice is so slow. God counts on humans to move the cause of justice forward. Humans are like the judge – many of us don’t want to be bothered. Just like the judge, the ones with the power to make the world more just will resist as long as they can.

The parable gives us good news. Although it may not be swift, justice will come. It will come because those of us who demand it have worn out those who resist. If we pray without ceasing, in the end, justice will come. Justice will come faster if our prayers move our feet, our hands, our economic decisions, and our votes.

So, this parable is about prayer after all. But it’s also about so much more than prayer. We need to pray without ceasing for justice. We also need to show up in courts of law and other places where decisions are made to plead the case for justice, and to do that without ceasing. We need to show up even when it looks like it’s a futile mission, even when it seems likely that our demands for justice will be met with violence, the way Christ’s demands for justice were met with his crucifixion. Through his resurrection, God shows us that although the powers that be may say no to our demands for justice, those powers do not have the final word.

God envisions so much more for creation than we do. We need to expand our imaginations, to listen to our demanding widow God, who reminds us again and again that a better world is possible, this world, our world, here on earth. We can be like that judge who finally relents and says yes, yes to that relentless invitation to be part of creating God’s vision for this world on earth.