Unfortunately, a quiet 16-year-old and a hurried, mechanically-clueless mom in a car dealership are like a pair of young, tender wildebeest in a den of hungry lions. Let me just say that we bought a real lemon of a car. It didn't take us long to find that out, either. Within the first week, when the car started having problems, I was dismayed to find out that the expensive repair of a cracked engine part was not covered under the skimpy "warranty." Neither were any of the long list of assorted issues that continued to come up. I was furious. I called the dealership and asked to speak with a supervisor, giving the salesman who answered the phone a piece of my mind and demanding justice. In passing the phone to his colleague, the salesman forgot to put me on hold. Imagine my dismay when I heard, "Hey Joe, remember the lady with her kid who came in here last week, the one we unloaded that old Geo Prism on? She wants to talk with you, and O boy, is she mad!" he added with a gleeful giggle.
Well, from that moment on, I was on a crusade for justice and vengeance. I was absorbed with it. I spent hours online, reading about Geo Prisms, the dealership, and the rules around warranties. I pursued an eloquent complaint with the Better Business Bureau. I wrote a passionate letter to the dealership. I wrote to corporate headquarters. I carried on and on about it, driving my friends crazy. For the next twenty years, I sternly warned everyone I met in Louisville, Kentucky who was looking for a car NOT to go to Star Ford at Oxmoor. I put more "righteous" energy into this project than into anything before or since.
Unlike the widow in our Gospel parable, I never got justice or vengeance. We were stuck with that awful car for years, spending much more on it than it was ever worth. But there are definitely parallels in my story with today's Gospel:
First, like a widow in ancient Israel, I was, as a single mom in a car dealership, a stereotypically mistreated and easily ignored character. Yet, like the widow in our parable, I was also no paragon of virtue. I was forcing my son to buy a car (with his own money, no less!) because I was tired of driving. To top it off, I was reacting less out of a desire for justice than a desire for vengeance for having been laughed at and humiliated. The parable says in Greek that the widow, too, desires the judge to grant her not "justice," but vengeance. She wants an opponent to get what's coming to him for having wronged her personally. And she's determined to get that vengeance, too! She isn't just persistent; she's violently persistent. In the Greek, the judge says that he's afraid of being beaten black and blue, like a boxer in a ring.
Secondly, I see something of the mocking, unscrupulous car salesmen in that judge, as well. The judge in the parable is the opposite of what a moral person is called to be: instead of loving God and loving his neighbor as himself, this judge doesn't fear God and cares nothing about his neighbor. He even admits as much in his own words! The only reason that he acts on the widow's complaint is that he's worn down and tired of being attacked. The unjust judge certainly doesn't represent God in this story!
Remember, Jesus tells parables, not allegories. Parables are supposed to make us think, to make us change how we see things. They are supposed to make us uncomfortable. We can't assign allegorical roles to the characters and gather up a neat little moral message. With these characters, Jesus is showing us that he knows how corrupt and discouraging the world can be. There is humiliation and vengeance. There is corruption and injustice. Our motives and our reactions are never pure. Sometimes I'm the widow, bent on getting revenge at all cost. Sometimes I'm the judge, looking out for number one. Sometimes it feels like God is indeed an unjust judge who has forgotten me, who makes me wait far too long for an answer to my pleas. Sometimes I wonder if God is a neglected widow, persistently pursuing me, desperate for my wandering attention. And in all of the messiness of this world, it is easy, O so easy, to lose heart. To give up. To turn inward. To put up barriers between ourselves and God, between ourselves and the world's problems.
In her Convention address yesterday, Bishop Kym talked about the difficulties of following Jesus in our time. She mentioned those who pound on her door persistently crying out that Christianity is for superstitious fools, that it has nothing relevant to say to our world. At the same time, others beat her down with complaints about the direction the Church is taking to address injustices, climate change, and other "controversial" issues. She told us that, in spite of those who want to beat us up on all sides for who we are as Christians, we must continue to love. In our everyday lives, day in and day out, we are called to act in love, to follow the example and teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ.
And that's what Jesus is showing us, too, in today's parable. We live in a world that can be grim, a world in which God often seems absent. We do lose heart sometimes. And yet, the truth of our faith is that we live and move and have our being in a world in which God is present, in which God's reign has begun. It has begun in Jesus, and in us, as we follow him: praying, opening ourselves to God, reaching out to one another, acting in love. When the Son of Man finally does come, Jesus asks, will he find faith on earth? In other words, when he returns, will he find a dead, frozen world—one that is grim and joyless?[1] Or will he find us acting as Christ's hands and feet, persisting in prayer, persisting in goodness and love, in spite of it all?
My hope--my challenge--for myself and for all of us, is that we take up Christian practice in our everyday lives—things like prayer, hospitality, generosity, celebration, gratitude and all the rest. That we take them up not just in our spare time, or with our spare energy, or with a half-despairing heart. No, that we take them up with the same single-minded passion, certainty, and new-found energy that I took on bad-mouthing that car dealership in Kentucky. If we could do that, just here at St. Ambrose, imagine the divine joy and love and freedom that we could unloose in our corner of this messy world!
[1] Richard Lischer, Reading the Parables [Interpretation] (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2014), 115.
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