“Tradition Isn’t All That It’s Cracked up To Be”
By Bill Martin – 8 October 2023
PARABLES OF THE BIBLE
What kind of God do you have? In the last week of his life on earth, Jesus came face-to-face with the fact that his disciples then (yikes, now?) didn’t have a complete understanding of who he wants, of the nature of God the father, and what living in the new kingdom that Jesus was ushering in was like. There was so much to teach and so little time. Trying to close this gap in understanding, Jesus told his followers parables of the Kingdom. You know, “The kingdom of heaven is like….”.
TROUBLES IN THE BIBLE
Christian tradition has typically treated these parables as allegories. You may know, an allegory is a story in which a particular character represents something or someone else.
[You faithful folk who are in church every Sunday don’t need me to re-preach previous lessons, but let me refresh your memories.]
Three weeks ago we heard the parable of the unforgiving debtor. You’ll recall that in that parable the King decided to settle his accounts with the servants. One man owed him 10,000 talents—an impossible amount to repay.
The king felt sorry for him and forgave him the debt, whereupon the unforgiving debtor went out and put the arm on a guy who owed him 100 denarii. The unforgiving debtor threatened to imprison this poor soul, and when the king heard about it, he was enraged. He handed him over to the torturers until he could pay all his debt.
As an allegory, the king represents God. the first debtor represents a sinner of first proportion (like us?), And the second debtor is a sinner of much less degree. When the first debtor refuses to forgive another as he has been forgiven (doesn’t that sound familiar), God comes down him like a ton of bricks.
Two weeks ago we heard Jesus tell the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. Remember how the owner of the vineyard went out early in the morning to hire laborers for the harvest? Then he went out three more times during the day, and at the end of the day he paid everyone the same amount.
Allegorically speaking, who would you suppose the owner of the vineyard to represent? You guessed it, God. The first laborers represent the Jews, to whom Jesus originally came. The denarius represents salvation. The later groups of laborers represent Gentiles to whom Jesus came later. But both groups received the same salvation.
Last week we heard another parable regarding vineyards. From Jewish times on, the vineyard represented Israel. A father – that would be God – told the first son to go into the vineyard, and the son said that he would, but then didn’t. A second son told father he wouldn’t go, but then relented and went. The first son represents the scribes and the Pharisees who purport to obey God but don’t. The second son represents tax collectors, prostitutes, and other sinners – like us – who don’t appear to be righteous but in fact answer the call of Jesus.
TROUBLES IN OUR OWN TIME
What kind of God do you have? If you hear Jesus allegorically, Following Christian tradition, you have a God who is, variously, a king angrily settling accounts, a capricious employer, or an aggrieved father. Other parables cast God as having other forms of anger management issues. But, sometimes tradition isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be.
GRACE IN THE BIBLE
Maybe we should shuck the tradition of interpreting all of Jesus’ parables as allegories. We do so with the imprimatur of no less than that brilliant theologian, that amazing evangelist, that short, red – headed, physically deformed, irascible Paul. In his First Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul urges us “to test everything and hold fast to what is good”. I ask again, “what kind of God do you have?” Based on the totality of Scripture, our collective experience, the reflection of God shone forth in you friends of mine, and most of all in the words and examples of Jesus, God’s son, my God is not a “big King angrily settling accounts, a capricious employer, or an aggrieved father”. The parables must be telling us something else.
Restorative justice
For seven years, I was head of school at All Saints’ Episcopal School. Carole, my wife, became the admissions director (and call if you’ll pardon my saying so, under her tutelage our enrollment sky-rocketed). It was a small, boarding and day school serving seven through 12th graders. About one third of the students came from the Vicksburg, Mississippi area and the rest came from 10 other states and five other countries.
When We arrived, we inherited a disciplinary system based on retributive justice. Simply stated, that meant that we told the students that we expected them to screw up, when when they did we would catch them, and when we caught them we would punish them. That did little to reform the perpetrators and nothing to restore whomever or whatever was aggrieved.
With the support of soulful, prayerful colleagues, we changed that system to one based on restorative justice. The great theologian, Walter Brueggeman says that restorative justice is a process of “determining what belongs to whom, and returning it to them”.
Today’s parable about the wicked tenants in the vineyard could easily be seen as an exercise in retributive justice. When the Tenants refuse to give the owner of the vineyard what belongs to him – that is, the fruits of the harvest – ultimately killing his own son, the owner retaliates by killing them. A pretty good allegory, isn’t it? But a true parable is a realistic story, true – to – experience which points beyond the everyday situations it describes.
So, let’s drill down to exactly what it is that God, through Jesus Christ, wanted from those chief priests and Pharisees – indeed from everyone in
their time and from everyone in all times, in other words, from us, too.
Does God want us to behave properly, righteously, religiously? While it’s true that we can pretty well mess up our lives by not behaving thusly, right behavior doesn’t have a thing to do with God’s love and forgiveness for us.
Does God want us to think the right thoughts, to practice orthodoxy, to conform to the rules of religion? While it’s true that right-thinking can help us to understand God and the world more clearly, such thinking, such believing, doesn’t matter one fig to God when it comes to God’s unconditional acceptance of us.
What God wants from us is faith in God and faith in God’s son. As Richard Rohr, an astute Roman Catholic theologian with close ties to the Episcopal1 church, says, “God has always loved and always will love what God has created.” Faith in God’s love – belief in God’s love, acceptance of God’s love – those are the fruits that God expects from us, the tenant farmers of God’s creation.
Don’t you love the simple profundity of the hymn, “All things bright and beautiful”? Join me in reciting the refrain if you can remember it.
“All things bright and beautiful, creatures great and small, all things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all.”
‘The Lord God made them all.” And remember, “God has always loved what God has made”.