From our Rector

Jesus told parables because they serve…as keys that unlock the mysteries we face by helping us to ask the right questions: how to live in community; how to determine what ultimately matters; how to live the life that God wants us to live. They are Jesus’s way of teaching, and they are remembered to this day not simply because they are in the Christian canon, but because they continue to provoke, challenge, and inspire.

– from SHORT STORIES BY JESUS: THE ENIGMATIC PARABLES OF A CONTROVERSIAL RABBI by A.J. Levine

I really enjoy A.J. Levine’s commentaries and insights into the New Testament. As a noted scholar and writer, his works have sparked wonderful debate and renewed exploration into the Jewish nature of Jesus’s teachings, especially in removing antisemetic, sexist, and homophobic readings of the texts.

Dr. Levine insists that the parables in particular are not sweet, bucoloic stories that comforted the farmers in Israel and Judah in the first century; on the contrary, they were revolutionary naratives that turned the faith community on its ears. This Sunday’s reading is no exception. In fact, in confounds the Temple leadership with such confrontation that they try to avoid answering Jesus’s challenge.

Although we may look at them from a Christocentric position, feeling that “our guy” won the debate, in reality sometimes we are no better than they are. Just last week, when presented with the landowner’s awarding of the same daily wage to all the workers, regardless of how many hours they put in, we didn’t particularly care for the justification of why. And many of us, like the high priest and leaders, in order to not debate Jesus, sat back and said, “I don’t know.”

Dr. Levine insists that we do, indeed, know, and that the stories Jesus tells are so clear and direct that they bring to the surface our own hypocrisy and voluntary ignorance. Our hypocrisy sits in the reality that we recognize that God through Christ insists that we love God, love one another, and work to reconcile all to one another. Everything we do should bring about the end of injustice, the end of hatred, the end of war; yet we still espouse winning over compromise, destruction over creation, and dominance over cohabitation. And when we say prayers and read our scriptures, which clearly direct our lives, we feign ignorance or lack of understanding.

The teachings of Jesus are clear. We either follow them or we don’t. There is no wiggle room to pretend that we don’t know what is the right path in our Christian faith.

If you follow Christ, then follow Christ. Period.

Peace,

Father Shawn