The Unjust Judge

Closer than you may think

In the name of the creator, the liberator, and the comforter. Amen. Amen.

This text, first thing that came to mind, is a very peculiar piece of scripture. You can kind of give a fairly straightforward sermon about it, but I’ve heard that sermon and it wasn’t interesting to me. When I started digging into it a little further, I realized that it’s actually much more complicated than it seems.

I wanted to start off because when it is about a widow seeking justice, we know widows who have been seeking justice in our country. I want to just start off by paying tribute to one of them: Myrlie Evers-Williams. Her husband and she together formed the first chapter of the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) in the state of Mississippi. They were standing up for the rights of African-Americans, registering people to vote, helping them with legal troubles—all the things that the NAACP was involved in. It was very dangerous work.

Indeed, Medgar Evers was murdered in 1963, leaving behind Myrlie Evers and her two children. They knew who did it; it was obvious to everybody. It was a member of the KKK, who—I mean, it wasn’t even a secret—but it took three trials for him to be tried and found guilty in 1994, 31 years later. So when we hear about a widow who keeps knocking on the door of justice until finally she sees it, in this country, it may take not a couple of days or weeks as the story may suggest, it may take 31 years. She did get it.

She is often remembered as the widow of, but let me emphasize that she is a powerful civil rights leader in her own right and always has been. She moved to California, married Stanley Williams, who was also a civil rights activist, and she later became the national chair of the NAACP from 1995 through 1998. Of course, she was also the first non-ordained person who gave the invocation at a presidential inauguration in 2013 when President-elect Obama invited her for that role. She was, and is, a powerful person in her own right, and I want to just hold that and honor her and know that we have examples in our country to follow who we can look up to, and she is absolutely one of them.

We live in very interesting times, and so there are a few other things that I want to talk about. I want to talk about prayer, black eye, robbery, no kings, and then I want to see how we can all bring it together because this text and the times that we are in keep challenging me.

The Unjust Judge

Once there was a certain judge in a certain city. He feared no one, not even God. The way it’s presented in the story, it makes it sound like it’s maybe not a good thing. But in some way, that’s what we want from a judge, right? We want a judge to not be afraid of anyone. We want them to be impartial, and we also don’t want them to be influenced by a religious agenda—in our country, in our day and age—because that gets us into all kinds of very strange debates that we actually, I believe, see playing out even in the Supreme Court at this moment. It’s troubling when that happens.

So, even though the setup is like, “There was this judge who feared no one and not even God,” is that really the truth? It refers back to an early text in the Hebrew scriptures, Deuteronomy chapter 1, where God is saying, “Look, I need you to appoint just judges who are going to be just, but who are also going to remember that in the end, justice is mine.”

There is a long tradition, all the way from Deuteronomy stretching towards this text in Luke, that says, “Not even as a judge do you have to remember you are not the ultimate arbiter of justice and what is right and what is wrong; that in the end belongs to God.” God even says in that chapter in Deuteronomy, “I will be the judge ultimately, and if you can’t decide what is right or wrong, give it to me.”

Now, how that works has led to some interesting practices in many countries around the world. Maybe we don’t do that anymore, but we hold that there is a justice beyond what we know. There is a righteousness beyond what we understand, which belongs to God, that we all strive towards even though we don’t fully comprehend it.

Vengeance vs. Justice

The widow comes to him and says, “Give me legal protection from my opponent.” There are a couple of words here that are interesting to pick up. Opponent: the book of Luke has another chapter when it talks about what you do with an opponent when you go to court. In chapter 12, a little earlier, it says, “When you’re going with your opponent to court, you better try and find a resolution to your problem before you get to the magistrate.” So we have very different stories about how to interact with an opponent. Here in the early chapter, Jesus is telling people to sort it out yourself. But then in this chapter, we have the story of the widow who is basically knocking on the judge’s door constantly until she gets what she is looking for.

The word in Greek is ekdikēsis, but it doesn’t quite mean justice as in just or righteousness. It means vengeance or perhaps vindication. There’s a kind of a range of meanings that it can have, but it’s not righteousness or justice because there’s another word for that, which is dikē. The judge, whom we later see Jesus calls unjust, is adikos, which means he’s unjust. So this is the word which is referring to justice and righteousness, and not vindication and vengeance.

Now, why do I bring that up? We sometimes confuse vengeance with justice. Years ago, before I moved to the United States, I saw a documentary about the death penalty, and a family was followed. One of the family members was brutally murdered, and they wanted the murderer to receive the death penalty. I don’t fault them for that wish; I understand. The person got the death penalty, and they got to be present at the execution. The brother was interviewed afterwards, and he said—and it has stuck with me for more than 30 years—”I wish he had suffered more.”

So, witnessing somebody’s life being snuffed out did not satisfy his feelings of vengeance. I understand that. I was at one point also, before I came to the United States, robbed at gunpoint in Amsterdam. I was walking down the street; it was 3:00 in the morning. I was a student, what can I say? That’s what you do at 3:00 in the morning. A group of four guys approached me, and all of a sudden, I had a gun in my face. I was swept up, kicked, the whole thing.

They caught the guys because it was 3:00 in the morning. When I called the police, all of the police in the area circled right away because when you say “gun,” everybody drops everything else and they go for it, because it’s highly unusual in Holland; it doesn’t happen. They caught them. I had just sat down, and my roommates, who had heard me dial 911—this was so long ago you had rotary phones, and you can hear the dials, and they wake up like, “Wait, that sounds like 911.” That’s how long ago that was. They poured me a drink, and I sat down. Here’s the police, and I said, “Do you want to come in, take a statement?” is what I thought. No, “Why don’t you come down? We got him.” It took minutes.

Anyway, long story short, finally I have to go before the judge magistrate. This is like the Dutch version of what you would do with a grand jury here, so it’s a pre-trial hearing. After that testimony I gave, I walked away with the clerk and I said to the clerk, “I’m really glad you got them, because if they were in my hands, things would be much worse for them.” I wanted vengeance.

I was glad I could hand them over to a justice system. I honestly don’t even know what punishment they got. Whatever it was, it’s not what I would have sought. But I’ve learned why the feeling of vengeance is in place. Because when you’ve been victimized in such a way, you have been completely robbed of any sense of power and agency. And vengeance is the feeling of wanting it back, wanting it restored to you, and having power again for yourself.

For some time, I was terrified of all kinds of things when I went, when just walking down the street, and people could sense it and feel it, and I felt it. I wanted my power back. What we reckon with in our life, and why we can’t ever get it fully to the place that we want it, is because we always will feel an element of powerlessness. That’s part of life’s struggle. We all feel it all the time. We really don’t like it most of the time, but vengeance is a way to try and get it back.

The Black Eye

So when she keeps banging on the door of this judge, he thinks, “I’d better give her protection she seeks or she’ll keep coming and wear me out.” The Greek word for “wear me out” is actually hypōpiazō, which means it’s a boxing term: “She’ll give me a black eye.”

That’s what that means. That’s what the text says. I don’t know why they, in a translation, make it, you know, like she’s just persistent. There’s nothing wrong with being persistent for women, by the way. “She persists” was a good thing. Don’t get me wrong. But this is different. This is giving somebody a black eye.

So she’s like, “If I can’t get to my opponent, I may be getting to you.” And this judge is like, “Uh oh, let me not get in the way. Let me give her what she wants.” Not exactly the right motivation for whatever it is that he did.

Jesus then says, “How much more swiftly will come the vindication”—it’s that same word—”of God.” The only problem is, and this is when this is challenging, the only problem is when God comes back, the Son of Man comes back to earth, “Will the Son of Man find faith here?” Remember, this is a parable that Jesus gave to tell us we have to pray continuously. And so it’s an odd example.

No Kings and Self-Exploration

Yesterday was No Kings Day. Many millions of people went out. You know where you know me; I thought it was a good thing. I went out, too. Not everybody here agrees with me, and you know what? It’s okay. It is really okay. But I went out and participated.

After a while, even though I was happy to see how many people were there, the colorful things that they did, and I particularly like the animal costumes that are now coming out—they give me a kick—but as we were walking back, I also had an uneasy feeling. I wondered, “What is that about? What am I uneasy about today?”

As I was contemplating this, I realized, well, we live in a time in this country where everybody is very convinced about what they did wrong, what you are doing wrong, what over there they are doing wrong. We all know it very well, and we all have big stories, and I’m not arguing with you. I’m not saying what I believe is right or wrong. That’s not the point. The point is that the energy of pointing towards others for what they are doing wrong is intense. The millions of people who came out yesterday, but also the voices that oppose them, are intensifying.

Very few people seem to be asking or having space or oxygen right now to ask the question, “Where did I go wrong? Where did we go wrong?” as an honest self-exploration that makes us part of the story. I don’t think most people right now think that this country is going in a good direction. Some do, but not most people. And that must give us pause and an opening to say, “Maybe we can explore where we went wrong, starting with where I went wrong.”

I don’t have answers at this point. I mean, I have some thoughts, but that’s not interesting right now. What I’m realizing is from this text that we are in some way all too familiar with the unjust judge that perhaps we are carrying within us. The one who is always, for the wrong reasons, pointing towards others and not, for the right reasons, saying, “Let me explore this, what justice is for real.”

I believe with Jesus that when God brings God’s justice here, we’re going to be very surprised what we’ll see. But we all act as if we’re going to look to the other side and say, “See, told you what’s going to happen. What God’s justice is going to look like is what I think it’s going to look like.” And it’s both ways. I’m not pointing to anybody. We act as if our sense of justice now is going to come and be vindicated all over the earth, and we’re going to be like, “See?” Told you. We hear it, too. Don’t get me wrong. We hear it all the time. And we have to be defended again against it to keep our own sense of self intact.

But let’s be honest and let’s see if we don’t carry the unjust judge within instead of seeing him outside of us. That’s why this is a parable about prayer. That’s why for me today, this is a parable about prayer and praying continuously to remind me that as much as I think I know—and I think I know quite a bit—as much as I think I know, I know nothing about the justice of God ultimately. I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I don’t know how it’s going to come about.

There are a few things that I like to know. I think it’s going to be for the vulnerable, for the poor first and foremost. I think so. And the rest of it we will have to see. And so I pray that within me I can find openness and space for God’s justice to come on in and not be overshadowed by the voice of the unjust judge that is also within me.

Amen.

Amen.