The Parable of the Relentless Widow: “Hersistence”
I love how this parable disrupts our still heavily male-focused culture by celebrating and centering the agency of women—thus my subtitle “Hersistence”! There is so much in which to delight in this story of the tenacious prayer and public resistance of this unnamed protagonist, who is truly a great ancestor of women’s personal and political efforts through the ages for justice and peace in a hard-hearted world. So this will be a longer blog!
Let’s be clear about this parable in its real-life context. Jesus is not inventing some fable about a superhero woman who topples patriarchal plutocrats with amazing magical powers. He’s relating a tale about women he knew—not least his mother. And women he knew of, like the persistent, powerful peasant women of his people’s histories and traditions, from Sarah to Myriam and from Rahab to Bathsheba (e.g. the ones Matthew sneaks into his genealogy of Jesus). The woman of our parable is not fictional, she is archetypal. (Right: “Mary of Nazareth,” Sarah Beth Baca.)
Such women have always been the backbone of poor and oppressed communities, including in old Europe, as recognized in Vincenzo Campi’s 1591 portrait of “An Old Peasant Woman with a Distaff and Spindle Flanked by Two Male Peasants” (left).
Note the finger gestures of the men, both pointing to her as if to say “Yo, do not mess with this woman.” Such fierce women are strong, relentless, and prevail more often than the men who try to manage them might imagine, as our gospel story testifies.
Our parable is a dyad with the one that immediately follows it (18:9-14). But it is also twinned with the “friend at midnight” tale (11:5-9), which is also about the practice of prayer as dogged tenacity in petitioning for justice and mercy (both are unique to the Third Gospel). Significantly, the earlier one follows on the heels of Jesus’ “short catechism” in Kingdom priorities: the Lord’s Prayer. It’s important that we see how Luke weaves stories together to make larger arguments:
Luke is exhorting listeners/readers to persist in pressing for what is needed, because God stands with them.
Luke makes it clear that this parable illustrates the necessity of persistence so as not to “lose heart” or “grow weary” in a cruel world (18:1). The verb egkakein is found five times in Paul’s letters, usually referring to dire physical or legal circumstances, and testifies to how excruciating Christian survival was under the first century Roman empire.
Like so many of Luke’s vignettes, two socially disparate characters are set up at the outset. They inhabit very different places in “a certain city” (perhaps Jesus’ code for “we all know which city we’re talking about here,” or perhaps, a cipher for any city). On one hand is an intransigent judge—perhaps alluding to a notorious political figure—who fears “neither God nor public opinion” (18:2). My teacher Bill Herzog thinks this implies that the magistrate often made rulings on behalf of those who bribed him, a corrupt practice not uncommon in antiquity, and obviously still today.
On the other hand is a marginalized woman who refuses to let go of her demand for “vindication” (ekdikeō) from an “adversary” (antidikos)—both words using the root dike, the Greek goddess of justice and moral order, often depicted holding scales. This conflict between a judge who has no respect for law or people and a woman who refuses to settle for anything short of full justice is a classic “irresistible force meets immovable object” situation!
The fact that her specific issue is not stipulated in this story renders this scenario an archetype for justice struggles. Yet as a widow she was categorically vulnerable; indeed, the Hebrew word connotes one who is silent, not allowed to speak publicly. Imperatives to protect widows were as ubiquitous in the Hebrew Bible as they were rare elsewhere in the ancient world. At left are just four examples from different strands of Torah and Haftorah, and they hang heavily over this scene.
The fact that this unnamed woman is breaking all patriarchal norms by publicly advocating for herself indicates just how alone she is, having no male to represent her. She may be childless, isolated in her village, and alienated from her husband’s family, who could be contesting a will or estate. Moreover, Herzog points out:
magistrates were almost always in the service of the elites. The problem they faced was how to appear as representatives of justice while consistently rendering decisions in favor of the richer and more powerful. The only surprising element in the parable is that the judge seems to have abandoned all pretense of impartiality, and has become openly what he has always been covertly: a judge of injustice.” Unfortunately, this sounds all too familiar to us as well.
This scenario would have been all too familiar to Jesus’ audience—and in our moment as well!
The actual plot of the story is brief—and takes place completely in the judge’s head: “he said to himself” (Lk 18:4a)! This is the third time Luke has used this literary device—like the thought bubble in modern cartooning—in vignettes featuring rich people: he used it to reveal the self-focused greed of an estate owner obsessed with building bigger barns (12:17–19), then the scheming of a desperate bureaucrat in the story of the Defect-ive Manager (16:3–4). Perhaps Luke was trying to imagine a more humane inner life of powerful people in the absence of public evidence. But so we are clear, this judge is only repeating the narrator’s assessment of his corrupt character (18:4b).
Here we need to remember that our churches have for centuries excelled at “selling” a less controversial Bible to the middle classes by domesticating and trivializing parables such as this one—running them through a sort of “earthly stories
with heavenly meanings” industrial complex. This manipulating and dumbing down of scripture is still fueling the resurgence of toxic Christian nationalism today, and it’s not an innocent project.
At right are two examples of what comes up when you search for images of this parable online. The woman is typically portrayed as a pious “damsel in distress,” who demurely and politely petitions the male authority for redress—hands clasped or arms outstretched in supplication. The story is then interpreted as a theological allegory of praying to the Almighty—despite the dysfunctional implications of comparing God to this judge!
Jesus’ introduction to this parable does indeed draw a parallel between prayer and persistence, but as an analogy, notallegory. Prayer is not like piously desperate begging of a hard-hearted deity, but rather like tenacious, public struggles for justice in the face of long odds. This story exhorts us not to lose heart precisely because God’s universe bends toward justice.
The artistic rendering at left is therefore much more on point. Though Lotto’s 1532 “St Lucy before the Judge,” is not depicting our biblical story, it could be, as it poignantly portrays the exact scenario of this parable. There’s the woman in the center, lecturing and giving the judge a pointed finger.
Swirling around her are men freaking out, as one tries to restrain her. And at the margins of the composition, a baby (bottom left) runs toward her in joy, while a dove descends upon her from above.
Jesus very clearly portrays the judge as relenting only because the widow “keeps disrupting his business as usual,“ and “wearing him out.” This latter verb (Gk upōpiazō) means literally “to strike under the eye” or “browbeat.” This could not be further from a demure damsel with hands clasped begging Big Daddy for a favor. But it is what justice requires in a world ruled by the Powers on this side of history.
Let’s clarify this widow’s twofold strategy of approaching the judge directly and publicly. Both were breaches of patriarchal etiquette, but served to create a spectacle that raised questions about this judge’s system, confounded his stalling tactics, and undermined any intention to cut a backroom deal with her adversaries (likely more powerful family members possibly paying bribes for him to settle in their favor—in clear violation of Torah). Note too that she prevails “not by denouncing the judge’s character, but by demanding he do his duty,” as Herzog puts it, testing “the limits of his expediency” so that he eventually decides “it is simply too costly to continue the stalemate… forcing the judge to reevaluate the cost-benefit ratio of her case . . . cut his losses and move on.” Her relentless demand “broke the spell of inevitability that is cast by the ruling elites.”
As both an exploited class and as fighters for justice, widows recur often in Luke’s narrative, as you see in the list at right. These characters reflect all of Luke’s keystone themes:
This series of vignettes centering widows offers a microcosm, indeed a sort of mini-catechism, of Sabbath Economics justice, and rehabilitates Hebrew Bible imperatives to stand with vulnerable women in their struggles for equity and dignity.
Ronnie Farmer, Jr.’s “The Persistent Widow”(left) is a beautiful rendering of “hersistence.” Note the scales of justice in her right hand (like Dike), and her halo of fire. In Jesus’ story, the corrupt judge changes not because of his conscience, or fidelity to the law; rather, he concedes (at least to himself) that he is yielding to her inconvenient, indefatigable, and relentless self-advocacy. She is like trickling water that eventually erodes
his fortress façade of callousness, thus embodying the prophetic conviction that justice will, like flowing water, ultimately prevail (Amos 5:24).
This parable is one of many Lukan stories that have been suppressed or domesticated by churches that follow the dominant patriarchal social script of respecting the powerful and invisibilizing the poor. But in fact, Jesus is trying to get us to imagine the internal dialogue in the heads of elites, to “Pay attention to their unarticulated anxieties and fears, and imagine how afraid they are of you using your power for justice” (to paraphrase Lk 18:6). But whether or not they will ever yield, adds Jesus the realist, we can count on God’s fidelity to the dream of justice. Because according to the roots of our tradition in Exodus, the biblical God always hears the cry of the poor.
The twist in the parable comes at the very end: the haunting question whether the Human One finds such faith among US? The Atlantic magazine wrote a few years ago about the remarkable picture at right: “A single woman stands in the roadway, feet firmly planted. She poses no obvious threat. She is there to protest the excessive force which Baton Rouge
police deploy against the city’s black citizens. She stands in front of police headquarters. And she is being arrested by officers who look better prepared for a war than a peaceful protest. These are images that are impossible to forget, searing themselves into our collective consciousness. One man staring down a column of tanks in Tiananmen Square. A high school student attacked by police dogs in Birmingham, Alabama. This is such a photo.”
We might add: it is an image of faith on earth. As were the Mothers of the Disappeared movement in Latin America (left). Or any of the women pictured below (top row l-r: Viola Liuzza, Ella Baker, Deb Haaland, Dolores Huerta; middle: Winona LaDuke, Nora Bernard, Ash Leigh Henderson; bottom row: founders of Black Lives Matter [Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi] and Idle No More [Jessica Gordon, Sylvia McAdam, Sheelah McLean and Nina Wilson]).
In fact, the list is endless. Yet because Jesus’ query is a perennial one to us, we ought always call their names, learn their stories and stand with them. I encourage you to take a moment to think of persistent women known to you who advocate for personal and political wholeness.
Jesus correlates prayer to the stubborn persistence of public advocacy. Contemplation and action are not opposed to each other, but two sides of the same Janus. Which is why continually acting and praying for ceasefire and wealth redistribution and climate sustainability are not exercises in futility, but the very way by which the God’s sovereignty is realized.
–CM
