Sermon based on Luke 18:1-8
“Jesus was telling them a parable about their need to pray continuously and not be discouraged.”
Those are the kinds of words that only make sense when life has worn you down. When you’ve prayed until you have no more words. When you’ve stared at the ceiling in the dark, waiting for something—anything—to shift.
“Pray always and don’t lose heart,” Jesus says.
It’s easy to read that like a piece of advice on a refrigerator magnet. But Jesus isn’t giving advice here. He’s giving survival instructions. Because the moment we stop praying—when we stop believing that something good and just is still possible—our hearts begin to close.
And that’s where this parable begins: with the question of whether our hearts can stay open in a world that keeps breaking them.
The Setting of the Story
The story Jesus tells is strange and, in a way, a little bit comical. There’s a widow who keeps showing up at the courthouse, demanding justice. We never learn the details of her case. We only know that she’s been wronged and that the man in charge of doing something about it refuses to care.
This judge is everything a judge shouldn’t be. Jesus describes him as someone who “neither fears God nor respects people.” In other words, he doesn’t believe in accountability—to heaven or to humanity. He’s a man whose power has insulated him from empathy.
And then there’s the widow—his opposite in every way. She has no power, no husband to represent her, no family to advocate for her. She’s at the very bottom of the social order. But she does have one thing left: persistence.
Day after day, she keeps showing up at the courthouse. She stands in front of the judge’s door until he notices her. She doesn’t go away quietly, and eventually, he relents—not because he suddenly cares about justice, but because she’s driving him crazy.
It’s such a vivid image. This widow, small in stature and big in courage, threatening to wear down this man of status. We can almost see the scene: the crowd chuckling at the absurdity of it, the judge trying to maintain dignity, the widow standing firm.
And then Jesus turns to the disciples and asks, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. Won’t God provide justice to his chosen people who cry out to him day and night?”
It’s the moment we realize that Jesus has been setting us up—not to compare God to the unjust judge, but to contrast them.
If even someone like that can eventually act justly, how much more can we trust that God—the one who hears the cries of the oppressed—will not delay in bringing justice?
God Is Not the Judge
Of course, it’s easy to get tangled up in the comparison. Some of us have prayed for years and still carry grief that hasn’t lifted. We know too well that justice doesn’t always arrive “quickly,” as the text suggests.
So it’s tempting to hear this parable and think: Maybe God is like that judge—distant, slow, unfeeling.
But Jesus isn’t painting God as indifferent. He’s showing how radically different God is from the human systems we’ve grown used to.
In our world, power concedes nothing without a demand. That’s what the widow knows. It’s what anyone who’s fought for their dignity knows. But Jesus is saying: the God who made you doesn’t need to be badgered into goodness. You don’t have to wear God down to get a hearing.
What Jesus does here is almost a theological judo move—he takes the imbalance of power in this story and flips it on its head. God is not the unjust judge. God is the one who stands beside the widow, listening to her cries.
It’s an inversion of everything people assumed about divinity. In the ancient world, widows were symbols of vulnerability. Yet throughout Luke’s Gospel, they are also symbols of faith.
There’s Anna, the prophet who recognizes the infant Jesus in the temple and begins to proclaim the good news to everyone who will listen.
There’s the widow of Zarephath, who shares her last bit of flour with Elijah and receives the miracle of her son’s life restored.
There’s the poor widow who drops two coins into the temple treasury—“all she had to live on,” Jesus says, and yet she gives it freely.
Luke never treats widows as objects of pity. They are models of active, courageous faith. The same faith that Jesus asks about at the end of the parable: “But when the Human Onecomes, will he find faithfulness on earth?”
Faith as Persistence
So, what kind of faith is Jesus talking about here?
It seems to me that it’s not the kind of faith that recites doctrines or checks theological boxes. Instead, it’s the kind that keeps showing up when the odds say you shouldn’t.
The kind that prays through the silence, even when the heavens feel closed.
The kind that refuses to accept that injustice has the final word.
The kind that keeps knocking on the door—not because you’re certain it will open today, but because you believe the One on the other side is still good.
This widow’s persistence isn’t born out of naivety. She knows how the world works. She knows how the system is stacked against her. But she also knows something the judge doesn’t: that justice still matters. That her voice still matters.
Her persistence becomes an act of resistance. It’s faith with grit in it.
Dorothee Soelle, the German theologian and mystic, once said that prayer doesn’t give us a new vision of God—it gives us a new vision of the world. Prayer, she said, teaches us to “borrow the eyes of God.”
That’s what this widow is doing. She’s seeing her situation through divine eyes. Every time she returns to the judge, she’s declaring—without words—that the world as it is cannot be the world as it must remain.
Her prayer is not just a plea; it’s a protest.
Prayer as Protest and Communion
I think that’s something we sometimes forget. We treat prayer as a quiet, passive act—something that happens in our heads or at the dinner table. But in Scripture, prayer is rarely quiet. It’s active. It’s embodied.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said of marching in Selma for civil rights in the 1965, “I felt my legs were praying.” That’s what happens when faith takes form. Prayer becomes motion.
To pray always and not lose heart is to keep faith with a God whose justice runs deeper than the world’s corruption.
And yet, that’s not easy. Because when we look around—when we scroll through headlines or sit beside a hospital bed—it’s not always clear that justice is coming soon.
We can understand why Jesus told this story right after his apocalyptic teaching in chapter 17. He had just told the disciples that suffering and chaos would come before the kingdom of God breaks through. That the world would carry on “as in the days of Noah”—people eating, drinking, marrying—oblivious to the holy interruption that’s about to arrive.
He knew they would face despair. He knew they’d be tempted to lose heart. So he told them this story: when justice feels delayed, pray anyway. When the world is unfair, stay faithful.
Because prayer is what holds us together when everything else is falling apart.
The Mystery of God’s Justice
Still, we ask the question: Where is justice?
It’s one thing to say that God will bring justice quickly; it’s another to live through the waiting.
I’ve sat with families who’ve buried their children and wondered how those words could possibly be true. I’ve prayed with people who’ve waited years for a diagnosis, or a job, or forgiveness. And there are days I’ve prayed for peace in our world and felt nothing but the echo of my own voice.
So when Jesus says, “God will not delay,” part of me wants to whisper, “Are you sure?”
But maybe the point isn’t timing. Maybe the point is trust.
The cross itself is the place where it looked like justice had been forever delayed. Jesus, the Chosen One, hanging between two criminals while the religious leaders mocked him: “He saved others; let him save himself if he is God’s chosen one.”
And yet, in that moment of complete injustice, something holy was happening. God was still at work. Life was being born out of death. The one who cried out from the cross was the same one who told this parable—the one who promised that God hears those who cry day and night.
Three days later, justice came running out of a tomb.
God’s justice is not about getting even—it’s about setting things right. It’s resurrection justice. And it’s already begun, even if it’s not yet complete.
When Justice Feels Far Off
That’s what Jesus gives his disciples here: not an explanation, but a way of living through the in-between.
“When justice seems far off,” he says, “pray.”
“When rejection is near at hand,” pray.
“When your heart is tired and the world is cruel and your hope feels small—pray.”
Not because prayer is a magic trick, but because it keeps us tethered to God’s heart.
It keeps our imagination alive.
It keeps us from becoming like the judge—numb, indifferent, cynical.
When we pray, we hold space for something better. We open ourselves to the kingdom that is “among us,” as Jesus said in the previous chapter, and also within us.
The widow’s persistence shows us that faith isn’t a feeling—it’s a rhythm. It’s the steady heartbeat of hope in a weary world.
Living With Faithful Persistence
Though fictional, some have said that this widow might be one of the bravest characters in all of Scripture. She’s not given a name. She’s not given status. But she is given a voice—and she uses it. That’s what faith looks like.
It’s not the loud confidence of someone who’s sure of every answer. It’s the quiet determination of someone who refuses to give up.
Faith, in this story, looks like persistence in prayer and persistence in love. It’s the refusal to let the darkness define you.
And that raises the question Jesus leaves hanging in the air: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”
Maybe that’s not a question of belief so much as a question of endurance. Will he find people still praying? Still hoping? Still believing that goodness is stronger than evil, that mercy is stronger than hate?
Will he find people who, like the widow, keep coming back to the door of justice and knocking, even when the world says it’s pointless?
That’s the kind of faith Jesus longs to find. Not perfection. Not certainty. Just faith that keeps breathing.
Eyes Wide Open
There’s another way to say all this: prayer keeps our eyes open.
Dorothee Soelle wrote that those who pray with the eyes of God learn to see the world differently. They begin to notice what God notices. They begin to love what God loves.
That’s what this widow teaches us. She prays with her eyes open. She prays standing up, with her whole body involved. Her persistence is not simply spiritual—it’s incarnational.
In a time when “thoughts and prayers” have become clichés, when we hear those words after another act of violence and wonder if they mean anything at all, this parable calls us back to the deeper truth: prayer is not a substitute for action. Prayer is action. It’s the movement of our hearts toward God’s justice.
To pray always and not lose heart is to live as though God’s kingdom is already breaking in.
The Invitation
This parable begins with an invitation to pray and ends with a question about faith.
Between those two lines lies the entire Christian life.
We live somewhere between praying and believing—between crying out for justice and trusting that God is already at work bringing it about.
That tension can be hard to hold. But maybe the point is not to resolve it, but to inhabit it faithfully.
To be like the widow: to show up again tomorrow, to keep praying through the silence, to keep believing that our persistence matters because it mirrors the persistence of God’s own love.
Because God doesn’t give up on us. God doesn’t grow weary of our cries. God doesn’t stop showing up.
So we keep praying—not to convince God to act, but to remind ourselves that God already is.
And we keep living—not as if justice will come someday far off, but as if it’s already stirring in our midst.
That’s what it means to pray always and not lose heart.
That’s what it means to live by faith.
And when the Son of Man comes, may he find that kind of faith in us.
Amen.
Sermon by: Rev. Dave Wasson
Dove Sermons 
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