Proper 24: Genesis 32.22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3.14-4.5; Luke 18.1-8
BEING “broken-hearted” is greater than metaphor. It is an actual medical condition, also often called “broken heart syndrome”. Extreme suffering or grief may cause weakness in the center which is potentially fatal. But hearts may be stressed, or damaged, in addition to broken. This was in my mind as I read Luke’s tackle this parable: a teaching telling people to (a) pray and (b) . . . what?
The RSV, NRSV, and NJB all say that we should always not “lose heart”. What a good looking way of expressing the miserable human experience that we also discover by the word “discouragement”! The Greek word being translated as “losing heart” or “being discouraged” is egkakein. It seems to have particular technical meaning for Christians. Though it isn’t a standard word, it occurs six times within the New Testament, and at all times with this sense of losing heart, or being discouraged.
In all six cases, it’s prefaced by the word “not”. There could possibly be no clearer indication that Christianity and discouragement (or “losing heart”) don’t belong together. That isn’t to suggest that we will never experience that emotion, however it does warn that we must resist it in all its dreary disillusion. Truly, courage is prime to the lifetime of a Christian.
As in prayer, so in writing — sometimes the mind wanders. I got to considering: what are the roots of this concept of “losing heart”? The first recorded example of it’s within the book History of Two the Most Noble Captaynes of the World, Anniball and Scipio, written in 1561 by Sir Anthony Cope. (No, I had not heard of him either.)
Since that first usage, “losing heart” has turn out to be a daily English way of referring to failing in confidence or courage, each of that are pertinent to the case of the unjust judge and his dogged appellant. It takes courage to maintain stepping into painful circumstances; and it’s important, for people of religion, to take care of one’s confidence that, in the long run, right will prevail, and justice might be done.
What example would Jesus select if he were sending this message today? Perhaps he would sketch the character of a person attempting to tackle faceless and conscienceless social-media giants, resembling the bereaved father Andrew Russell, after the death of his daughter Molly (News, 6 December 2024) (highlighting the hazards of young people’s exposure to damaging content online).
Shame for wrongdoing is exceptionally difficult, if not actually meaningless, where individuals hide behind a company entity. In 2007, this problem was addressed in law, when the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act got here into force. It created an offence of corporate liability for (effectively) gross-negligence manslaughter. Because of this, it’s now possible in law to discover collective responsibility in a company. Identifying a person miscreant is not any longer the obstacle to pursuing justice that it once was.
In the parable, though, the unjust judge has no faceless corporate giant to cover behind. In that pre-modern society, justice is a direct process. He cannot avoid encountering his “pesterer” repeatedly, and head to head. That term, “pesterer”, is my relatively loose translation of the Greek: “this one who keeps providing me with trouble”. But I hope that it communicates the judge’s exasperation.
If you can’t shame your abuser into doing the best thing, then becoming a nuisance to them is a wise plan B. Sidestepping the entire business of identifying what’s just, it sticks, as an alternative, to easy practicality: “How can I dangle the carrot of a quiet life, untroubled by pesterers?” The answer seems to be: “Give the person what they need.” The widow’s brainwave (turning his selfishness to her advantage, by appealing to his self-interest) is the one strategy that has any hope of succeeding.
It matters that Jesus has made the moral parameters of the parable unambiguous. He states the judge’s nature (caring nothing for human or divine opinion) as an objective fact. As for the widow, the actual fact of her widowhood is a virtual guarantee of ethical rectitude: there are not any bad or merry widows in scripture. Nor is she one in all those litigants who’re themselves the issue due to their insatiable appetite for self-vindication (the law calls them “vexatious litigants”). Jesus’s sympathies are all together with her. She jogs my memory of the dishonest steward from 4 weeks back, although she “makes to herself a friend” out of another person’s unrighteousness.
