29th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 19 October 2025
There can be many times in our lives when we know the temptation to lose heart. Sometimes life’s events simply take away our strength to keep hoping. And we are inclined to despair. It is difficult for us not to lose heart.
Yet this Sunday we are told a story by Jesus about never losing heart. It seems that we are to be like the importune woman, while God is presented like the judge who eventually gives in to our persistence.
But perhaps there is another way of looking at the story Jesus tells us.
I recall a writer, Megan McKenna putting it this way: she was in Mexico sitting in on a group of people discussing the Scripture and talking about praying when a woman stood up – and this was an unusual thing in the group – and said that she had a speech to make.[1] It was hard for her to do, but she wanted to say what she’d been thinking the whole time. She spoke of being a widow, of going to a judge just like the one in the parable and pleading for her rights: to find out why her son had been arrested and taken away and where he was weeks after his disappearance. She hounded the judge day and night. She watched him, his moves, his daily schedule, his friends. She approached him every chance she had. She had nothing more to lose; she had already lost her husband, her other children. She was desperate. She grew to hate him, despise him and all those who were connected to the military, the jail, the courts. This had gone on so long. She prayed to God the same way while she pleaded and begged and got angry with the judge.
And then as she listened to the parable, she knew that she was the judge and God was the widow! We only get so persistent and long-suffering when we want something, and then not always or consistently. But it is God who is always in our face, begging, pleading, cajoling, hounding us to do justice, and to respond as we should. God is the widow crying out for justice to us. We should be praying like that, like God who is always attentive and trying to get us to do justice. God has nothing to lose; God has lost everything trying to call us back to justice and living with one another as we should. God does not lose heart over us. God forgives again and again and calls us to do the same. It is we who are the judge.
This is a parable about not losing heart when we pray continually. However, the story turns everything upside down. God is after us! God is always after us, has been all through history, never relenting, always finding new ways to catch up with us. God is the widow, found in the powerless, looking for justice and so often not getting it from us. The 18th century Doctor of the Church, Alphonsus Ligouri knew this, too. He presents God as the iddio pazza: the ‘insane God’, the God driven by the mad passion of love. He recognised that rather than it being a case of we before God grovelling before the divine majesty, it is God who grovels at our feet begging for love. And God does this in four main ways: God empties himself into creation, hoping to attract our love by the beauty of the created universe; He empties himself in the Incarnation, in the life of Jesus who is his Word to us; He empties himself in the Passion, assuming human life at its weakest and most vulnerable; and He empties himself in the Eucharist, in simple bread and wine given to us so that he might live within us. In each of these four ways God comes before us begging us for love
What gives us hope in this parable is that God does not lose heart! Let us not be deaf to the sound of his voice.
[1] See Megan McKenna, Parables: The Arrows of God (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994), 104-105.
