Luke 18:2-5
Of all the names we have for Jesus – Christ, Son of God, Messiah, Savior, Teacher, Healer, Good Shepherd – one of my favorites is Storyteller. For Jesus was master at the craft of telling tales, using common, everyday objects to provide lasting lessons for life.
We experience Jesus’ storytelling ability best in the embodied story of bread and cup which we will tell and share together later in the service. You and I also have experienced the extraordinary story of new life that comes through baptism told through the very ordinary stuff of water. Yet, there were many, many other stories Jesus told using daily activities that sought to help people experience God in a whole new way. Jesus called these stories parables, and for most of the remaining Sundays of the summer we will be looking at what are known as Jesus’ more perplexing, problematic parables.
While a parable is a story, a more exact definition is that a parable is a short narrative fiction that references a transcendent symbol.1 For Jesus, parables always referenced the kingdom of God. They were created to be told rather than written down, with vivid and even outlandish language to help people remember them. If there were any missing links in the narrative, hearers were expected to fill in the blanks themselves.2
Now, sometimes the parables Jesus told appear to be fairly straightforward – a woman searching for a lost coin, seed being sown and ending up with various outcomes depending on where the seed landed. Other times, however, the parables would unfold in ways that would shock those who heard them as Jesus tried to startle people out of their conventional understandings of how both life and God worked.
You see, in the time in which Jesus lived, it wasn’t only that the Jews were suffering under Roman occupation and for the Messiah to come and free them. They also lived in a culture strictly limited by a social map that defined an individual’s place in the world. This map told people who they were, how to react and how to behave. At the center of that map was the family, especially the father, then came the village; finally the city and the world beyond.3 Integral to this social map were the concept of honor and shame, and the concept of patron and client that further defined how people were in relationship and the ways they should interact. Into this tightly regulated social system came Jesus with his parables to upset and challenge all those cherished assumptions.
Take our morning’s story, for example. Jesus’ hearers would have been immediately shocked by several things. First, by the judge himself. Here is a man who by virtue of his position is supposed to be completely honorable. Yet we are told from the start, ‘that he neither feared God nor had respect for people.’
Secondly, there is his behavior. The widow, by virtue of her status, had every right to plead her case because God required protection of widows, orphans and strangers, but the judge would not respond. The hearers also would have been shocked by the widow’s behavior. Even though she had every right to ask for what she needed, as a woman she would have been considered an object of shame and required by the social map to address the judge with respect. Yet she doesn’t. She was absolutely shameless in her persistence, her badgering for justice.
And the irony is that the judge ‘who neither feared God nor had respect for people’ comes to fear a widow, the weakest member of society! He gives in to this shameless woman. And though he grants her justice, he hasn’t acted with honor.
This was not how the story was supposed to end! Jesus’ hearers would have been confounded! Could this really be the way God will realize the kingdom of peace, justice and dignity for all – through dishonorable means? And in the parable was God supposed to be the judge; or if the parable wasn’t about how God acts, then what does the parable mean? Could it have to do with the widow and her persistence, her continual coming? This is how the kingdom of God comes through this outsider battering down barriers regardless of honor or justice? Could Jesus really be saying that grace and transformation clearly happen through what society and culture label shameful, shameless?
Ponder those words for a moment… shameful, shameless. It’s not a description many us would welcome for ourselves, is it? I have very clear memories of being told as a teenager what actions would reveal me as shameless; and I also remember my parents’ keen disappointment and their labeling our behavior shameful when my brothers and I were blatantly mean to others or cruel in our teasing.
And while present day connotations for shameless may differ from the definition of the word in Jesus’ day, the questions this parable raised then are the same today: Where have you and I closed our eyes to the miraculous life-giving work of God because we deem it happening outside the norm, in shameless ways? Who are we to say that our understandings of what is honorable and what is right are what God intends? Who are we to judge? No pun intended. Moreover, where in our own lives or in the life of this congregation is God calling us to be shameless in our persistence, to keep battering down barriers so that needs are met, people are transformed and justice occurs?
I am sure Jesus’ hearers were not only confounded and perplexed by this parable, possibly they also were upset and thrown off balance. Convictions are wonderful things until God invites us to reconsider and revisit them, and perhaps to even move beyond them! Yet that, dear friends, is for me an integral and one of the best parts of the journey of life and faith. Our learning and growing in faith never end! God never stops teaching us, never stops challenging us, and never stops offering us unending wisdom, love and grace. We keep being invited to stretch beyond where we are now, and the only thing we need to remember is that more often than not, God’s gifts and guidance come in the most surprising, even shameless ways.
Amen.
1. Hear Then the Parable, Bernard Brandon Scott p. 7
2. Ibid p. 36
3. Ibid p. 79