Where the lectionary meets the events of the day

I have been working on a post about Julian of Norwich, the 14^th century theologian, as part of my “Retrieving Theology” series. I’ll post it in a week or so. Julian is a fascinating theologian. As Denys Turner argues, she’s not really a mystic, the category into which she is usually placed along with other medieval women, but a theologian, writing theology for the first time in English. I will come to all that in the next post, but first, in this post, on the day after millions of people showed up for the No Kings rallies across our land, an encounter with the word of God.

In liturgical churches, we are still in ordinary time. “Ordinary” means “ordered,” as in numbered. There are two stretches of ordinary time in the church year, one in the season between Christmas to Lent, often called the season of Epiphany. The longer stretch of ordinary time runs from Trinity Sunday to Christ the King Sunday, which falls this year on November 23. This Sunday past was the 19^th Sunday after Pentecost. Ordinary time reminds us that, like ordinary time Sundays, our days are numbered.

In ordinary time, the lectionary passages are not always matched with each other. Instead of reading for a theme, we read through various biblical books from week to week. The focus on capturing with a few passages what a given biblical book is about. For the Old Testament, we have lately been reading through Jeremiah; for the New Testament, through 1st and 2nd Timothy. This being a Year C, for the gospel, we have been reading mostly Luke. Even so, sometimes the passages come together in surprising fashion, as they did this past Sunday.

The gospel was Luke 18:1-8, a parable found only in Luke about a grumpy judge and a persistent widow. It’s framed by the Jeremiah new covenant passage, Jeremiah 31:27-34, and the 2nd Timothy passage about the inspiration of scripture, 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5. The psalm for the day was a section of Psalm 119 (97-104) about the Torah. They are all in one way or another about words: the word in our heart (Jeremiah), the word on the page (2nd Timothy), and the word on our tongue (the psalm). Centering them all are the words of a particularly persistent widow.

The widow is one of two characters in a story Jesus tells. The other is a small-town judge who “neither fears God nor shows deference to those who deserve deference” (my translation). The widow has a case she wants decided; the judge, apparently out of nothing more than native perversity, repeatedly refuses to hear her case, until her persistence becomes too much for him, and at least he relents, giving her the decision she wants. As Luke tells it, the story is about prayer. And about faith.

Jesus puts us in the position of the widow: seeking justice from a judge who appears not to care. It’s hard to tell what Jesus had in mind when he told the story, but there are at least two possibilities. Luke steers us towards the first of these possibilities in his preface to the story, Luke 18:1. He tells us that the story is about persisting in prayer even when we seem to get no results. In that interpretation, the one who seems not to care is God. But there is another possibility. Perhaps the story is about seeking justice when the system seems rigged against us, something that the Jews of Jesus’s day would have daily encountered. In that case, the story has to do with the persistence of resistance in the face of evil.

We need not decide between these interpretations. Both can be true, but it’s the second of these that speaks to the world in which we presently find ourselves. Injustice is rampant and growing more so. An apartment house in Chicago is raided by masked agents of the government, people who have committed no crime are ziptied, including children. They are left outside for hours without explanation. People on boats in international waters are gunned down, allegedly because they are drug runners, but without legal process and without proof. People who have not given deference to the hero of the moment for the MAGA movement (Charlie Kirk) are fired from their jobs and harassed in their homes. I need not go on. You know all this. The present regime is much like the judge of the parable: it seems neither to fear God nor respect human rights. Calls for justice fall on deaf ears.

On this reading of the parable, what is Jesus saying? It would seem that he is urging persistence in resisting evil, even when it seems to do no good. For today that might mean to join the huge happy crowds at the No Kings rallies. One of the signs I saw in the New Times report captured this precisely: “Resist. Persist. Repeat.” 

The widow in the parable can come off as a persistent crank, but I would suggest that this is not the case. What got to the judge was not only her persistence, coming back to him again and again, but her lack of fear. She was not afraid of the bad temper of the judge. And, along with this, I would like to hope, her sense of humor. Perhaps she didn’t take him as seriously as he took himself. He was a fool, and she reminded him how foolish he was.

It’s this sense of humor that characterized the No Kings crowds: “Monarchs (the butterflies), not monarchs (would-be kings).” “Make America read again.” “Orange lies matter.” And irony. In front of the Brandenberg Gate in Berlin, a crowd gathered to say “no kings” in a place that knows much about claims to power by would-be dictators. Or in Spain, “Sin justicia . . . no hay paz.” People caring about others, about each other, resisting, persisting, like Jesus’s widow.

At the end of the parable, Jesus offers one more comment, a saying about the “Son of Man”: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find this faith on the earth?” “Faith” in this saying shades towards “faithfulness.” The reference surely is to the widow and her persistent pursuit of justice. Will there remain on earth, when the divine kingdom at last comes, who will have not stopped demanding justice, even when the system seems rigged against them? Which, at the end of this piece, brings me back to Julian of Norwich, if only briefly.

Julian distinguished between “seeking” and “beholding.” The more common words for these are “prayer” and “contemplation.” We need both. Prayer for Julian is petitionary. She regards this sort of prayer as a work of God. Prayer is God’s instrument. By our persistent prayer, we are shaped into the sort of people who honor the ways of God. Prayer forges in us hearts that seek justice. In contemplation, we glimpse, if only briefly and partially, the kingdom that we seek and expect. Contemplation gives us hope for the future. Prayer is the work we do to hold out in a world of systemic evil; contemplation is eschatology, the dream for the future.

In this age in which the government itself seems neither to fear God nor respect human rights, we, like the widow, must keep on praying for justice for those who cannot speak for themselves. For this is not the last age. When the Human One (the meaning of the Hebrew phrase, “son of man”) comes at last, the one who comes will come on the wings of our prayers.

Clay