There is a lot packed into this parable recorded in Luke and It’s worth spending a moment or two unpacking what it says. I guess that many of us might have an image of the widow even though we know almost nothing about her. We might imagine loneliness; powerlessness; marginality. Yet none of the text tells us this. All we know is her loss, but not whether it was long ago or recently. Maybe she is wealthy; relatively independent and well educated. We simply don’t know. But we do know that she believes she has suffered an injustice. Perhaps something connected with her bereavement – a matter of inheritance? Who knows. What we do know is that she was persistent.

The judge, on the other hand, is high and mighty. Like the labour party of Tony Blair, he doesn’t ’do God’. Equally, he seems aloof from what people think about him. But the key issue, it seems to me, is that he doesn’t do his job. The widow keeps coming because he’s failed to attend to her cause or make a decision. Only her persistence compels him to do what he’s supposed to do: To pronounce judgement.

So, is this weak pleading or courageous insistence?

It is for us to decide.

Down the centuries women who have suffered injustice have risked much by appealing for an outcome. The mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires are just one example. In Gaza and elsewhere women will turn their despair and outrage into a demand for restitution to be made.

Last week I was fortunate enough to see Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure performed by the RSC in Stratford. Despite various reconciliations at the end (and forced marriages) it’s not a play that is comforting or amusing. The production team clearly knew that and they began, before the first word was spoken, to show images of all the men whose conduct has been questioned in recent years. Men who have used their place and their power to satisfy their own desires and obstruct justice.

Perhaps what was most depressing for me was to think that, across an arch of 500 years – half a millennium – nothing has changed. And of course, going back to our parable today, that story stretched much, much further back into history. Think of the woman caught in adultery in John’s Gospel. Thrown down before Jesus with men standing by telling him to judge her. But where was the man?

In Measure for Measure the full horror of so many women’s experience is expressed in painstaking detail when Isabella threatens to expose her unjust judge. Alone together, Angelo simply laughs in her face, asking: “Who will believe thee Isabel?” His speech makes it abundantly clear that say what she will, no one will take her word over his. As he put it at the end of his address to her: “my false o’erweighs your true”.

Seeking justice implies vulnerability. The courage of the widow in Luke’s Gospel is to refuse to be swept aside by denial; or to be hushed by the stare of authority. She will not be silent; will not be biddable; will not simply walk away. She demands justice.

It might seem a minor detail, but it’s interesting that Jesus is telling this parable to his disciples to encourage them not to lose heart. He chooses the actions of a woman to model the behaviour they will need to adopt. They aren’t to be like the judge, in his authority and power. It’s probably not how many preachers address this parable, but I have to ask, isn’t Jesus saying to his male apostles – you need to model your faith on the example of a powerless woman?

As the parable concludes we are told that God isn’t like the judge in this story. Eventually, simply for a quiet life, the earthly judge gives the woman the justice she demands. As Jesus says, God is utterly and completely different from this judge. God brings justice – God is justice – it’s in the essence of what we understand about the God we worship. Our God is attentive to the cry of the widow, and to every petition that we make. Rather than waiting to be ground into submission, the God we love and worship wants to work with us to bring justice to the world today. And how desperately needed that justice is, in so many places and among so many people.

This parable calls to us, each of us, to model our lives on the courageous outsider; the second-class citizen; the one whose voice isn’t likely to be believed. It is part of the radical message of the Gospel, as when Jesus put a child into their midst, that confounds the values and expectations of the world. This is different; Jesus is different; the Gospel is different. Unless we learn that, we can never enter the Kingdom of God.

Amen.