Justice at the Center of Spirituality

Sermon # 6 in a Lenten Series: “The Parables Jesus Told and Lived:”

Lanny Peters, Pastor

Oakhurst Baptist Church, Decatur, Georgia

The Sixth Sunday in Lent (Palm/Passion Sunday): April 9, 2006

Mark 11: 1-11

Luke 18: 1-8

As we come to the end of this series on the parables of Jesus, I hope it is clear that the parables are at the very heart of Jesus’ teachings, and that he embodied and lived out the parables. There are so many parables that we have hardly covered half of them; we may have to have a second series on the parables someday. There were probably even more not recorded in the four gospels since Mark says that Jesus told so many that it seemed “he did not speak to them except in parables.” (Mark 4:34)

There is one more parable I want to look at today that is found in Luke 18: 1-8: Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my opponent.’ For a while he refused; but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

Note that Luke introduces this parable by saying that it is about “the need to pray always and not to lose heart.” Well, that’s kind of strange because the parable seems to have nothing to do whatsoever with praying. But let’s look at it closer and see. It is a very short story with only two characters. One is a judge. A judge who neither fears God not respects human beings. In other words, he is corrupt and unredeemable. A common technique in interpreting the parables is to treat them like allegories and make one of the figures in the parable God, which I believe was not what Jesus had in mind at all. In this case, it is very clear that the judge is in no way a stand-in for God since the judge is a despicable character. The story quickly bears it out when a widow comes to him seeking justice. Widows were among the most vulnerable people in Jesus’ society with almost no rights without a husband to stand up for them. Jewish law in the Torah recognized how defenseless widows were. In Exodus it says, “You shall not abuse any widow or orphan. If you do abuse them, when they cry out to me, I will surely heed their cry; my wrath will burn, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives will become widows and your children orphans.” (Exodus22; 22-24) This is the very law this judge was trained to observe. But he “is beyond shame; neither an appeal to God’s justice nor an appeal to human need can evoke a sense of shame.” (Kenneth Bailey) In his study of the society in which Jesus told this story, Bill Herzog says that the concern for which the widow is seeking justice against an opponent is most likely an inheritance. Women did not normally appear in court which may be why the judge ignores her. That she is representing herself indicates that she has no male family members to stand up for her. She is desperate because her very life may depend on the settlement of her case.” (William R. Herzog. Parables as Subversive Speech: Jesus as Pedagogue of the Oppressed. Louisville (Westminster/ John Knox Press, 1994), P. 228.)

The corrupt judge is most likely on the take, hoping for a bribe from her opponent. “Rather than hear (the widow’s) case on an urgent or priority basis, the judge stalls, dawdles, and refuses to hear her case. He is violating the Torah in putting her off, an indication that the stakes are high enough to induce him to delay the case. It is this context that he ‘neither fears God nor respects human beings.’” (Herzog, P. 226)

But the widow refuses to give up despite the tremendous odds against her. She again and again demands that he grant her justice as God’s law prescribes and human decency demands. She refuses to give in to her opponents who would use the courts to serve their greed. This is dangerous business. At least a couple of movies have been made about a woman like this.

One of them is Steven Soderberg’s’ Erin Brokovich, about an unemployed single mother who becomes a legal assistant and almost single-handedly brings down a California power company accused of polluting a city's water supply. The other is North Country, director Niki Caro's film about a woman's fight against sexual harassment in the iron mines of Michigan.

Like these women, the woman in Jesus’ parable refuses to be silent in the face of injustice and against all odds. She is so courageous and persistent that the corrupt judge finally says, “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”

This is likely where the original parable Jesus told ended. Luke added his interpretation, “And the Lord said, ‘Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?’”

What fascinates me about this is that Luke began by saying that the parable was about the need to pray always and not to lose heart. But the woman is the story is not praying but working for justice. But that’s it! Working for justice is a form of prayer. A very neglected form of prayer. 

To see this more clearly, let’s return to our Palm Sunday text from Mark 11 (1-11), which was read earlier. I like Shusake Endo’s reflection on that text. He says, “The Pesach (Passover) was at hand. The people preparing for the festival were looking back on their long history, rueful over the anguished adversity of their ancient wandering migrations, and they prayed with fervor that God would come again to restore prosperity to this land now trampled underfoot by the Gentiles. Jesus, of course, knew the spirit of the feast. On this particular day, shortly before the festival itself began, with full knowledge he dared to plunge into that whirlpool of popular misunderstanding. Descending from the Mount of Olives and through the cheers of the crowd, he certainly knew that he was soon going to disappoint these people, and that the people in their frustration would then turn against him…. Jesus, coming down the mountain and entering the city, wore a painful smile.” (Imaging the Word, Volume 3: United Church Press, 1996, P. 180.)

Remember a couple of weeks ago when we heard where, Some Pharisees came and said to (Jesus), “Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you.” He said to them, ‘Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.’” (Luke 13: 31-33)

But now Jesus was in Jerusalem. He knew that the time had come when his vision of God’s reign was about to collide with that of Herod and the religious and political establishment. Jesus had told the disciples “See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.” (Matthew 10:16) His parables had served to teach about God’s coming reign but now he was about to act them out. He did this knowing that those in power were closely watching him. Despite his triumphant welcome by the peasants, he was not invited to lead a prayer breakfast in Herod’s palace.

At the end of Mark’s account of Palm Sunday, Jesus entered Jerusalem and did what every pilgrim would do; he went straight to the temple. But strangely, he did not do what would have been expected of every pilgrim. He did not pray. He just looked around at everything, and left. Something had disturbed Jesus. The next day we see what it was. Jesus returned to the Temple, but again not to pray. Or at least not in the traditional sense.

Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written,
“My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers.” (Mark 11: 15b-17)

In Jesus’ eyes, God’s house had been turned into a commercial enterprise, a bastion of capitalism. He had to clean it out before he could even pray. And that is exactly what he did, without considering the cost. Remember we have been reflecting this Lenten season on an observation and a question raised by Bill Herzog, “If Jesus was a teacher of heavenly truths dispensed through literary gems called parables, it is difficult to understand how he could have been executed as a political subversive and crucified between two social bandits. It appears that Jerusalem elites collaborating with their Roman overlords executed Jesus because he was a threat to their economic and political interests. Unless they perceived him to be a threat, they would not have publicly degraded and humiliated him before executing him in as humiliating (ignominious) a way as possible. How is it possible to bring together the teacher who spoke in parables and the subversive who threatened the ruling powers of his day?” p. 9.)

Now we know. During this season of Lent, we have seen how Jesus’ vision increasingly threatened the ruling powers of his days. Like the widow in his parable, he would not be silent about injustice. Jesus was challenging what Walter Wink calls, “the Domination System.” Like all oppressive forms of rule, it lives by the lies or cover stories it creates. This sets up the role of the prophet. “When anyone steps out of the system and tells the truth, that enables everyone else to peer behind the curtain, too. …Anyone who steps out of line therefore denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety. If the main pillar of the system is living a lie, then it is not surprising that the fundamental threat to it is living the truth.” (As cited in Herzog, P. 229-30)

But domination systems in Jesus’ time, and in ours, get vicious when their power is threatened. “And when the chief priests and the scribes heard (what Jesus had done), they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching.” (Mark 11: 18)

Where are we? Are we spellbound or are we threatened? Or a mixture of both?

I hope that if we have learned anything from our six-week study of how Jesus told and lived out parables, it is how central justice is to Jesus’ vision of God’s realm. Bill Herzog concludes his long look at the parables with this insight:

“One clear implication of this study is that Jesus’ ministry was concerned with political and economic issues. Matters of justice were not peripheral to a spiritual gospel but were at the heart of his proclamation and practice. Perhaps is would be more accurate to say that justice was at the center of Jesus’ spiritually. It is a conceit of the North American church that Jesus was not involved in politics and economics but limited himself to spiritual matters. Although this view may allow some the luxury of limiting ministry to so-called spiritual needs, it violates the fundamental practice of Jesus. It will not do “to spiritualize his message and avoid its penetrating gaze.” ….

Theology needs to grow out of social, political, and economic analysis as it did for Jesus. “This kind of theologizing begins not with the mysteries of God but with the perplexities of daily life. (Herzog, P. 264, 266)

In the parables Jesus told and lived, he made it clear that a spirituality that does not have justice at it center is likely to be a form of narcissism. What Jesus did in challenging the Domination System of his time was as unacceptable as it is in ours. I was a teenager when Martin Luther King, Jr. was murdered. I lived in a neighborhood where I heard not one word of appreciation for him when he died. One man spoke for virtually everyone when he said loudly in one of our main social gathering places, “That trouble maker got what was coming to him.” A number of folks from our church were there and not one disagreed. I had seen them pray fervently in church. They saw no connection between their spirituality and God’s concern for justice. Jesus’ death on the cross was all about dying to pay God off for our sins so we could get in to heaven. But Jesus’ goal was in his prayer, “Thy Kingdom come on earth, as it is in heaven.”

Those of us then trapped in segregation, one of the great dominant systems of that time, did not know what it meant to follow Jesus. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood and not even the threat of death could turn him back. As a teenage boy, I suspected that there was a lie going on here. It would take me many years to understand what King was about, but I finally got it. “When anyone steps out of the system and tells the truth, that enables everyone else to peer behind the curtain, too.”

Jesus said, “You will know the truth and the truth shall set you free.” (John 8: 32) For his insistence on God’s justice as central to faith and spirituality, Jesus would get what was coming to him. And contrary to much of popular theology today, his death would not be a suicide; it would be a homicide. But he was not turning back.

At the end of that day when Jesus cleansed the Temple, “when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.” (Mark 11: 18-19) All was quiet that night, but it was the quiet before a great storm. Jesus had set in action a series of events, which are so central to our faith that we will not just remember them this week, we will even re-enact them as if they were happening in our lives…. which they are.