Exodus 17:8-13
Psalm 121:1-2, 3-4, 5-6, 7-8
2 Timothy 3:14-4:2
Luke 18:1-8
Luke tells us immediately what this parable is about.
What the disciples are to learn is that they ought "to pray always without becoming weary" (Luke 18:1). Jesus had just been talking about the coming of the kingdom, that the time is nigh "when you will desire to see one of the days of the Son of man, and you will not see it" (Luke 17:22).
The times now are betwixt and between; the kingdom, as the theologians put it, is both already and not yet, something now but also something yet to come. Thus, the proper disposition of the disciple is to pray without losing heart, without giving up.
The believer should imitate the widow, "importunate" she's called. It’s quite possible here that this parable is meant to be humorous. The characters are drawn such, almost cartoonishly, to underline the moral; the judge's stoneheartedness is cinematic while the widow's annoying persistence is equally dramatic. Yet it all serves a simple message: that although the kingdom is indeed in a genuine sense "at hand," something "fulfilled in your hearing," it will also at times feel distant and unfulfilled, something you look for and long for, and sometimes painfully – like the widow waiting for her "just decision" (Mark 1:15; Luke 4:21; Luke 18:3).
About the Christian life, there is what St. Paul called a longing. We “long to put on our heavenly dwelling,” he said, a strange and mysterious way to put it (2 Corinthians 5:2). We long for the “revealing of the sons of God” (Romans 8:19). And it is a longing that can seem to be a kind of groaning.
What Jesus teaches by way of parable, St. Paul teaches by means of a description of feeling. We Christians feel our desire for the kingdom. That is, there is something about being a follower of Jesus that instills a providential restlessness for the sake of God's true rest. We are meant to feel something of the angst of the widow; we are meant to be restless and to pray with an urgent purpose just like her. Because we are not indifferent. We really do long for the kingdom just as a kid waits for Christmas, a beggar for a little relief, a tired soul for rest, a sinner for salvation.
Here I naturally recall St. Gregory of Nyssa and his famous dictum that “the one who looks up to God never ceases in that desire.” That certainly is a mystical truth to be drawn from this parable. However, I do believe the widow’s importunity, a Christian's longing, helps us think about our earthlier trials and our more daily experiences and not just mystical experiences.
What I mean is that the parable of the importunate widow reminds me never to despair. It reminds me of the fact that there will indeed be days when I will feel the need to pray so passionately, bitterly even, that it feels like this widow taking it to the judge.
Yet our judge is not like the judge in the story; our judge is a merciful Father, kind and loving. He will answer our prayers. But still our prayers will feel like that sometimes, and that’s just the mystery of it. Which is why the believer must have faith. As Jesus asked, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth” (Luke 18:8)? That’s simply the name of the game for the believer, the grit of the Christian.
Gabriel Marcel was a 20th century French philosopher as well as a playwright and a theatre critic. He was also an adult convert to Catholicism. What I mean by grit and by not giving up, by the longing about which St. Paul wrote and which is sometimes painful, is described perfectly by Marcel in a preface to a collection of some of his “metaphysical” journal entries.
He said that one would have a poor grasp of the faith if one considered it to be a “kind of talisman or good-luck charm.” The faith, he said, offers nothing like that at all. The world remains as hard and precarious for the believer as for the atheist; there is, to be clear, nothing magical about the faith in the slightest. However, what the faith does give the believer is the grace to endure. He wrote: “Faith is life, a life in which joy and anguish continually jostle each other, a life which will remain to the end menaced by the only temptation against which in the last analysis we must guard ourselves, namely that of despair.”
That is simply how Christian longing on occasion feels, weeping as we sometimes do in this vale of tears. It will feel at times like the brutal resistance of despair by means of anxious prayer. At times we will indeed share in the light joy of the angels while at other times we will weep. That’s just how it is. There will always be something like Good Friday and Easter to our earthly existence; they will always be mingled this side of heaven. Which is why we must keep the faith, why the widow still teaches us.
(Father Joshua J. Whitfield is pastor of St. Rita Catholic Community in Dallas and author of "The Crisis of Bad Preaching" (Ave Maria Press, $17.95) and other books.)
