The Persistent Widow and the Unjust Judge

By Jens Soering

The eighteenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke begins with one of those little scriptural pearls that spiritual piggies like me often trot past on our way to meatier Biblical passages: the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge. I would like to suggest, however, that there is more to this story than its obvious point about perseverance in prayer.

Biblical critiques of human judges

To begin with, let us examine the metaphor that Christ used in this parable: an unjust judge. This is not one that would immediately come to mind in 21st-century America, which has come to regard judges and courts with the kind of respect and near-religious awe that used to be reserved for church figures. In our age and culture, we even let Supreme Court Justices decide Presidential elections! The idea that these hallowed figures on the bench might in some cases be “unjust,” as Jesus takes for granted in our parable here, strikes most of us as very nearly blasphemous.

Yet the Bible takes a much more critical view of human judges. In Psalm 82:1-3, God gives judgment among the gods: “How long will you judge unjustly and favor the cause of the wicked? Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless; maintain the rights of the poor and oppressed.” Some scholars take the “gods” in this psalm to mean pagan deities, over whom Yahweh exercises some sort of authority. But in every other Old Testament passage in which God exhorts his listeners to “defend the cause of the weak and the fatherless,” that command is directed to humans, not pagan deities. The most plausible reading of Psalm 82 is as a critique of human judges who are so self-righteous that the author lampoons them as “gods.”

In the Gospels and Letters of Paul, this same critical attitude toward judges is reflected in Jesus’ advice to “settle matters quickly with your adversary who is taking you to court,” because the legal system is self-evidently merciless: “the judge [will] turn you over to the officer, and the officer [will] throw you into prison. I tell you, you will not get out until you have paid the last penny” (Matthew 5:25-26; Luke 12:58-59).

In his book The Powers That Be (Random House, 1998, pp. 103-104), Walter Wink gives us historical insight into the scenario Jesus is describing in this passage:

“Indebtedness was a plague in first-century Palestine. Jesus’ parables are full of debtors struggling to salvage their lives. … [E]xorbitant interest (25 to 250 percent) could be used to drive landowners ever deeper into debt … to pry Galilean peasants loose from their land. By the time of Jesus we see this process already far advanced: large estates owned by absentee landlords, managed by stewards, and worked by tenant farmers, day laborers and slaves.”

Thus early Christians, mostly lower-class men and women, saw courts and judges primarily as tools of their oppressors. And given that background, the “unjust judge” in Jesus’ parable of the persistent widow would have been seen as a common fact of his and his listeners’ lives.

Unjust judges today

If we take a far more reverential attitude toward judges in our own age, that is not necessarily a reflection of the much-improved quality of 21st-century legal training and ethics. More probably, we have simply lost touch with the roots of our faith, a religion originally meant for the foolish, the weak, the lowly and the despised” (cf. 1 Corinthians 1:26-30).

Upon further reflection we have to admit that Christ may have a point: Even American judges are human, so they must be subject to temptations and prejudices. And if the possibility that they might be “unjust” is too sacrilegious to suggest ourselves, we need only take the word of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. On August 10, 2003, Kennedy gave a speech on the need for sentencing reform at the American Bar Association’s general assembly. There Justice Kennedy told his listeners, “Our resources are misspent, our punishments too severe, our sentences too long. … In too many cases, [long sentences] are unjust.”

That is a fairly stunning admission for any professional to make about one of the central elements of his or her own vocation, so perhaps we should spend a few minutes examining the excessively long prison sentences that Justice Kennedy considers so unjust. This is, in fact, one of the two major reasons why the U.S. correctional population has grown so dramatically in the past 30 years, from 300,000 in the 1970s to 2.1 million today (Marc Mauer, Race to Incarcerate, New York: 1999).

Keeping offenders locked up for decades on end is not an effective crime prevention strategy, however, because crime is essentially a young man’s game. “Most men age out of committing violent crimes in their 30s,” notes New York City Corrections Commissioner Michael Jacobson in an article in Parade magazine (“Can Parole Cut Crime?” December 2003). “It is difficult to say you are preventing crime by locking up men in their 50s, 60s and 70s.”

Yet more and more elderly inmates are filling this country’s prisons: Today’s total of 125,000 is expected to rise to one-third of the total correctional population by 2030. Penologists define “elderly” as 55 and older for convicts; prisoners’ physical ages are assessed at 10 years higher than their chronological age because of poor health. Medical expenses for older prisoners are three times higher than those of younger prisoners. In California alone, health care for elderly convicts is projected to cost $5 billion by 2020, or the equivalent of California’s entire prison budget for 2002.

Thus the overlong sentences criticized by Justice Kennedy are not only “unjust,” but also unnecessary for preventing crime and fiscally harmful to states already struggling with budgetary crises.

Breaking away the chains

What then shall we do? Oddly enough, the Old Testament gives us very specific counsel about this precise issue, in two different places:

Job 36:8-11 says, “But if men are bound in chains, held fast by cords of affliction, [God] tells them what they have done – that they have sinned arrogantly.... If they obey and serve him, they will spend the rest of their days in prosperity and their years in contentment.”

Psalm 107:10-14 says, “Some sat in darkness and the deepest gloom, prisoners suffering in iron chains, for they had rebelled against the words of God and despised the counsel of the Most High.... Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he saved them from their distress. He brought them out of darkness and deepest gloom, and broke away their chains.”

If they do not listen and repent, the psalmist says, they will of course “die without knowledge.” But those prisoners who pay their penalty and reform their lives are supposed to have their chains “broken away.”

In the New Testament, we do not find such explicit directions on criminal justice issues. Yet Paul made very clear that restoring offenders to the community, not excluding them forever, was to be the ultimate goal of punishment within the church:

“Brothers, if someone is caught in a sin, you who are spiritual should restore him gently. But watch yourself, or you also may be tempted” (Galatians 6:1).

“The punishment inflicted on him by the majority is sufficient for him. Now instead, you ought to forgive and comfort him, so that he will not be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. I urge you, therefore, to reaffirm your love for him” (2 Corinthians 2:6-8)

A modern parable

Rather than laying down general principles as Paul did, Jesus preferred to teach through parables, anecdotes and stories taken from real life. We might ask what the parable of the persistent widow and the unjust judge might sound like today. As it happens, I know a widow in her 70s named Ann, now remarried, whom Christ would surely have immortalized in a teaching tale if he had met her 2,000 years ago.

Ann’s son Stan was a troubled youth whose Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder got him in trouble with the law throughout his teens. At 17, he was tried as an adult and sent to a real, grown-up prison. There he served 22 years for burglary, aggravated assault and aggravated battery.

Last year, at age 40, Stan finished all his prison sentences for those crimes – but he was not released. Instead, he will have to serve another 13 years behind bars because a judge re-imposed a previously suspended prison sentence for a burglary Stan committed at age 17. This practice is perfectly legal, very common and politically popular: “Lock ‘em up and throw away the key!”

Because Stan was originally tried in 1980, before the abolition of parole, Ann is allowed to go to the parole board every other year or so to plead for her son’s freedom. The board is not listening, however. In spite of Stan’s exemplary conduct in prison, they send Ann the standard rejection notice after each parole hearing. Her son cannot be released “due to the serious nature and circumstances of the offense.”

The only offense Stan is now serving time for is a 23-year-old burglary in which nothing was taken. A troubled kid’s stupid adventure.

Since no new circumstances can change the “serious nature and circumstances” of that burglary, Ann has no realistic chance of getting Stan out of prison. Virginia, the state in which she lives and her son is serving time, grants early release to only 2 percent of the thousands of aging convicts like Stan, who are still technically eligible for parole (Victim’s Vigil,” by Joanne Kimberlin, Virginian-Pilot, 2004).

In spite of the apparent hopelessness of her and Stan’s situation, Ann keeps going to the parole board each time they schedule a hearing. “Grant me justice,” she pleads, just like the persistent widow (Luke 18:3). And every time the unjust judge gives her the same answer: “due to the serious nature and circumstances...”

Social dimensions of prayer

Perhaps Jesus deliberately chose to explain prayer in terms of a widow pestering a judge in order to encourage us to see the social and even political dimensions of prayer. According to Walter Wink (op. cit.), “Prayer is never a private inner act disconnected from day-to-day realities. It is, rather, the interior battlefield where the decisive victory is won before any engagement in the outer world is even possible.”

In our parable, we can well imagine how the widow fought on that “interior battlefield” of prayer each time the unjust judge denied her plea. What gave her the power to return time after time, to give her cause yet one more try in spite of all the disappointments that went before? Surely she must have been praying intensely all along!

And God answered the widow’s prayers, not by miraculously changing the judge’s mind and thereby interfering with his free will, but by giving her the strength to persist until she persuaded the judge. Thus prayer transformed a lonely little old lady, one of the most powerless members of any society, into a potent agent for achieving justice, one of the primary hallmarks of our Father’s kingdom. Who would dare deny such a miracle?

Perhaps we, like the widow of the parable, will pester unjust judges to adopt the Pauline approach to justice: While criminals must be punished, they should not be “overwhelmed by excessive sorrow” either (2 Corinthians 2:7). Can we change this? It all depends on how hard we pray. Justice waits for our prayers and our advocacy on behalf of the imprisoned.

Readings

Stefanie Pfeiffer, “One Strike Against the Elderly: Growing Old in Prison,” Medill News Service, August 2002; U.S. Census Bureau, quoted in Joshua Maher, “The Quality of Care of Elderly Inmates in Prison,” KELN.org May 2000.

Jim Krane, “The Graying of America’s Prisons: An Emerging Corrections Crisis,” APB News, April 12, 1999; Matthew Nehmer, “GW Professor Jonathan Turley to Testify,” GW News Center, George Washington University, February 24, 2003.

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