Until Justice Is Done.

I don’t know. I have reservations about equating the judge in today’s gospel with God. After all, the Bible is full of lines saying that God hears the cry of the poor, that God is eager and willing to give good things to those who ask. So it’s hard, when you really look at it, to equate the insensitive judge with God. Besides, is the message that if you badger God long enough you can eventually wear God down and get what you want?

I suggest there is a more fruitful and less obvious—and unexpected—way to understand this gospel. Why not see the widow, not the judge, as the image of God? Once you reverse characters, then a whole new perspective emerges. That is to say, when the widow is seen as a God-like figure, then the message of the parable becomes crystal clear: Anyone who determinedly resists injustice—faces it, names it, and denounces it until right is achieved—is acting as God does, is
God-like. Powerless as Jesus on the cross who defeats the power of death, the widow achieves victory for right. Through her persistence the widow becomes a kind of Gandhi or Martin Luther King figure. Against all odds she will endure until justice is done and God will be present.

This parable is not about strategies to wear down a reluctant God with non-stop prayer. It is about us little people who act like God whenever we persistently seek, often against terrible odds, to have justice done: whenever we hold selfserving politicians’ feet to the fire, when we work to have children insured and free of violence, when we uncover the greed and corruption that siphon off money from the poor, when we work to improve education and to break down barriers
that separate people.

This is a parable about justice.

Fr. William Bausch, adapted from Once Upon a Gospel. Taken from Give Us This Day.

Fr. William J. Bausch is a retired priest of the Diocese of Trenton, New Jersey.