The gospel reading for the Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time is the Parable of the Widow and the Unrighteous Judge (Lk 18:1–8). The figure for God the Father in this parable is, interestingly enough, an unjust judge, that is, one who has no fear of God and no respect for any human being. And he refuses to listen to a widow who is pleading for a just judgment, a woman who has lost her protection (her husband) and who has lost her social standing. He simply refuses to consider the merits of her case. So why is this kind of judge a figure for God in this parable?
I contend that this is a very subtle proclamation of the good news of the gospel; for the unjust judge ends up granting her justice (ekdikeso), but not on the merits of her case—merely for self-centered reasons: “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.” In other words, “to get her off my back.”
The same root word is employed by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “There is none righteous (dikaios)” (Rom 3:10), and “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified (dikaioumenoi) freely by his grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (Rom 3:23). The verb is dikaioun, to justify, to render favorable. The same word is used in 2 Corinthians when Paul says: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (dikaiosune theou) (2 Cor 5:21). In other words, we are the ones who were given a favorable judgment, made righteous, justified, not on the merits of our lives, but purely on the basis of God’s good pleasure. We could even say “for self-centered reasons,” like the unjust judge. In other words, the reason for our justification is nothing more than that “he wanted to,” “he felt like it,” for he is not beholden to anything above himself—there is nothing above God—nor is he beholden to any human tribunal.
To be the righteousness of God is to be justified because to justify is to “make right” (jus), that is, to stand in right relationship with God. We can’t do that; we have no power to justify ourselves, to redeem ourselves, to buy ourselves back from the slavery of sin. We cannot make up for sin. Only God can do that, and he does so in Christ, in his death, as a sheer gift, not as a result of anything we might have done, nor by virtue of any disposition or prior goodness on our part. All of us stand before God in need of redemption, in need of salvation, completely dependent upon one who can and does redeem us.
So why does Jesus hold up the unjust judge as a figure for God? The reason is that from our point of view, God is often seen as unjust. Think of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. The landowner hires laborers at different times of the day, but at the end of the day he pays the one who worked one hour the same wage as the one who worked a full day. They grumbled and saw that as a violation of justice. Consider the parable of the lost son (apollumai: “being destroyed”), the son who “destroys himself” by his own choices, and the older son’s anger toward his father for his unjust royal treatment upon his return. In other words, God is like an unjust judge who pays no attention to the requirements of justice, but does what he pleases, and what pleases him above all else is raising the dead to life. If one is dead, one cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process, for one is dead. Jesus raised a twelve-year-old girl (the daughter of Jairus), and he raised the son of the widow of Nain, and he raised Lazarus from the dead. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him…” (Eph 2:4–5).
God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy, said a long-time priest friend of mine. That is the God we worship. It would be terrible news if our justification depended upon the merits of our life—that is, terrible news if our God was a “just judge” who rendered judgments on the basis of how much our lives measure up to the standards of justice.
When a defendant awaiting a verdict stands before a court judge, he or she is typically nervous, filled with fear, a servile fear. But God calls us to grow out of servile fear and into filial fear, which is not the fear of punishment, but a profound reverence for God that is so deep that sin loses all attraction. What human judge can cause us to lose all attraction to sin and self-seeking? If we stand before God with servile fear, we haven’t learned what we should have learned in this life; we have not embraced the good news of the gospel, and that may be in part because the good news was not proclaimed to us; for what is often proclaimed is a false gospel, a gospel reduced to a transaction: “If you do this, you will get that; if you don’t do this, you will not get that.” It is the false gospel of salvation through works, the semi-Pelagian heresy that we have to do something to earn that initial grace. But we have earned nothing. It is all grace, including the grace of our cooperation.
Jesus ends by asking: “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” If we project our own limits onto God, if we see God as a God who judges us on the merits of our case, on the basis of what we actually deserve, then we will not pray much, at least not with a great deal of hope. But if we truly believe the good news of divine mercy—which is not easy to believe—then we will pray with great confidence, and when we pray with confidence, we begin to see miracles, especially when interceding for others.
St. Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, so the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words (Rom 8:26). When we pray for others, it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, and God loves our children and all those for whom we pray infinitely more than we do. Whatever love we have for our children, it is merely a limited sharing in that love of his for them. And so we can pray for them without anxiety and uncertainty. Our God is an unjust judge. In other words, his mercy goes far beyond the demands of justice. He hears our prayers because he inspires them. And that is indeed hard to believe, which is why this reading ends with Christ saying: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Specifically, the faith that we have nothing to fear in the servile sense, faith that we will get not what we deserve, but what he wants for us—which is a never-ending sharing in his own happiness, which not only lasts forever, but which expands without end, an eternal life of unimaginable surprises. And God always gets what he wants in the end.
Image: Adapted (colorized) from The Unjust Judge and the Importunate Widow (1864) by Sir John Everett Millais. Public Domain. Courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Douglas McManaman was born in Toronto and grew up in Montreal. He studied philosophy at the University of St. Jerome’s College (Waterloo) and theology at the University of Montreal. He is a permanent deacon of the Archdiocese of Toronto and ministers to those with mental illness. He taught Religion, Philosophy and the Theory of Knowledge for 32 years in Southern Ontario, and he is the current chaplain of the Toronto Chapter of the Catholic Teachers Guild. He is a Senior Lecturer at Niagara University and teach Marriage Prep for the Archdiocese of Toronto. His recent books include Why Be Afraid? (Justin Press, 2014) and The Logic of Anger (Justin Press, 2015), and Christ Lives! (Justin Press, 2017), as well as The Morally Beautiful (Amazon.ca), Introduction to Philosophy for Young People (Amazon.ca), Readings in the Theory of Knowledge, Basic Catholicism, and A Treatise on the Four Cardinal Virtues. He has two podcast channels: Podcasts for the Religious, and Podcasts for Young Philosophers. He currently lives with his wife and daughter in Ontario, Canada.
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