Marion Wright Edelman and the Parable of the Persistent Woman
Last week the wonderful Janet Wolf invited us to send a message to our friend and mentor Marion Wright Edelman for her 85th birthday on June 6th. Here’s what I wrote:
Dearest Marion: We have so missed seeing you each summer at the Proctor Institute; the last time was, 2019, pre-Covid! I want you to know what an impact you have had on my and Elaine’s life and work.
I first met you out here in California in the mid-2000s (at Gordon Cosby’s urging), then several times in DC. But the moment foremost in my mind and heart was having coffee with you on my first-ever day at Haley Farm (right) in 2014.
To have touched the hem of your garment, dear mother in faith and justice, is one of the great blessings of our lives. For so many of us who were too young to have experienced it ourselves, you are the living embodiment of the great Freedom movement of the 1960s. More importantly, you carried it on and passed its spirit and task on to us. Thank you for creating such a space of hospitality and animation on those sacred grounds, a gift to the future.
We want to offer you a gospel image that comes strongly to mind and heart when we think of you: the militant and persistent petitioning of that importunate widow narrated in Jesus’ parable in Luke 18. Her relentless advocacy for justice wore down the most hard-hearted of judges. Luke tells us that Jesus offered this parable “so that we may not lose heart” (18:1). Indeed, we are all enduring such a season of darkness!
Like all of Jesus’ parables, this story paints a picture of the way the world is: presided over by heartless powers and principalities, who like this judge “care neither about people or god.” But it also reveals the way of change: when people, no matter how marginalized, repudiate their invisibility, refuse to remain silent in the face of injustice, and stubbornly press their case. Yet this is not a fairy tale about a superwoman who topples patriarchal plutocrats with magical powers. Rather, it is about someone who refuses to abandon faith that God’s universe bends toward justice. Someone like you, Marion!
I love the medieval painting at right by Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto (1532) entitled “St Lucy before the Judge,” because it illustrates Jesus’ parable so vividly. A woman gestures fiercely at a judge
on his bench high above her, while two court officials try to hold her back. A crowd of men around her flail their arms, yet in the foreground, a child (encouraged by a black woman!) runs toward her in joy. And note the dove hovering above the scene—symbolizing a baptism by fire perhaps!? You have stood in such rooms many times, Marion—and prevailed!
Jesus’ portrait of the “persistent widow” was surely rooted in his memory of the women who raised and accompanied him, as well as of those who preceded him, from Sarah to Myriam and from Rahab to Esther. Such women have always been the back-bone of poor and oppressed communities: inconvenient, indefatigable, and indomitable.
For so many of us today, you stand in that genealogy: refusing to let injustice go, stubbornly persisting, and mothering others in faith and justice. May you be comforted by the fact that your “children” here and around the world (such as those pictured at right) carry on your work and witness. Your life work has been in no way futile, but rather profoundly fruitful.
For you, Marion, we thank God—who hears persistent prayer and action for justice, not least your own!
Elaine and I send you so much love and respect,
