NewCreation

Homily for 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And this Sunday we've jumped a little. Last time we had the account of the healing of ten people, of whom one, a Samaritan, came back and gave thanks. And then we jump a chunk of chapter 17 of Luke's Gospel, which is where Jesus is asked by the Pharisees concerning the coming of the kingdom. And we jump that because presumably we're going to get it closer to Advent, towards the last Sundays of the Church's year. So it's quite important we remember that, because at the very end of today's Gospel we'll get a reference back to that chunk, where the parable says, "And yet when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" — which looks back at all the examples that Jesus had given of the Son of Man coming, or what the shape of the coming of the kingdom was like in the midst of — famously, in Luke's Gospel anyhow — we then begin this parable, which Jesus has told a group of Pharisees and disciples, because it was the Pharisees who asked him the question about the coming of the kingdom. So Jesus tells them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart, not to become cowardly. Apparently the word means just "not become cowardly." And he says: "In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people." Now I pick up that as someone who's more or less deaf and dumb — can't be moved by anybody. But there may be a more technical meaning here, because of course in most ancient cities in the Hebrew world, and much of the world still today, you will very often get two sorts of court: one where customary or religious law is meted out, and that in the case of Jewish people living in the Holy Land at the time of Jesus would have been the Beth Din — so a court made up of Pharisees, guess what, the people whom he's talking to — and then you would also have had the court which would have dealt with matters from the Torah strictly; they would have been judging matters according to the Law of Moses. And then you would have had the local procurator's court, so some variant of secular law provided by either the Roman authorities or one of their sycophants, who would give some kind of secular law. The person might also be a Jew, but the point would be that they were not into Torah; they were into ruling according to the secular authority who ran them at the time — Roman or Greek or whoever, whatever their view of what law ought to be. They were the local civil judge, as it were. Remember, even in English-speaking worlds we've had a difference between civil and ecclesiastical courts for some time. So there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. This may merely mean he was the secular judge. And not only that, Apparently he was rather a good judge, because if you're a judge you're not supposed to have respect for people — you're supposed to decide things on their merits. You're not supposed to look and decide according to the favour of the rich or the favour of the poor. In fact, Jesus appears to be riffing here on a passage from the book of Sirach, where there is a chunk reading this: "Do not offer him a bribe, and he will not accept it. And do not rely on a dishonest sacrifice, for the Lord is the judge, and with him there is no partiality. He will not show partiality to the poor, but he will listen to the prayer of one who is wronged. He will not ignore the supplication of the orphan or the widow when she pours out her complaint." It goes on in this vein. Jesus is clearly referring to that in his parable here, though his use of the characters is slightly different. So let's imagine that our judge is a secular judge. He's not going to be moved by appeals to Torah, and he's not going to be moved by either rich people trying to ply him with favours so as to get a good judgment for them, or poor people being obviously victims and therefore obviously needing help. And even so, he must keep the law. So let's give him a chance at this judgment. "And in that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, 'Grant me justice against my opponent.'" Well, actually: "Vindicate me against my adversary." It's quite strong. She's a tough one. Now, the interesting thing is that as a widow, of course, she was in a precarious situation, because she would normally have needed men to do things for her. And she would certainly have needed men to do things for her in a Torah court. And she would have been dependent on people who might be adverse to her — like sons-in-law, who would have wanted a greater part of her husband's inheritance than maybe it was their right. So what has she done? She has jumped the religious court — the court of the Pharisees, the court of the people who Jesus is talking to. She's jumped that. She's saying, "I'm not putting up with this any longer. I'm going straight to the secular judge." And apparently this is something that people quite frequently do. Sometimes, if you're in a Muslim country with a sharia court, you will try to resolve your family issues within the sharia courts. But if you think there's an advantage for you in going to the civil law of the country, you do. And people disapprove of you, but you do that. And it was the same with Jewish people. Any pious Jewish person would go to the appropriate Torah court — the Beth Din — and hope that things would get sorted out there. But if they saw an advantage for themselves in going to the secular court, one which feared neither God nor people, then they would go for it. So here she's plucky, she's out of line, she's doing something which is borderline betraying of family values by heading outside the people who ought to have sorted out her issue at a local and at a lower level. So here she is, she's going to the court: "Grant me justice" – vindicate me against my adversary. And the parable doesn't tell us whether she's right or wrong, merely that she's very determined. She really wants to get her way. And what she wants the judge to do is something actually quite unacceptable, because she's asking the judge to be her vindicator. And the judge's job is not to be a vindicator. The judge's job is to judge according to the law. But she's saying to the judge effectively, "You be my vindicator, you be my attorney, my prosecuting attorney, my defending attorney, I want you to be on my side." She's trying to bully him to do what she wants. She may be right, she may be wrong. We don't know the issue. "For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, 'Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone'" – so he's quite self-conscious about the fact that he is not following Torah law, and that's part of his reputation, and that's his good reputation. Part of his reputation is that he doesn't make exception of persons. "Yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will take her side. I will vindicate her" – doing something which probably as a judge he ought not to do – "so that she may not wear me out by continually coming." Well, apparently there are many, many different translations of this "wear me out." I had originally thought that it was from the language of boxing, and apparently it is used in boxing. But apparently behind the notion of wearing me out is actually the notion of someone blackening my face. "Blacken my face" – she will cause me to lose prestige by continually coming. Why? Well, supposing that you are in the town and you see this widow, this feisty widow, constantly coming to a judge's chambers, insisting on getting in and having loud exchanges with him – well, a couple of possibilities: either you will begin to suspect that the judge is partial to her and that there is some form of dishonesty going on, or you'll believe that he is partial to the adversary, which is why he's taking so long to give anything to her, or – and this is the other thing – you will think that they're having an affair. In other words, she just by continually coming is putting him in the position, putting him into the position where he'll lose his reputation. So he decides that he will go for her because it's the least worst. He will sort her issue out. He will take her side because it's the least worst of all the options available to him. And so then the Lord says, "Listen to what the unjust judge says." And that's again our translation, which fills it – because it literally says, "Listen to what the judge of unrighteousness says." And that may be that he's referring to the judge now as unjust because the judge has now made a decision on behalf of the woman which perhaps he shouldn't have, but simply because he was fed up. Maybe the judge has become unjust. But it may be that it's simply referring to the judge who had judgment over non-sacred matters – in other words, over secular matters. That would have been a standard phrase for referring to secularism: the judge who's in charge of day-to-day things, nothing holy. Look at how he reacts: "And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping?" So the image being given by Jesus is that the judge of impeccable reputation over secular matters will eventually be bullied into doing something in favor of those people who pester him enough, and that God is even more like that. In other words, you can bully God effectively into taking your side, and God is even more greatly like the judge. The way we think – which is an extraordinary image, when you think that it makes it seem as though God is someone who has to be bullied into doing something that may not even be the right thing to do, but it's just something that someone wants terribly, and that person is feisty and rule-breaking and terribly insistent. This seems to be the image that Jesus is giving. "I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them." So he's saying: yes, God is the sort of person who precisely will intervene – even when it's apparently not the right thing to do – in favor of his unjust people, and he will do so quickly. "And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?" And that's this strange final remark. Does our pestering, our not being cowardly – does that mean we are able to avoid being cowards? Will he find that we've been bullied into submission by our normal expectation of, "Well, religious justice is slow and probably won't get any" – which, certainly speaking as a Catholic priest who's been through the religious justice system of my own Church, I can tell you, is slow and doesn't work properly, and very occasionally a judge from unexpected high quarters gets on board and does something about it, but it's very rare. I've been praying for that for a long time. But mostly, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth? Will we be the sort of people who will believe enough that God might even step outside what seems to be right and proper? Will we be rather — what's the word — more than feisty, as in the case of the widow, but actually a right old bully? Do we have that in our hearts, or will we find that the world makes cowards of us all? The Son of Man coming seems to me to be Jesus indicating that there is a place of slightly crazed bravery and stepping outside boxes and insisting that God come and do something that apparently isn't even right. This is a rather extraordinary little parable. Thank you.