P ♰ C

by Jean Allen

So, Jesus just finished shutting up the Sadducees about life after death and along comes some Pharisees to test him some more. They ask him what the greatest commandment is and we all know his answer. His answer was in no way inflammatory; in fact, it was pretty mainstream in the Jewish religion having been given to them in Deuteronomy, which modern scholars believe was written 600-700 years before Jesus’s time. The commandments were preceded by the Shema: Hear, O Israel: theLord, our God, the Lord is one. ‘Shema’ means to hear.

The difference between Jesus and many of the Pharisees and Chief Priests regarding the two greatest commandments was that Jesus actually followed them and it was his following the commandments wholeheartedly that really irked the Jewish authorities. He loved God with his whole heart above everything and everyone else and he loved his neighbors to such a degree that there was huge disapproval of who he loved. To the Jews, ‘neighbor’ meant other upright Jews; to Jesus it meant everybody bar none. Tax collectors, prostitutes, Samaritans, Canaanites, prodigal sons and daughters, thieves…there wasn’t a soul who was not a neighbor to Jesus. My God! He was polluting the Jewish religion with his undiscerning love of his neighbor.

‘Shema’, or ‘Hear,’ doesn’t just mean to register sounds; it means to listen deeply and consistently act upon what is heard. It means meditating on and pondering the words and their meaning and then doing it! Many Jews wore tefillin, small black leather boxes containing a piece of parchment on which was written Torah verses. These boxes were bound to the forehead and to the arm. For many Jews, these phylacteries were probably more habit than anything and for some they were a proud sign that they were pretty spiritual. You can imagine their consternation when Jesus came along and actually acted upon what he had heard.

You can hear the words of the Gospel this Sunday and they may just fly over your head because you’ve heard them so often, or you can be like Jesus:

Shema the words.

by Jean Allen –

It has been customary to assume the king in the parable of the wedding banquet is God but many scholars question this assumption. While the king does demonstrate some lovely Godlike actions (inviting the poor and downtrodden after the rude rejection by the well-to-do), the parable also demonstrates some actions that are definitely not Godlike. Enraged, he orders that the citizens who murdered his servants be killed and their city burned. He orders an improperly clothed guest to be bound hand and foot and thrown out helpless into the outer darkness. The whole parable reeks of retaliation and violence. Is this Jesus’s God? I think not.

Context here is important. Jesus has been challenged by the temple authorities to say where he gets his authority. Jesus then tells three parables: the two sons asked to work in the vineyard, the tenants who killed the landowner’s son and then this parable, the wedding banquet. After one parable, it even says that the Pharisees realized he was talking about them.

“The Kingdom of Heaven may be compared to a king…” Sure sounds like he’s saying the king is God until you realize that comparing something to something else doesn’t always find that the two things are exactly the same. Quite often a comparison shows up radical differences. The king in this parable practices anger, violence, retaliation and exclusion, the way the world does – and the way the temple authorities will do very soon when they will bind the ‘improperly clothed’ Jesus, hand and foot, and attempt to cast him into the outer darkness. Jesus is not equating the king with God; he is exposing how humanity, particularly the temple authorities, have deviated from the true heart of God and have been swept along into the despicable practice of scapegoating the innocent who have no voice.

Believe it or not, God is NOT a violent tyrant.

by Jean Allen

In this parable where the tenants, who refuse to give the landowner his produce, beat and kill the landowner’s representatives and end up murdering his son, it’s easy to assume the landowner represents God. Not so. In Jesus’s day, heavy taxation, debts and crop failures forced many peasant farmers to lose their land, which was then bought up by absentee landowners. Tenants lived on the edge of economic disaster all the time but they still had to pay the landowner no matter what. It is also historical fact that land could possibly be claimed by tenants if there were no owner and no heir, sort of similar to homesteading today. So, the tenants in this story may have been striving for that outcome. 

This story was politically and economically charged to the listeners, who would have been sympathetic to the tenants at first. It was not simply a parable about giving God his rightful dues. What might Jesus have been trying to point out? The tenants begin as objects of sympathy; they end by becoming a united mob, convinced that killing one person will secure their future. What Jesus was revealing was how easily victims can become victimizers when rivalry and fear take over.

It is important to note that Jesus didn’t say that the landowner should “put those wretches to a miserable death…” The Chief Priests and Elders said it. Remember, this was not a parable about God; it was a statement about victims and victimizers. The people listening to Jesus, who could be seen as victims, became victimizers themselves just before Jesus was crucified. Any group of people can turn against one victim and believe all their problems will be solved by expelling or killing the victim. 

Nowadays we don’t resort to actual murder but a person can be ‘killed’ by rumors, unkind words and exclusion stemming from fear and anger. I’ve seen it happen in too many groups and churches to believe it’s a rare occurrence. 

It’s a mob mentality and it’s dangerous.

by Jean Allen

At first glance, this Gospel parable seems to be just encouraging us to do God’s will rather than saying we will but never getting around to it. Fair enough. That’s important. But Jesus wasn’t just giving a lesson in general to his followers; he was speaking directly to the Jewish Chief Priests and Elders. He was making a point about the self-righteousness that precludes a person from really listening for and hearing the voice of God.

I think we all feel we can easily identify a self-righteous person and, no doubt, we can when witnessing someone who exudes self-righteousness in the way the pharisee did when comparing himself to the publican in another text. But what about our own pockets of self-righteousness? Are we as adept at recognizing those pernicious little pockets? 

Part of the definition of self-righteousness is ‘the belief that one’s own goodness, correctness, or virtue makes one morally superior to others and entitles one to judge, exclude, or condemn them.’ The key phrase is ‘one’s own goodness’. That means that, subconsciously, my righteousness comes from me, from my achievements, my morality, my theology, my sacrifices, and my religious observances. My identity comes from comparing myself to others. Several examples: “I have been more involvedand done more than most people.” “I follow the liturgical guidelines scrupulously but those people don’t.” “I have more experience, therefore I know best.” “I have prayer time every morning without fail; I doubt if she/he does.” You get the gist.

The more one gives in to self-righteousness, the harder it becomes to be compassionate and it becomes almost impossible to recognize God’s heart and hear his will. And the ones we think we’re better than have more capacity to act with God’s compassion than we do. 

Just think of the last time you criticized someone, either out loud or in your heart. There you go. That came from self-righteousness. Kind of shocking isn’t it? 

We all have a long way to go.

– by Jean Allen

The world operates on a certain sense of justice and this kind of justice is challenged in today’s Gospel of the landowner who paid the workers who were hired last the same as the workers who were hired early in the day. The world’s sense of justice is comparative and often competitive. “Hey! That’s not fair. We worked harder and longer than them; therefore, we deserve more.” This sense of justice resents anyone who seems to get more than their fair share and it engenders conflict and struggle.

The Kingdom’s justice, on the other hand, is not based on fairness but rather on love imparting dignity to the one who is receiving the justice. The landowner told the workers hired later that he would pay them “whatever is right” So, who decides what is right? If it was left up to the early hires, they would get the most pay and to heck with those other guys. It is God’s role to decide what is right because he knows that in the world’s sense of justice, there is always someone who loses. In this Gospel, there were no losers, only guys who decided they lost.

The Kingdom does not operate on the basis of winners and losers. This is an important lesson for us all. Christianity is not a worthiness contest. This truly is beyond our fathoming because it goes against the grain of everything we’ve been taught from infancy. The whole world operates on the reward system; from families to schools to the workplace, we’ve been taught that personal success depends on our own hard work. It’s extremely gratifying for the person at the top of the ladder and demoralizing for those on the lower rungs. God does not demoralize anyone. 

In the Kingdom, you have to go down to be up, you have to be less to be more, the smaller you are, the larger you become and failure is a pathway to God. There is only one requirement.

Just show up.