Jeremiah 31:27-34
Psalm 119
Luke 18:1-8
We have three images from our Scripture readings this morning. From our Old Testament reading from the prophet Jeremiah, the image is sour grapes. From the portion of the Psalm we read together, it’s honey. And from our gospel reading from Luke, the image is a courtroom. We’re going to focus mostly on the gospel lesson from Luke, but first let’s explore the images of sour grapes and honey.
First, the prophet Jeremiah and his sour grapes. For context, the prophet Jeremiah is speaking to a bunch of beaten down and battered refugees. The people of Israel were exiled from their homeland and forced to move to a new land. It’s a long story, but the Lord allowed this catastrophe to happen to them because of their sin and unfaithfulness. But now, God makes a way for these former refugees to return to their homeland. Everyone is scared, but also excited.
The Lord’s message to the people through the prophet Jeremiah is this: just as I watched over you while things were going horribly wrong, so now I am going to watch over you while things are being renewed. It’s both a message of judgement and grace. God’s judgement for sin and evil, but God’s grace that brings about renewal and rebuilding what has been ruined. Then comes the image of sour grapes. Here’s the quote: “The parents have eaten sour grapes, and the children’s teeth are set on edge” But all shall die for their own sins, the teeth of the one who eats sour grapes shall be set on edge.”
Let’s think about what this means. If I say to you, “don’t be sour grapes”, what am I saying to you? It’s something like, “don’t criticize something you can’t have. Don’t be angry, don’t be sour about something that you want but can’t have.” That’s a huge temptation for us all in our faith. We each create stories that we tell ourselves about who God should be and what God should do for us and give us. That’s what the people of Jeremiah’s day were doing and the Lord’s warning to them is to keep their eyes open for what God is actually doing and not what they think God should be doing. Why? Because the fundamental difference between us and God is God is the Creator and we are creatures. We get sour grapes when you are disappointed and you don’t know how to deal with your disappointment.
The Lord’s message turns hopeful in the next few verses. The Lord’s promise is that there will be a day when God will remake the human heart. The biblical word for this promise is covenant. God is saying that he agrees to refashion everyone’s hearts so that we will each know God’s law and God’s ways, and just as important, we’ll each know God himself in a deep and personal and intimate way.
That is the message of the gospels, that in Jesus Christ, we know God in deep and personal and intimate way. God, through his Spirit, shows us Jesus Christ and in looking to Jesus Christ, we come to know what is good and what is not good, what is right and what is wrong.
Our reading from Psalm 119 gets at this goodness of knowing God’s ways. In the portion that we read, we said together that God’s laws, God’s ways, God’s promises are “sweeter than honey in my mouth.” Think about the image. Honey is very sweet. It’s also soothing in a cup of hot tea when your throat hurts. And think about honey’s longevity – unlike salt or sugar or other spices, honey keeps its flavor, it’s sweetness for a very long time. The sweetness of God’s ways and knowing Christ (sweet like honey) is a big difference between the bitterness of sour grapes and criticizing something you can’t have or criticizing someone for being themself.
Finally, our parable from the gospel of Luke. This parable is one of Jesus’ lesser-known parables. In fact, this parable is only found in the Gospel of Luke. It’s titled ‘The Parable of the Persistent Widow”. Luke even does most of the work understanding the parable up front for us. He tells us about the underlying message at the beginning: “And [Jesus] told them parable to the effect that they ought always to pray and not lose heart.” Put into modern English, Jesus tells the parable to encourage us to pray even when things suck, and to remain steadfast in our hearts even when life has been made crappy by our circumstances.
That’s the whole point of the parable: be persistent in your prayers. Resist becoming cynical and having an “I don’t care” apathetic attitude about your life. That’s the two-minute sermon.
But parables are not PowerPoint presentations. We’d be missing the richness of the parable if we stopped there. Part of the value of Jesus telling parables are the images they give us. Picturing things helps us to understand them. So, let’s do a little imagining this morning. Let’s rehear the parable and picture the interaction between the corrupt judge and the persistent widow.
Jesus begins with a description of the judge’s character. “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor respected man.” You might know someone like this character. He’s powerful and arrogant. He doesn’t fear God or respect man. The sad reality is that his lack of reverence for God and his arrogance leads him to not really care about his job. Why? Who knows the human heart? Maybe he’s been a judge too long that he’s grown cynical? Maybe being a powerful judge has given him the ability to skirt the rules and care about things only when it benefits him? Maybe he’s never known hardship or maybe he’s never been humbled to learn that doing to others as you’d want them to do to you? Maybe he is sour grapes? Whatever the case, the judge’s heart is bent in the wrong direction. He’s corrupt and he’s cruel and he has no problem miscarrying and perverting justice.
The other character in the parable is a widow who keeps coming to the judge’s courtroom demanding justice. This probably wasn’t a Supreme Court type of courtroom where the brightest legal minds in the country debated legal values and set precedence for how the law will be interpreted future generations. No, this courtroom is probably more like family court or small claims court. The widow is just one of many begging for justice to be done. It was probably loud, probably chaotic, probably filled with people yelling and begging and bargaining for backroom deals while legal clerks and aides fluttered around the judge moving each person, each case along. We don’t know much about the widow’s case other than that it’s against an adversary. But the point of the parable is not the content of her case. The point is how she is treated. The judge refuses to grant her the justice she is owed.
You might know the widow’s character too. She’s the person who’s overlooked. She’s the person who has all of the right documents, all of the right evidence, all of her stuff together, but because she’s a widow and likely poor, she has nothing to offer the judge. So, she’s ignored. But she keeps showing up to the courtroom and the judge keeps turning her down. Why? Why does she do that? What is in her character that leads her to be so persistent? Maybe she believes so strongly in her cause that she can’t not keep trying? Maybe she has that internal fire, that internal fight that doesn’t stop until justice is done? Maybe she was taught to never ever give up trying for what is just and right? She could be sour grapes about a lot of things in her life, and yet instead, she has a fire in her belly and she also has tasted the goodness of the Lord which is sweet like honey.
We don’t know if it was days, weeks, months, or even years that the widow kept showing up to the unjust judge’s courtroom asking for justice. The length of time is less important than her persistence. The parable takes a surprising twist when the judge relents. “Though I neither fear God nor respect man,” the judge tells himself, “yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will give her justice, so that she will not beat me down by her continual coming.” Essentially, the judge gets sick of her. He grants her the justice she’s been seeking.
Jesus helps the disciples understand the point of the parable more by asking a rhetorical question. “And will not God give justice to his elect, who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long over them?” He’s pointing us back to the parable’s purpose to remind us to be persistent in our prayers and steadfast in our faith. He does so by way of comparison. He compares this arrogant and unjust judge and God. His point is this: if even the unjust and arrogant judge is willing to grant justice to this persistent widow, how much more is God, who the Scriptures teach is himself full of justice and righteous, willing to grant justice to the faithful?
Finally, Jesus ends the parable with an open-ended question, a challenge for the ages, “when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?
How would you answer that question? Is our faith sweet like honey because in spite of all that is going on, we know that God is good and Christ is risen and the Spirit has poured out God’s love in our hearts? Or are our spirits bitter as if every day we eat a handful of sour grapes? Put another way, are we seeking to find our life in Christ or we full of wrath and bitterness and an “I don’t care attitude”.
Friends, I’d like to leave you with two words to help remember this parable. The first word we’ve already talked about. It is persistence. The second, we haven’t. It is resistance. This parable is about persistence and resistance.
The good news is that these are qualities of our Lord himself. The Lord is persistent in his love for us. God doesn’t wait for us to love him first before he loves us. The Son of God, Jesus the Christ, climbed down from the splendor and majesty of heaven and took on flesh as a man. He shared our common lot and all the joy and sorrow, toil, boredom, and delight we experience. The Lord was so persistent in his love for us that, as the apostle Paul wrote to the Romans, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for the ungodly.” The crucifixion of Jesus in all its ugliness and horror and shame is the ultimate demonstration of God’s persistence in his love for his creation.
The Lord is also resistant. He is resistant to all that is evil and wrong and unjust and sinful. The cross of Jesus is also a demonstration of his resistance because you see friends, the way the world is not necessarily the way God created it to be. In fact, the Psalms mention over and over again how God created the world on the “pillars of justice and righteousness.” Whatever subverts or perverts those pillars of justice and righteousness are things that the Lord will resist. So much so, that how does the Bible end? It ends with this picture of a new heaven and a new earth, and the Old Testament prophets speak of the Lord giving humanity a new heart. The vision for the world is that all people and all creation will taste and see that the Lord is good, that life itself will be sweet like honey. The Lord’s resistance is not punitive. It is restorative. The prophet Micah speaks of the restorative nature of God’s grace this way. “Mortal, what does the Lord require, but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God.” Justice is what love looks like in community.
So here is our challenge. Be persistent in your faith. Pray often. Show up even if you don’t feel like. Resist apathy and injustice and turning your heart cold with an “I don’t care attitude.” Resist going along to get along. Don’t eat sour grapes. Justice and righteousness are the pillars of the earth. And if you don’t feel you know how to pray or you don’t feel up to praying, pray anyway because the Lord is not an unjust judge who grades our prayers on their fanciness or eloquence. Instead, the Lord looks after the intent of the heart. Pray the Lord’s prayer. Find other faithful Christians’ who’ve written out their prayers and pray them. Read the Psalms. But keep praying, keep on keeping on Jesus Christ at the forefront of your thoughts, keep seeking to do what is good and right and just.
Lord, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. We confess that even our spirits are weak too. So, Lord, when are hearts are sinful, cleanse them with your divine love. When our hearts are weak, strengthen them with your joyous Spirit. When our hearts are cold, warm them with your selfless love. Above all, Lord, draw our hearts to rest in you, to be strengthened in you to continue faithfully on the way you’ve laid before us. Amen.