Twisty Things

Propers: The Twentieth Sunday After Pentecost (Lectionary 28), AD 2023 A.

Homily:

Lord, we pray for the preacher, for You know his sins are great.

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Parables are twisty things. Our impulse is to try to pin them down, to distill the one true interpretation that will make them to make sense. To allegorize them, in other words. But parables aren’t allegories, or at least not only allegories. Were it preferable to tell us simple stories, pithy aphorisms, then that’s just what Jesus would have done. But would we then remember them? Would they have any impact at all?

Parables shock and confuse, amuse and outrage. They shake us up, often turning our expectations on their heads. Yet how else can one speak to religious people? Our rituals, our language, even our stories become so familiar that we take their teeth. We think that we’re conversant, when really we’re just immune. C.S. Lewis called this the dragons of the imagination. To tell old truths afresh, they must seem strange and new. “Tell the truth, but tell it slant,” as Madeleine L’Engle taught us. “Success in circuit lies.”

We mustn’t tame the stories, or else they’ll lose their bite.

Those narratives that stand the test of time, which wrap ageless truths in beautiful blankets of fiction, do so precisely by evolving, adapting, altering their outward form to fit their time and place. After all, the secret to keeping everything the same has always been change. Nowhere is this more obvious than in collections of fairy tales, yet we see the dynamic at work even within the Gospels. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John each bear witness, each present the narrative of Jesus, in ways that speak to their individual cultures and concerns.

They tell us not simply what Jesus means, but what He means to them. And so we often have slightly different versions of the same story, leading generations of scholars to wonder which one is most original—if indeed there is an original at all.

I had a friend in highschool whose favorite band was Aerosmith, and he was such a fan that he made a mixtape—remember those?—of nothing but different versions of the same song, “Dream On,” recorded live at different stops along a single tour. You get what I mean? Same singer, same song, same concert, but with slight variations at each and every venue, a dozen and a half, if I recall correctly. Now which of those was the original song? Which would be authoritative, and which derivative?

I think of Jesus’ ministry like that. He actively preached, taught, and healed the sick all throughout the Holy Land for at least three and a half years. Yet Mark’s Gospel can be read in about an hour and a half. Don’t you think He told His stories more than one time? Don’t you think that He would have adapted His delivery to whatever situation He was in, for the audience before Him? I certainly do. Never can quite preach the same sermon twice. Same story, different versions, and all are true.

The parable we read today comes down to us in several forms. This morning we heard Matthew’s version, but there’s another one in Luke; and a third in the Gospel of Thomas, an ancient collection of Jesus’ sayings. There’s even something similar in the rabbinic writings of Jesus’ time. Maybe they heard it from Him, or maybe Jesus, as a rabbi, repurposed a source for His parable. Who is to say?

Regardless, the bones of the tale are consistent. A wealthy man holds a banquet, to which guests had been invited in advance. Once the feast has been lavishly prepared, he sends out servants to gather his guests to his table. It is a time of joy. Yet each guest demurs. Everyone has an excuse. In Luke’s version, the excuses are feeble. In Thomas’ they are reasonable. And in Matthew’s they’re downright hostile, even violent. The guests mistreat the servants, beyond any sort of rational response.

Yet the feast has been prepared, at great effort and expense. In the Ancient Near East, where few ever ate their fill, a wedding banquet was a time of communal festivity, a grand soiree. This is an insult to the host, to have a party and nobody comes. Well, to heck with them in that case. “Go out,” he says to his servants, “and gather all you can find,” the good and the bad, the rich and the poor, the undeserving and uninvited. The food will not go to waste. The feast will not be denied.

So again, the last will be first. And the first will be last. Rather a theme with Jesus.

What then shall we make of this parable? Each evangelist has already adapted it to his message, his individual emphasis. For Luke, the banquet is a model for us as to how we should treat the poor. Feed those who cannot repay you, and great will be your Father’s reward. This actually conforms closely to the rabbinical version of the story, in which no guests come to a rich man’s funeral, and the feast is given over to the poor. This, then, is why the man is remembered, for one posthumous act of generosity.

Matthew has a rather different message in mind. His Jewish-Christian community has suffered at the hands of other communities, fellow Judeans, for their faith in Jesus Christ. He uses  this parable to proclaim their vindication, their history of salvation. He injects the story with violence, because that’s what his people have known. He speaks of a fallen city to explain the loss of Jerusalem. He allegorizes the parable, and maybe that’s how Jesus told it. But it’s a darker version of the story, told to a suffering congregation.

Whereas we are justly uncomfortable with a passage that has been misused throughout subsequent history to justify antisemitism, Matthew is telling his people that God is on their side, and so even their defeats have been in reality their victories in Christ. Perhaps he’s gone too far, providing posterity with an interpretation that’s a bit too simple, a bit too clear, and a bit too self-righteous. But it wasn’t written for us. It was written for people who were hurting, who were shouldering the Cross, who needed to hear hope.

I wonder if Thomas’ version isn’t the one most suited to our times. Obviously the Gospel of Thomas is not in our Bible, in part because it offers Jesus’ teachings without any context or narrative whatsoever. Yet the sayings recorded therein ring true. In Thomas’ retelling, the guests aren’t violent, nor are their excuses quite so lame. They’re actually rather sensible. One has to deal with a business venture, another with property, a third with social obligations, and a fourth with collecting his rent.

They all say they have no time, absorbed as they are buying and selling, investing and profiting. And so, says Jesus in Thomas’ Gospel, “businessmen and merchants will not enter the places of My Father.” Not because they weren’t invited, but because they all have better things to do. They miss the forest for the trees. Before them is laid a banquet divine, and all they can think of is their bottom line. Only the poor are idle enough to take up the host’s invitation.

Ain’t that just the religious life in a nutshell? Here we are, constantly surrounded by the presence of God, by the bounty of the divine, beauty and joy and justice and peace, and we do not see it because we cannot slow down; we cannot breathe; we cannot be. We can only do. Despite all of our technology, all of our societal wealth, we fill up our days with busyness and noise, mistaking entertainment for leisure, substituting work for worth, thinking that exhaustion has some virtue or value in and of itself.

It seems we’re always running from our souls. God help us if they should ever catch up. We are anxious and troubled by many things. There is need of only one thing.

This is not to romanticize poverty, nor to deny the very real stresses and debts that we bear. But we are so distracted by ephemeral things, passing things, dying things, all of which we will lose, none of which will make us happy for any but a fleeting moment. The eternal, the invisible, the immaterial, these alone shall endure. These alone are real: wisdom, fortitude, prudence and justice; faith and hope and love.

Behold, the banquet is ever before us, our invitations already received. Be still and know the grace of God. Be still and know that we are home.

Now there’s a parable fitted for the age in which we live, a story told by Jesus for us all.

In the Name of the Father and of the +Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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