Mixed Motives
Mixed Motives
One group of Jesus’s parables are almost poetic in their use of vivid agricultural imagery, like mustard seeds and weeds among the wheat. Others are stories of human beings, which are also symbolic, but are also vivid depictions of real people with mixed motives in real-life dilemmas. Luke excels in the latter, including today’s parable, which he said was about praying, though the two characters in today’s story don’t actually do any praying.
It doesn’t help that translators too often water down the original Greek. For instance, it’s not so much “justice” that the widow keeps demanding from the judge. It’s more like “vindication,” or even “revenge.” And while widows could often find themselves cut off from family support, there are many examples of Jewish marriage contracts making provision in the case of widowhood that have been found. And Jesus tells us that this widow “kept coming” to the judge, a luxury of time that a poor woman working on her own for her survival wouldn’t have. And as the lawyers among us might have noticed, the widow is getting a lot of ex parte time with the judge, in which the other unnamed party in this lawsuit doesn’t have the chance to respond.
And the judge isn’t afraid of being worn out, as the NRSV weakly puts it. The Greek is literally, “give me a black eye.” We use that as an idiom for harming someone’s reputation. But it might well have been understood literally, that the widow would slap the judge around, or perhaps pay someone else to do it for her. None of this is meant to put a white hat on the judge, who says he has no “respect” whatsoever for God or for his fellow human beings. And for all we know in this alternate universe that Jesus has placed us in, the widow’s opponent has it coming. And in his quest for what he sees as “justice,” the widow’s opponent, being only human, probably has mixed motives like the widow and the judge.
As already noted, no one’s praying here. The judge is upfront about it. And the widow seems more inclined to take matters into her own hands than ask God to do anything about it. And yet, according to Luke, Jesus made this story about the “need to pray always and not lose heart.” So this story is really about us and our own mixed motives. I doubt not that many are praying to God these days for justice, vindication, revenge. The Good News from today’s Old Testament reading is that if we take our mixed motives to God, God will mudwrestle with us.
I’ve heard this said enough times that I fear it might become a cliché, but it is true that prayer changes us as much if not more than it changes God. Perhaps the more we pray, even if that prayer starts out with us a shaken fist, the more we might find our motives purified.
In the last of his Four Quartets entitled, “Little Gidding,” T.S. Eliot wrote about the English Civil War between the King and Parliament. Eliot wrote this fourth quartet in the early 1940s when his adopted England faced an existential threat. But he found comfort in the political strife of 17th century England:
We cannot revive old factions
We cannot restore old policies
Or follow an antique drum.
These men, and those who opposed them
And those whom they opposed
Accept the constitution of silence
And are folded in a single party.
Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a creed:
A creed perfected in death.*
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
By the purification of the motive
In the ground of our beseeching.
If Julian of Norwich could be inspired to write that all would be well in a 14th century England beset by the Peasant Revolt and Bubonic Plague, then perhaps we might be able to accept that all things shall be well. Perhaps we might also be able to accept Jesus’s promise that God “will quickly grant justice.” And perhaps with purified motives, we might be able to give the Son of Man faith from the ground of our beseeching.
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* For the sake of modern clarity, I have substituted “creed” for “symbol” which, in 17th c. England, was synonymous with “creed.”
The 19th Sunday after Pentecost
Proper 24, Year C,
October 19, 2025
The Rev. David Kendrick