The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge (11 of 26)

The most common misreading of this parable is that God is the judge.

He is not. The parable works by contrast, and if the judge stood for God it would teach that heaven can be worn down by nagging, which is close to the opposite of what Luke says it is for.^[1]

Who Are the Two Characters?

A judge who fears neither God nor man, and a widow with no standing at all.

Luke describes the judge twice in those terms, once in his own narration and once from the judge’s own mouth. He is not a flawed man doing his best. He is a man who has decided that neither divine nor social accountability applies to him, which is the worst possible person to bring a case before.

The second half of that description is stronger in Greek than in English. Did not respect man sounds like rudeness. The verb is built on the word for being made ashamed, and in that world shame is the mechanism that regulates behaviour. A parent there says that is shameful rather than that is wrong. Jeremiah uses two words for it when he says the offenders were not ashamed and did not know how to blush.

So the description is not that the judge is impolite. It is that there is no handle on him. In the Middle East a petitioner appeals either for the sake of God or for my sake, and this man has publicly closed both doors. The widow arrives with no lever of any kind.

She has nothing else either. No husband to advocate for her, no money to secure a hearing, and in that society no independent legal footing. What she has is a claim and the willingness to keep bringing it.

What Question Is Jesus Answering?

One that already had a well-known answer in print, and the parable is a reply to it.

Ben Sirach, written a couple of centuries earlier and widely read, has a passage on whether God hears the powerless. It opens with a widow. Her tears run down her cheek, and her cry goes up against the man who caused them.

Then it does three things Jesus does not do.

It drops the woman almost immediately and shifts to a man, and the man carries the rest of the argument. It makes the hearing conditional: God responds to the one whose service is pleasing to him, which turns being heard into something earned. And it ends in vengeance, with God crushing the loins of the unmerciful and repaying the nations.

Jesus keeps the widow to the last line. Nothing she has done qualifies her, and the parable never suggests otherwise. And instead of vengeance the ending is a question about whether anyone will still be believing when the answer comes.

Sirach’s arbiter is God directly. Jesus introduces a human judge who is the opposite of God in every respect, and that substitution is the engine of the whole parable. It only works as an argument if the judge is not a picture of the one being prayed to.

What Finally Moves Him?

Not justice, and not compassion. Self-interest.

He says so. He does not fear God or respect people, but because this widow keeps bothering him he will grant her justice so she will not wear him out by her continual coming.

The verb is a boxing term, and it literally means to strike under the eye. Paul uses the same word for the discipline he applies to his own body. Three readings of it are in circulation.

Some take it literally, as a judge afraid of being hit. Bailey rejects that on practical grounds: she can shout insults at him all day, but the moment she touches him she is removed from the courtyard and not readmitted, which would end her case rather than win it.

Others read it as blackening the face, meaning damage to reputation. That fails for a different reason. It describes a man anxious to preserve his standing, and Luke has just told us twice that this judge has no such anxiety. The reading contradicts the premise it is attached to.

Arabic versions have gone a third way for a very long time, with renderings amounting to lest she give me a headache, and Ibn al-Tayyib reads the boxing language as exaggeration marking how far her persistence has got under his skin. The phrase behind continual coming carries the sense of forever, which is what turns it into what T. W. Manson called a war of attrition.

He does the right thing for entirely wrong reasons, which is precisely what makes him useful to the argument.

Why Does the Contrast Matter?

Because the parable reasons from the worse case to the better one.

If even a corrupt judge who cares about nothing eventually acts, how much more will God, who is not corrupt, is not indifferent, and is described as a Father rather than a magistrate.

Bailey states the distinction plainly. The believer is not facing a capricious judge, and the persistence is offered inside a relationship of love and confidence rather than as a technique for extracting a result.

That distinction rescues the parable from the reading it is most often given, which turns prayer into a siege.

Is This Parable Saying That Prayer Wears God Down?

No, and the practical version of the answer is worth stating.

Bailey’s formulation is that persistence is appropriate up until there is an answer. Before the answer is clear, keeping at it is part of genuine piety.

When the answer comes, and particularly when it is no or when it is something other than what was requested, the expected response changes. Then it is your will be done.

So persistence is not leverage. It is what faith looks like in the interval before an answer, and the interval is where most praying actually happens.

Does Verse 7 Say God Delays, or That He Is Patient?

Translations split, and the two readings point in opposite directions.

Most English versions turn the clause into a question. Will he delay long over them? The ESV takes it that way. Read like that it belongs with the promise: God will not put his people off, he will act speedily.

Bailey reads it as a statement instead, and the word is one of the New Testament terms for patience. It is built from far and anger, and it means putting anger a long way off. On that reading the line says God is slow to anger with them, and them is the elect.

That is a much harder sentence and it points inward rather than outward. The chosen ones crying out day and night are not sinless. People who suffer injustice easily assume that the injustice has made them righteous and that God’s anger is reserved entirely for their oppressors. The clause, read as a statement, says the opposite: God is able to hear them at all only because he is holding his own anger at a distance.

The word carries that sense elsewhere. Exodus has God slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love. The rabbis illustrated it with a king who quarters his troops far from the capital so that in the time it takes them to arrive the rebels have a chance to come to their senses. And in the Sirach passage this parable is answering, God has none of that patience toward the nations at all.

The clearest New Testament illustration is a man saying have patience with me and I will pay you everything, to a king who then cancels an unpayable debt. That is the unforgiving servant, and the patience in question is the same word.

I lean to the statement reading because it does more work and because the question reading makes the clause redundant beside the promise that follows it. Both are defensible, and a reader should know that the pleasant version is a translation decision rather than a plain sense.

Why Could a Woman Say What a Man Could Not?

Because in that setting she could get away with it, and this is the detail that makes the parable work as a scene rather than as a lesson.

A nineteenth-century traveller, H. B. Tristram, described a court of justice at the city gate in Nisibis. The judge sat half buried in cushions. Secretaries took what were politely called fees. Judgment ordinarily went to whoever had paid the most. And at the edge of the crowd a poor woman broke into the proceedings every day with loud cries, was told sternly to be silent, and answered that she would be silent when the judge heard her. Her son had been taken for a soldier, she could not work her ground alone, and the tax collector had made her pay an impost a widow was exempt from. Eventually the judge asked what she wanted and exempted her.^[2]

Bailey makes an observation about that account that commentators from Plummer to Jeremias walked past. Many people were shouting in that courtyard. The question is not why anyone shouted. It is why hers worked.

His answer comes from the Lebanese civil war. A Palestinian family he knew lost a cousin, the only son of a widow, taken and disappeared, and not a member of any militia. The family sent a delegation of three peasant women to the commander of the area, an internationally known figure. They shouted their way into an audience and threw hard words in his face.

Bailey asked what would have happened if the men of the family had said the same things. She raised her eyebrows and said they would have been killed at once. The family had not sent the women because the men were unwilling. They sent them because women could say it and survive.

That is the widow’s one asset, and it is the only one she has. She cannot appeal to God with him, or to shame, or to money, or to a husband. What she can do is stand in a public courtyard and make a scene that would get a man removed or worse.

Why Is a Woman the Hero?

Because Jesus made her one, and Sirach shows what the alternative looked like.

Sirach opens with a woman in a similar position and shifts to a male image within a verse. Jesus does not shift. The widow carries the parable to the end and she is the model held up for imitation.

Bailey then places that beside what happens as the crucifixion approaches. A woman anoints Jesus before the entry into Jerusalem. Women remain at the cross when the men have gone. They follow Joseph of Arimathea to the tomb and so know where the body was laid. They buy spices on the Saturday evening. They go out on the Sunday morning, hear the angels, master their fear, and carry the news back to the disciples who were not there.

And the mechanism from the section above applies there too. In an occupied city, at a public execution, a known associate of the condemned man was in danger and a woman was less so. John, young enough to be counted with the women, is the exception that shows the rule. Reading the men’s absence purely as cowardice misses that the women were doing something they could do and the men could not.^[3]

Persistence and courage in the face of no standing. The parable holds up the virtues his female disciples then demonstrated.

What Does God’s Vindication Actually Look Like?

The parable promises vindication and does not describe it, and the description arrives a few chapters later in a form nobody expected.

Bailey raises the hardest form of the question by putting a Muslim objection directly. Islam honours Jesus as a great prophet. It also holds that God does not abandon his prophets, and reads the psalm that says touch not my anointed as meaning what it says. Where, then, is God’s vindication of his prophet in the passion narrative? The answer given in that tradition is that there must have been a rescue and a substitution, because the alternative is that God stood by.

Bailey’s response is not to dismiss it. He says the question is the right question, and that the Christian answer is not that the vindication was smaller than expected but that it was larger. The Son of Man who asks whether he will find faith on the earth is days away from a courtyard of his own, before a judge who also feared neither God nor man, with no advocate and no standing.

He does not get a rescue. He gets a resurrection, which is a different and later kind of answer, and it exceeded what anyone who followed him had imagined asking for.^[4]

What Is the Closing Question?

Whether faith will still be here.

Jesus asks whether the Son of Man, when he comes, will find faith on the earth. That lands strangely after a promise that God will vindicate his chosen ones quickly.

The two belong together. The vindication is assured, and the question is whether anyone will still be praying when it arrives. The parable promises an answer and then asks whether we will have kept asking long enough to receive it.

Part of a series working through the parables. See also the Pharisee and the tax collector, which follows immediately in Luke.

Footnotes4

1. Reading the judge as a picture of God produces a theology of prayer as attrition, and it survives in a good deal of popular teaching about persistence. The parable is built on the opposite logic, arguing from the worst imaginable arbiter to the best, and the how-much-more is where the whole weight sits.
2. Tristram's account is a nineteenth-century Western traveller describing an Ottoman-era court, so it is not evidence for first-century legal procedure and should not be used as though it were. What it is good for is the shape of the scene: an open courtyard, a crowd, a judge taking money, and a woman with no standing making herself impossible to ignore. Bailey's own field observation is doing the load-bearing work here, and Tristram supplies the picture.
3. Ibn al-Tayyib, an Arabic-speaking Christian commentator in Baghdad a thousand years ago, read this parable as encouragement for a church under pressure. That is worth noting for its source as much as its content, because it is a reminder that the interpretive tradition on these texts is considerably wider than the European one.
4. Putting the Muslim objection into a parable post is deliberate. The question of what vindication looks like when a righteous sufferer is not rescued is the question the parable raises and does not answer, and it is asked more sharply from outside the Christian tradition than from inside it. Answering a good question badly is worse than not raising it, and this section states the objection in its strongest form rather than a convenient one.

Sources

Kenneth E. Bailey, Jesus Through Middle Eastern Eyes: Cultural Studies in the Gospels (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2008), chapter 19. Supports the reading of the woman as the hero, the comparison with Sirach 35, the shame-based reading of the judge's description, the three options for the boxing verb and the preference for the Arabic tradition, the statement reading of verse 7, the Lebanese civil war account and its bearing on the women at the cross, the limits of persistence once an answer is given, and the vindication question. Supplied in full.

Ben Sirach 35:14-20. The passage Jesus is answering. Free in full at Sefaria and in most study Bibles carrying the deuterocanon.

H. B. Tristram, Eastern Customs in Bible Lands (London, 1894), on the court of justice at Nisibis. Cited in Bailey. Nineteenth century, and the post says so.

Ibn al-Tayyib, eleventh-century Baghdad physician, monk and biblical commentator, cited in Bailey. His Arabic commentary has never been translated into English, so Bailey is the only route to him.

ESV Study Bible (Wheaton: Crossway, 2008), note on Luke 18:7. Reads the second clause as a question, which is the reading Bailey argues against. In print, and in Logos.

Johannes Horst, on makrothumia in Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, cited in Bailey. Supports the sense of restrained wrath postponed.

T. W. Manson, on the parable as a war of attrition, cited in Bailey.

The biblical texts cited: Luke 18:1-8, Exod 34:6, Jer 8:12, 1 Cor 9:27, Matt 18:26, and Ps 105:15.

Where the sourcing stops: whether the verb describing the judge being worn out should be read as a literal threat of violence, as damage to reputation, or as exaggeration is disputed, and the post gives all three with a preference rather than a verdict. Whether verse 7's second clause is a question or a statement is a live translation decision and the post says which way it leans and why. Bailey's Lebanese account is his own field report and cannot be independently checked. The account of the Muslim objection is a summary of a position rather than a citation of a particular author, and anyone wanting the argument in its own words should go to a Muslim source rather than to this post.