Reflection on Luke 18:1–8 — “Faith and the Unjust Judge”

The Right Reverend Michael Angelo D'Arrigo

There’s something holy—sacred, even defiant—about the persistence of the widow in Jesus’s parable. She’s not rich, not powerful, not connected. But she knows what justice looks like, and she refuses to surrender her dignity to a corrupt system. She keeps showing up. She demands to be heard. She refuses to let an unjust judge, who “neither feared God nor respected people,” determine the boundaries of her worth. And simply through the grit of her persistence, she wears him down.

It’s impossible not to look at today’s judicial landscape—especially the marble colonnades in Washington, D.C.—and ask what Jesus might say about the current bench. We have a Supreme Court that increasingly seems less concerned with the arc of justice than with bending its decisions to the idol of Trumpism, to the swaggering demands of MAGA, to the machinery of Christian nationalism that confuses power with righteousness. These are not judges trembling before the God of Amos who thunders, “Let justice roll down like waters” (Amos 5:24). No, these are judges who too often wade comfortably in stagnant pools of self-interest.

And yet—like the widow—people keep showing up.

The queer kid who refuses to shrink.

The woman who will not stop marching.

The immigrant who keeps laboring with courage.

The Indigenous elder who keeps teaching wisdom the nation should have learned long ago.

The voter who still believes that their single ballot can help pull this democracy back from the brink.

We keep knocking on the door, praying with our feet, demanding, Grant us justice against our accuser. And in our demanding, we join the long line of the faithful who have persisted before us.

We stand with the prophets who refused to be silent: with Isaiah, who declared that God hears the cry of the oppressed and is weary of empty performances of religion (Isaiah 1:15–17). We stand with the Psalmist who cried, “How long, O Lord?” (Psalm 13), because the cry for justice is itself a form of faith. We stand with the apostles who, when told to quiet down, responded, “We must obey God rather than human authority” (Acts 5:29).

And Jesus’s question at the end of the parable still hits like a punch to the solar plexus: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” Not faith as sentiment, or superstition, or the pious performance of prayer breakfasts—but the gritty, lived faith of the widow who keeps showing up even when the courts are rigged and the powerful mock the powerless.

Maybe that’s the real spiritual test of our age: not whether we win every battle, or accumulate wealth, or cling to influence, but whether we can persist in the holy labor of justice when the institutions meant to protect the vulnerable have forgotten their mission. Whether we can embody Jesus’s call from Luke 4—to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, and freedom to the oppressed—even when those in power would prefer we stay quiet.

But here is the gospel truth: God’s justice does not wait for a Supreme Court ruling.

It breaks in every time compassion refuses to back down.

It erupts whenever a voice refuses to be silenced.

It rises each time a community gathers to protect one another.

It whispers to the weary, like Paul in Galatians 6:9, “Do not grow weary in doing what is right, for in due season we shall reap if we do not give up.”

The widow’s persistence is not just a story—it is our vocation. Our sacred task is to keep crying out, day and night, not because the systems are fair but because God is. To keep pushing this nation to remember what righteousness looks like, even as the powerful polish their golden idols.

And so we pray always, and we do not lose heart. Because beyond the marble steps, beyond the MAGA theatrics, beyond the gerrymandered lines and the stacked courts, there is a deeper courtroom—one where the Judge is not unjust but abundantly merciful, and the verdict has already been rendered in love’s favor.

May we have the widow’s courage.

May we carry her persistence.

And may Christ, when he comes, find such faith alive in us.