Just before Advent, Donald Schell and Amber Evans sent us some reflections from their preaching group. We published the first of these on Thursday, and the second today.
By Donald Schell
From the beginning Christians, even those who gathered Jesus’ sayings and wrote the Gospels, were puzzled to make sense of just HOW he was a ‘friend of sinners.’ They seemed to be as frightened as we are sometimes that someone might get the idea that Jesus condoned sin (or unjust or unrighteous behavior). How often, reading John 8 together, (the woman taken in adultery) do we find ourselves discussing (or even arguing) whether the story reaches its resolution when Jesus says, “Where are your accusers? Neither do I condemn you.” It seems as though there’s always someone to insist that the moment of not condemning is only prelude to Jesus’ real conclusion, “Go and sin no more.” But doesn’t that line contradict the story? Could it be an early editorial ‘fix?’
To my ear “sin no more” in this story echoes of catch-phrases most of us heard growing up like, “Love the sinner, hate the sin,” “a man is known by the company he keeps,” or “birds of a feather flock together.” Such folk “wisdom” poses a problem for us – though Jesus made himself of ‘no reputation,’ we, his followers, teach one another that reputation is everything. In effect we caution each other NOT to follow Jesus’ example.
Any of us who preach on such parables as the Unjust Judge, the Dishonest Steward, the Talents, and even favorites like the ‘Good’ Samaritan, and the Prodigal Son gets caught in this bind, and those of us who listen attentively to sermons will hear preachers doing exegetical handstands and somersaults to find ‘the moral’ of these quirky stories, or otherwise explain why Jesus would offer such contradictory and downright unsavory characters as some kind of likeness to God. Whatever we say between the reading and the conclusion, we seem to know we’ve got to reach the point of exhorting people to try harder to be “good.”
Unfortunately (or maybe by the Grace of God) if we stick close reading these parables patiently or come back to them again and again, finding their “moral” seems harder and harder. Gospel scholars tell us this preaching dilemma is even older than the written Gospels. Our bewilderment at the little sayings tacked on to the end of these problematic stories pushes us to accept that we may be hearing a saying of Jesus on another subject and from another context, and sometimes we’re hearing the Gospel editor and compiler putting someone else’s (troubled) explanation of the parable in Jesus’ mouth.
For almost thirty years I’ve guided volunteers through improvised Gospel enactments, sometimes of stories of Jesus, but also, sometimes of these parables. Working with groups as diverse as a family camp, 8-12 year olds at a kids’ camp, and associates of one of our church’s women’s religious orders away on retreat, I’ve found some of these stories demand a playful, comic telling as we get close to their stark tension and danger. Comedy reassures us until Jesus’ unsavory protagonist does something wholly unexpected.
Jesus draws people by surprise because his stories are of characters his listeners wouldn’t want to hear about. But my hunch as a writer, storyteller, and ‘theater director’ in these improvisations I’ve seen is that Jesus crafted stories about characters he liked.
The ‘good’ Samaritan offers a stark example of this. For Jesus’ listeners (far more immediately than for us), someone they would identify with lies near death by the roadside. The listeners know how dangerous the roads can be and they know the road from Jerusalem to Jericho is particularly dangerous. They also know that trouble is coming when Jesus introduces their Samaritan enemy coming down the road. Even in a story it’s a moment to catch your breath. What outrage would this hated enemy perpetrate on you or me if we lay helpless by the roadside? But then our Storyteller has the hated Samaritan quite inexplicably (and against the listeners’ inevitable ethnic profiling) do an expensive, hands-on, time-consuming act of mercy.
“The Samaritans – – – helps him? Jesus! We don’t get it!”
In this year’s lectionary run of these parables, while I was preparing to preach on the Unjust Judge, the guy who finally gives the stubborn suppliant widow what she says the law and justice owe her – – – because she just won’t stop hassling him – I remembered Belai the Cannibal.
The grotesque figure of Belai shows up regularly in Ethiopian churches, a nightmare character with a knife in his hand eating a large slice of raw flesh. The contrast with the warmth and folk art eloquence of surrounding icon scenes of Mary holding the infant Jesus, Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection, and other Biblical stories couldn’t be greater.
Now don’t bother to check a concordance – Belai isn’t in the Bible. He’s a character from a religious folktale, the story of a VERY BAD man. Belai was a voracious cannibal. When Belai appeared at the gates of heaven, the deeds for which he’d be judged included the deaths of seventy-two people he’d killed and eaten – including members of his own family. St. Peter seems to know what the outcome will be, but for justice sake, he puts what remained of the corpses of the seventy-two on one side of the scale and asks Belai if he brings any good deeds at all. Belai can only offer one good deed. Once, as he was looking around for someone to eat, an unappetizing leper begged him, “in the name of God” for a cup of water. Belai protested that he neither knew nor honored that name. So then the leper implored him in the name of Saint Mary, and in some dark corner of his memory Belai remembered that name, and impatient to get on with looking for an appetizing victim, he gave the leper a cup of water.
“All right,” St. Peter says, and puts Belai’s ONLY good deed in his whole life, the cup of water, on the other side of the balance. St. Mary watches as the scale the weight of Belai’s seventy-two victims lifts the cup high in the balance, and she asks St. Peter if the good deed done in her name counts for so little. “Just look at the scale,” St. Peter replies. So St. Mary leans forward and lets her shadow fall on the side of the cup of water, and the glorious weight of her holy shadow tips the scale the other way. “All right,” St. Peter says with astonishment, “It appears Belai must receive God’s mercy.”
Dostoyevsky has Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov tell a similar story. A very wicked old peasant woman dies and her guardian angel intervenes with God. The only good deed the angel can offer is the one time the old woman gave a poor beggar an onion. “All right,” God tells the guardian angel, “lower the onion down to the burning lake and tell the old woman to grab hold. If the onion is strong enough for you to pull her out, she’s free to come to Paradise.”
And the angel lifts, and draws the old woman slowly from the lake of fire. As everyone else in the lake sees what’s happening, they seize the woman’s legs and ankles, and the angel is drawing everyone out of hell by the one onion. And still the onion holds until the wicked woman panics and screams, “It’s MY onion!” and as she writhes and kicks her feet to break free of those about to escape with her, her writhing and struggling breaks the onion and all fall back into the fiery lake.
Grushenka’s story and the Ethiopian folk-tale of Belai shouldn’t startle Anglicans too much, at least not if we remember from Rite I and the old Book of Common Prayer that God’s “property is always to have mercy.” We sort of get it. But we also may not like it too well. Something in us protests – Belai is so NOT like us! Who cares about his single cup of water or that old woman giving a beggar an onion? An onion? So what! Anyone could do that!
Unintended, trivial kindness? Except when we need it ourselves, God’s mercy is just t-o-o much.
So this year preparing to preach on the Unjust Judge, I remembered Belai’s and the old peasant woman’s accidental good deeds. The Judge responds to the woman’s pleas because he’s annoyed. He gives the mercy he’d always had the power to give and he gives it quite reluctantly.
In fact Jesus’ selfish, opportunistic, wicked heroes in his parables all act like that. They do something kind or helpful or even life saving for no evident good reason at all. Or they do the right thing for a bad reason. The Unjust Judge, like the Samaritan, like the Unjust Steward, acts mercifully for no good reason. In fact the judge’s reason, to spare himself further annoyance, makes clear that he cares not a whit for justice. Unless you hassle him without rest, he never gives “justice” without a bribe.
Now, as a writer and storyteller and lover of fiction, I’m going to offer something I feel strongly but can’t prove. Jesus seems to genuinely like the bad characters in his troubling stories. Like the reputation he had for keeping bad table company, Jesus’ parables show his affection for people that ‘good people’ like us ought not like at all. And he repeatedly tells stories where his protagonists do good despite themselves, with no evident motivation, as often Jesus even declares that they’re doing it for the WRONG reason.
Moralizing these parables silences our teacher’s voice. His stories don’t tell us how to be good. They push us over the edge toward Godly mercy-practice. He’s inviting us into a kind of deliciously guilty pleasure celebrating people whom we don’t think we ought to or even want to like.
Here’s what I mean by mercy practice – “Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful. Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive and you will be forgiven. Give and it will be given to you.” (Luke 6:36-37) And yes, Jesus wants people just like us for his friends, not good people, flawed people who stumble into goodness and mercy even for the wrong reasons.
The Rev. Donald Schell, founder of St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco, is
President of All Saints Company.