“religious ramblings” for July 20 were accidentally omitted last week. Read them here...
SEVENTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIMEIn 1963, at the height of the vicious and bloody fight for equal rights for people of color, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and delivered his dramatic and powerful “I have a dream” speech. With consummate rhetoric and moving imagery, he articulated his vision for what America could and should be. None of us who have heard that speech will forget: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character... This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with a new meaning, ‘My country, ‘tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring.’” This speech is credited with inspiring the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights act, and won for Rev. King the Nobel Prize for Peace.
Back in dusty Palestine during the time of Jesus, most Jews were ground under the heel of the Roman Empire. They lived in misery and poverty which was largely the result of the intolerable religious and economic burdens laid on them by their leaders who collaborated with Rome to gouge the area of its resources and fatten the coffers of those already rich and powerful. Enter Jesus of Nazareth, who as an itinerant preacher, begins to articulate his vision of what the world could be like if it were ordered as His father wished. Jesus calls his ideal vision the “Kingdom of Heaven” and He tells his listeners that entrance into “the Kingdom” demands a radical personal conversion, a new ethic of personal behavior. Only then can the world be changed for the better. Of course, this new ethic, the ethic of “The Kingdom,” calls for habits and responses which are directly counter to the way the world operates. Shockingly so.
In Jesus’ preaching about “the Kingdom,” every conventional way of thinking was overturned, expectations of how things ought to work shattered, and worldly norms of conduct reversed. “This,” Jesus seemed to be saying, “This is how God operates: the first shall be last, and the last shall be first. God identifies with the weak, not the powerful, with the poor, not the rich. And furthermore, this is what God wants from us: forgiveness, not vengeance; cooperation, not competition; poverty of spirit, not wealth and power.” One of the ways in which Jesus described this ideal world, this “kingdom of justice, love and peace,” was through parables. A gifted storyteller, Jesus presented his audience pictures, not of miracles and power, but of humans and their relationships; then He turned his listeners’ expectations inside out with often shocking conclusions. These stories, or parables, as we now call them, were sometimes short and pithy proverbs employing imagery from the world they knew which celebrated God’s wisdom and illustrated how God acts. Several of the parables from today’s gospel fit into this category. Other parables were prophetic statements of how people stand in relation to God. The prophetic parable illustrates our behavioral deficiencies, usually by adding a totally unexpected twist to the story. These “reversals” turn conventional and accepted wisdom on its head, and cause people to stop short and re-evaluate their belief system. Even today, Jesus’ parables of the Man with Two Sons or the Laborers in the Vineyard provoke very emotional responses in those reading or hearing them.
Parables were meant to catch Jesus’ listeners off guard, to make them re-evaluate their normal ways of behaving, and to align their hearts with God’s heart. Many parables, like the one about the Pharisee and the Publican, or the one about the Good Samaritan, employed elements which were very countercultural, and shocking to the people of Jesus’ time. However, because we have grown up with them, they seem familiar or even ordinary to us. Often, we need to translate those stories using examples from our own social and cultural situations in order to see how truly counter-cultural they are.
These parables, which appear to be simple and straightforward stories, are actually multi-dimensional and complex. Frequently, we are left with things unresolved and have to make some conclusions of our own. Does the elder brother ever go in to join the party welcoming the prodigal son home? How do those in the vineyard who worked much longer hours respond to the words of the vineyard owner? Does the Good Samaritan return, and what happens to the victim? Does the Pharisee ever understand his spiritual arrogance? Once they get inside, do the five “wise” virgins enjoy the banquet, knowing that their sisters are still outside? How we resolve those issues in our own minds tells us a lot about our own attitudes. Are they in line with God’s or not?
If there is some overall wisdom to be gleaned from parables, it is this: God’s ways are not our ways. Parables tell us that the fight for the kingdom is not played out in palaces and war rooms, but in the everyday events of our everyday lives. The struggle for the kingdom is carried out in our divided hearts, where we sometimes mutter “Thy kingdom come” without fully realizing that we might have to pray “My kingdom go” (Alan Redpath, British Baptist Preacher). The parable demands that each of us answer the question “What do YOU say?” How we answer defines our moral landscape.
Nancy Greenfield
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