Who did Jesus call a hero?

Sometimes I get discouraged by the deluge of abuse revealed within American evangelicalism. Dave Ramsey. Bethlehem College & Seminary. Liberty University. The Southern Baptist Convention. The Anglican Church in North America. My own experience with RZIM (now The Lighten Group). 

The problem isn’t that abuse is being exposed. That’s good!

What grieves my heart is that there’s so much abuse — and that Christian organizations attempt to hide it. Our leading institutions are in a spiritual crisis when they value the art of image management more than the integrity of vulnerability, truth-telling, and repentance.

With so many fallen heroes, I’m looking for some people to celebrate. 

And I found that Jesus already identified her for me. 

She’s an unnamed widow. An adversary severely hurt her. She’s been denied justice for years. And, of course, she didn’t have trauma-informed therapists available. She endures ongoing pain from this abuse.

Given her situation, it’s reasonable to suppose that she’s poor and socially marginal. As the theologian Craig Keener explains, “In the law, the widow was the ultimate example of the oppressed person, because she had no means of support (e.g., Ex 22:22-24; Ps 146:9; Is 1:17, 23; Jer 7:6-7).”

The widow’s only recourse for justice is the local judge.

But he’s known to be unjust too! Possibly, her oppresser bribed the judge, hoping the ‘problem’ would go away.

So what does this woman do? Jesus tells us that she makes a complete nuisance of herself!

It’s like this. She keeps coming back to the judge to ask for justice. She pesters him. She’s persistent. Over and over and over again. Until he’s worn out by it. She keeps bringing it up. Until the judge can’t stand it anymore. He’s exhausted just thinking about it. When will she stop? He doesn’t want to think about it anymore. How can he make her go away? Do you sense what he’s feeling yet?

As one commentator explains the idiom used in Luke 18,

“The words “wear me out” (hypōpiazē me, GK 5708, v. 5) are difficult to translate, for they literally mean “strike under the eye,” “give a black eye to” (BDAG, 1043). Commentators usually give them a figurative meaning. Derrett (“Law in the New Testament,” 191) shows that they are common idiom in Eastern countries, where to have one’s face blackened means to suffer shame. Probably we can also compare our American idiom “to give a black eye to,” meaning “to damage one’s reputation.”

In other words, if it had been available, it sounds to me like she would have used Twitter. She would use the hashtags #metoo and #churchtoo.

Jesus says this tenacious woman got justice. He honors her! In the story, she’s the hero!

C’mon. Who tells stories to honor abused, neglected, poor widows who make a nuisance of themselves?

Jesus.

We all know that Lady Justice is supposed to weigh cases fairly, judge impartially, and provide swift, authoritative resolution to claims. Unfortunately, she’s an inanimate statue, and our living judges are subject to human frailty — and sadly, some of them are wicked.

But Jesus says that the living God of Justice is different. He promises us that he hears the ongoing, persistent prayers of the hurting. And he’s quite clear: God’s justice will be swift and final. 

For Jesus, this isn’t a fad or virtue signaling. Not at all. He says the eternal God is watching and taking notes. The mismanagement of earthly justice will one day result in eternal justice! 

If we believe Jesus is God, this has implications. It means we can’t just read this text to become better informed. Instead, it must affect our hearts. And we need to take action.

So let’s make it personal.

Who are your heroes?

And what if our churches intentionally honored those who’ve experienced injustice?

To ask a familiar question: what would Jesus do?