Category Archives: Scripture

The Return of the Prodigal Son

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Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1661–1669 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)

Rembrandt van Rijn, The Return of the Prodigal Son, c. 1661–1669 (Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg)

Sometimes I lead retreats to explore correlations between biblical narratives and our own stories. It’s not just a matter of putting ourselves in a given Bible story as a method of interpreting it. We also need to let it interpret us, as we discover the biblical motifs which are playing out in the particular circumstances of our own lives. What is my creation story, what is your exodus story, what is each one’s death and resurrection story?

At one such retreat, we considered Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. After studying the text, we tried out various ways of retelling it in our own words. Then we divided into three groups: Fathers, prodigal sons, and elder brothers. Membership in each group was determined by chance, although it turned out that the “elder brothers” consisted mostly of firstborn children.

Each group was asked to wrestle with their assigned character. What do you feel about this character? What does the story tell you about him? What does the story leave unsaid? Then they were invited to share a related story from their own lives. Tell about the struggles of being a parent, a child, or a sibling. Tell about a time you were forgiven, or needed to forgive. Tell about a time you felt neglected or ignored, envious or resentful.

One man said he had been disappointed at first to draw the father’s group, because he always related more strongly to the elder brother. As the oldest child in his family, he had some of the issues common to that role. He knew the burden of wanting to live up to his parents’ expectations, to be “perfect,” obedient, one who pleases by getting everything right. He had also experienced some envy and resentment of younger siblings who seemed more carefree and less responsible.

But as he listened to others in the group engage with the father’s side of the story, it occurred to him that he himself had actually been a father for as long as he had been only a son and brother. Maybe, he said, it was time to rethink his own story and who he was in it.

In the early nineties, Henri Nouwen wrote “a meditation on fathers, brothers, and sons” using the parable of the Prodigal Son along with Rembrandt’s famous painting of the moment when the errant child is welcomed home. Like the people in my retreat, he found critical insights into his own life in each of the characters. And in doing so, he realized that there were two sons, not just one, who went astray from their father’s will, into “a distant country,” the place of alienation.[i]

The younger son’s sins may have been more dramatic and colorful, but the elder brother’s bitter and jealous heart grieved his father just as much. Both sons are lost. Both need to be welcomed “home.” As Rembrandt’s painting shows, the elder stands in the shadows, separated from the radiant light surrounding the father and his youngest child.

“There is not only the light-filled reconciliation between the father and the younger son, but also the dark, resentful distance of the elder son. There is repentance, but also anger. There is communion, but also alienation. There is the warm glow of healing, but also the cooling of the critical eye; there is the offer of mercy, but also the enormous resistance against receiving it.”[ii]

Whether the elder brother will be able to step out of his darkness into love’s radiance remains unknown in both the painting and the original parable. But the father has made it clear that his parental love will never be withdrawn. Like the loving mercy of God, his welcoming arms remain ever extended and expectant, now and forever. As Nouwen writes, “The heart of the father burns with an immense desire to bring his children home.”[iii]

Nouwen describes the differences between the father’s hands in Rembrandt’s painting. His left hand is strong, masculine, gripping his son encouragingly. His right hand seems more refined, almost feminine, offering the caress of consolation. The father’s red cloak also conveys shelter and protection, like the enfolding wings of a mother bird.

Love so amazing, so divine, has a cost. It does not always produce happy endings. In the “fathers” group at the retreat, one woman told us about her own prodigal son, a forty-year old man who had struggled for years with his own lostness. “I welcomed him home every time,” she said, “and then he would just break my heart all over again.” Six months before our retreat, he had committed suicide.

When we hear the parable, it is natural to focus on the prodigal’s experience of unconditional, unmerited welcome. We all long to hear the word of mercy for ourselves: weary pilgrim welcome home. But Nouwen won’t let us stay there. Although we each need to make our way on the difficult journey home, in the end we are called to claim the role of the father as well. Forgiven so much, may we also become the ones who forgive, whatever it costs.

“His outstretched hands are not begging, grasping, demanding, warning, judging, or condemning. They are hands that only bless, giving all and expecting nothing … As I look at my own aging hands, I know that they have been given to me to stretch out toward all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God’s love.”[iv]

 

 

 

[i] Henri J. M. Nouwen, The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Meditation on Fathers, Brothers, and Sons (New York: Doubleday, 1992)

[ii] ibid., 126-7

[iii] ibid., 89

[iv] ibid., 127-8, 130

The voice that allows us to remain human

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Moses before the Burning Bush, 13th century icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai

Moses before the Burning Bush, 13th century icon, Monastery of St. Catherine, Mt. Sinai

Even in the darkest hours of mankind, there might be a voice within us that allows us to remain human.

– László Nemes, director of Son of Saul, accepting the Oscar for Best Foreign Film

These words, spoken last night at the Academy Awards, struck me with particular force, since one of the most famous accounts of that voice had just been told in the morning liturgy. Although Exodus 3: 1-15, the story of the burning bush, does not describe a voice coming from “within,” I believe that the voice which Moses heard at the foot of God’s mountain was the same voice which the Hungarian filmmaker longs to hear, the same voice we all long to hear in a dark time when the humanity of our country, our world, and ourselves is being called into question.

Whether it speaks in an interior whisper, or calls to us from an exterior source, the voice “that allows us to remain human,” to remember (or discover) our true humanity, is the voice which has been speaking us into being since the beginning of the world. It is the voice of revelation.

Revelation, in the words of Ashton Nichols, is “a moment when the soul of the recipient is filled with something outside the self. A literal inspiration occurs. Consciousness finds itself flooded, or breathed into, or simply filled, by a force it ascribes to an external agency. The metaphoric agent may be a wind, a flash of light, or a disembodied voice. Divine grace descends; the voice of God is heard in the whirlwind; a spirit inspires the prophet or poet with a truth that comes from outside the self and is incorporated into the soul of the recipient.”[i]

The sense of a truth coming from “outside the self” may seem a contradiction to Nemes’ “voice within us,” but only if we understand ourselves as separate, autonomous beings more or less self-contained and complete. If we are made in the image of the Trinitarian God, then we are part of a larger, interdependent flow of self-diffusive love in which outside and inside, or divine and human, are not strict opposites, but partners in a dance. We are constituted by a process of receiving our being from somewhere else, and in turn giving ourselves away. We “lose” our life to find it, as Jesus said. Like that bush in the Sinai, we burn with divine fire, yet are not consumed.

The first time I went to the Holy Land, in 1989, I saw a burning bush. It happened to be Ascension Day. I was visiting the Anglican sisters in Ramallah, with whom my mother had once worked to teach and care for Palestinian Christian children. Since a border closing prevented us from going to mass at a Benedictine church known for its beautiful chanting, a couple of the sisters took me for a walk in the local hills. As we descended a ravine, we encountered a shepherd with his small flock. And behind him, a little further on, I saw, with considerable astonishment, a burning bush. Why it was on fire, I never learned. If it spoke, I did not hear. Sometimes the voice is for the shepherd’s ears only. But I never forgot the wonder of it.

The bush which will burn and speak to you, or me, is out there somewhere, waiting for the proper moment of holy meeting. Anglican poet/priest R. S. Thomas described his own encounter in “The Bright Field.”

I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the pearl
of great price, the one field that had
the treasure in it. I realize now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying

on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.

Mary in The Burning Bush, Nicolas Froment (1475-6)

Mary in The Burning Bush, Nicolas Froment (1475-6)

In an exquisite fifteenth-century tryptich by Nicolas Froment, Moses beholds the Madonna and Christ Child in the “burning” bush. There are no prominent flames. The Word made flesh is both voice and fire. God incarnate is the ultimate revelation by whom and through whom and in whom we may, at last, become fully human.

 

 

 

[i] Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany: Nineteenth Century Origins of the Modern Literary Movement

The ten best Jesus movies

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Enrique Irazoqui and Pier Paolo Pasolini on location for "The Gospel According to St. Matthew"

Enrique Irazoqui and Pier Paolo Pasolini on location for “The Gospel According to St. Matthew”

The Feast of the Epiphany, recalling the journey of the Magi to adore the Christ child, ultimately celebrates the “showing” of Christ to the world. It seems the perfect day to post my list of the “ten best” Jesus movies, a genre which has fascinated me ever since I was a child extra in my father’s production of “Day of Triumph.” Surprisingly, that independent film by an Episcopal priest was the only Jesus film produced in the 1950’s, a decade packed with every other kind of biblical film.

For the last twenty-five years, I have taught “Jesus and the Movies” in seminaries, churches and retreat centers. I use clips from 19 feature films made between 1912 and 2014. The films always provoke rich conversations about biblical studies, Christology, religious art and film studies. Perennial issues of representation and interpretation are both repeated and transformed by the film medium, and the Jesus films, for all their limitations and imperfections, ask each viewer: “Who do you say that I am?” Even you don’t like a particular movie Jesus, you are compelled to think about the Jesus movie in your own head, your own heart. How does it differ from (or resonate with) what is on the screen?

As I noted in a prior post on the ten best religious films, top ten lists are subjective, revisable and always questionable, which is what makes them fun. And the Jesus film genre, burdened by religious expectations, commercial considerations, artistic pretensions and cultural controversies, has not produced any completely great films (each has its flaws, and the gospels themselves resist translation into perfect narratives), but it has given us many great scenes. I’ll list my favorite scenes in another post, but for now, in chronological order, here are my ten recommendations for your Epiphany binge-watching.

King of Kings (1961) Nicholas Ray’s uneven, studio-butchered epic was savaged by reviewers (“Incontestably the corniest, phoniest, ickiest and most monstrously vulgar of all the big Bible stories,” thundered Time Magazine). Blue-eyed fan-mag cover boy Jeffrey Hunter, although 33 years old, was dismissed as the “teenage Jesus,” though other saw echoes of JFK, inspiring and youthful, or “James Dean without the delinquency” (Ray had also made Rebel Without a Cause). And religious critics found too much humanity, not enough divinity. So what’s it doing on my list? Well, Ray was a terrific director, and the film is very watchable. It is also a prime example of cultural context shaping both the making and the reception of a Jesus film. Released at a time when both the biblical epic and the dominant Protestant metanarrative were on the wane in America, it failed for interesting reasons. At the same time, a Jesus constantly preaching “peace and love” reflected the ongoing anxieties of the Cold War era. And where else can you get narration by Orson Welles, a marvelous epic score by Miklos Rozsa (of Ben Hur fame), and the longest traveling shot in film history (160 feet of track on a steep Spanish hillside)?

The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1965) Pasolini’s black & white, hand-held, documentary “you are there” style, the rough-hewn faces of Italian non-actors, and the first dark-eyed Jewish Jesus all created an illusion of realism that instantly overthrew the conventions of biblical cinema. It is the first Jesus movie not to blend all four gospels or invent new dialogue and narration, though it significantly edits Matthew’s text (apocalyptic sayings, the Transfiguration, and some miracles are omitted). The director treats Jesus as a “revolutionary whirlwind” sweeping through Palestine. For some the protagonist is too strident, humorless and emotionally remote, but his relentless otherness nicely resists our domestication.

Jesus Christ Superstar/Godspell (1973) Permit me to link the Jesus musicals together: they came out in the same year, each is dated in its own way (singing and dancing on top of the World Trade Center, for example), and both remain strangely affecting, at least for persons of a certain age. In breaking the conventions of literal treatments, they not only opened new options for the genre, but influenced a rising generation of liturgists who brought street theater, comic play and contemporary music into the churches. Some critics glowered from the other side of a generational divide (“Jesus is just a teeny-bopper stoned on himself”), but there were more substantial controversies as well (in Superstar, a black Judas, an erotic Magdalene, Jewish villains caricatured as vultures, and a doubting Jesus). But each film provides a lively retelling with some very moving scenes.

Jesus of Nazareth (1977) Franco Zefferelli’s beautiful 6-hour miniseries on NBC, while shunning the artificial grandeur of Hollywood sets for a humbler, dustier Palestine, is suffused with its own pictorial conventions: Catholic iconography and Italian painting. Robert Powell’s engaging and self-assured Jesus, whose divine nature is clearly on display in key scenes, gives one of the most popular portrayals, though the film has been criticized for an overly interior spirituality that leaves the sociopolitical world untouched. Rather than trying to make Powell carry the entire burden of his character’s significance, Jesus of Nazareth focuses on the faces, reactions and emotions of his followers. Peter and Mary Magdalene, standing in for all of us who hear and follow, are unforgettable.

The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) The most controversial film of the genre prior to Mel Gibson’s Passion, Scorcese’s energetic, visceral take on the Kazanzakis novel is really a mashup of three bible characters: Jonah (the reluctant prophet resisting his inevitable vocation), Jesus of the gospels (creatively retold with a few quirky additions), and the Prodigal Son (who leaves the cross for the “far country” of a long, ordinary life, only to return “home” to Calvary at the end). This flawed but fascinating film has many firsts: the interior thoughts of Jesus, New York accents, sexuality, a restless camera always on the move, Peter Gabriel’s world music soundtrack, women at the Last Supper, and a novelistic source that exacerbates the confusions of fact and fiction.

Jesus of Montreal (1989) Denys Arcand’s postmodern play within a play furthered the transformation of a genre freeing itself from the restrictive conventions of piety and/or box-office caution. A group of contemporary actors, invited to reinvigorate a staid annual Passion Play, do so in wonderfully imaginative ways. At the same time, they find their personal lives starting to embody the characters they play. Earnest, clever and compelling, the film asks us to consider what it might mean to “play” Jesus in our own place and time.

Jesus (1999) This 4-hour television special offers a Jesus who seems quite modern in manner, speech and outlook. Jeremy Sisto is a “California slacker” type whose identity quest seems very American. This is often effective in putting us in the story, as if it’s something that could happen to us. But does it also reflect our own cultural selves so much that we can no longer believe we are seeing anything resembling history? An unprecedented use of special effects for the miraculous and mythic elements of the gospels is visually interesting, but it does create significant questions about what we are being asked to believe, since a special effect is transparently fictional, undermining the real but unseen content of faith.

The Miracle Maker (2000) Fresh, creative and often moving, this film uses claymation figures by Russian orthodox artists. Parables, dreams and inner experience are contrastingly rendered in two-dimensional animation. The engaging script, written by an Anglican, tells the Jesus story through the eyes of a child. The clay Jesus, resembling an eastern Christian icon (but with a ready smile) is more charismatic than many of his live-action brethren. The voice of Ralph Fiennes is part of the reason, but the animation itself engages us directly with the story in a way that real human faces do not. A dramatic film is always both a scripted fiction and also a kind of documentary about what the actors themselves are doing while the camera is rolling. With animation, you see only the story, not the actors, and that works beautifully here.

The Gospel of John (2003) This film gave itself a uniquely challenging task. Most Jesus movies invent dialogue to fill gaps in the narrative or articulate meanings left unsaid in gospel texts, but such a strategy is renounced here. The script uses only the words of the Fourth Gospel (in modern translation), forcing ingenious, if occasionally labored, strategies to keep the story moving and the viewer involved. The long speeches of the “Farewell Discourses” (John 13-17) are the supreme example. Ian Cusick’s Jesus is warm and passionate. You may never again hear “I am the bread of life” without seeing his smile.

Son of Man (2006) Produced in South Africa, it sets the Jesus story within a fictional 21st century African country beset by the horrendous legacy of colonialism, corporate exploitation, and factionalism. The first black movie Jesus is deeply embedded in contemporary times, teaching nonviolence to his disciples while speaking out against corrupt and evil powers. But we never lose sight of the original gospel story. The stunning depictions of Annunciation, Pieta and Resurrection will knock you flat. And the singing! So exhilarating. Here is a film where you really “meet Jesus again for the first time.”

Dies Irae

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Biblical prophet at Moissac Abbey on Le Chemin de St. Jacques

Biblical prophet at Moissac Abbey on Le Chemin de St. Jacques

Mr. McCleery, my seventh grade Latin teacher, had us memorize verses of the Dies Irae, a medieval chant describing the Last Judgment in strikingly lurid language. Most boys in junior high do not walk around chanting Latin poetry about the end of the world, but I rather enjoyed it. The tune was catchy, and those terse rhyming triplets beat time like the sensuous energy of a drum circle.

Dies irae, dies illa, 
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum Sibylla.

Day of wrath, O day of mourning,
See fulfilled the prophet’s warning,
Heav’n and earth in ashes burning.

The text of Dies Irae is inspired by the first chapter of Zephaniah, which was one of the eucharistic readings last Sunday. I sometimes wonder what churchgoers think about when asked to consider “a day of wrath, a day of distress and anguish, a day of ruin and devastation, a day of darkness and gloom.” In Syria or Ukraine, it’s just the latest news. But for those of us not living in one of history’s infernos, Zephaniah might be dismissed as a colorful crank carried away by the thrill of his own hyperbole.

The effect of the Bible’s more fiery rhetoric is often muted by the flat, inexpressive way it is usually read – or worse, mumbled – in the typical liturgy, as though no one really means it. Readers of prophetic texts should be given bullhorns. They should walk among the people as they shout, looking them in the eye.

I will bring such distress upon people
that they shall walk like the blind;
because they have sinned against the LORD,
their blood shall be poured out like dust,
and their flesh like dung.[i]

The church growth people might have something to say about that sort of messaging, but there is no denying that the prophets are working hard to get our attention. And in these last weeks of the Christian year, both the Sunday lectionary and the daily liturgical readings resound with the trumpet blasts of biblical warnings. People get ready. History’s chickens are coming home to roost.

Those prophetic rants have sometimes been read as endorsements of sacred violence – angry outbursts of a moody and unpredictable god – but God’s best friends have long rejected that crude picture as a tragic misreading of the divine. Nevertheless, there is no denying the violent imagery woven into some biblical texts, and we must find a way to make sense of it.

Walter Brueggemann explains that the prophets “speak in images and metaphors that aim to disrupt, destabilize, and invite to alternative perceptions of reality … [They] speak in outrageous and extreme figures because they intend to disrupt the ‘safe’ construals of reality, which are sponsored and advocated by the dominant opinion makers.”[ii] In other words, prophets blow up the old paradigms in order to make room for the new. They take seriously the power of language both to enslave and to liberate.

Zephaniah targets those “who rest complacently on their dregs,” who are blinded by their illusions, who assume divine indifference to the damage they do to the poor, the vulnerable, and the whole interdependent system of life on earth. We can find similar voices in our own time.

German writer W. G. Sebald’s apocalyptic poem, After Nature, is as harrowing as anything in the Bible. As he contemplates the dark and barren landscape of Matthias Grünewald’s Crucifixion, painted in 1505, Sebald finds a predictive warning of the planet’s own death unless we change our ways.

Here in an evil state of erosion
and desolation the heritage of the ruining
of life that in the end will consume
even the very stones has been depicted.[iii]

Today the United States Senate came just one vote shy of approving the Keystone XL pipeline, a massive fossil fuels project to enrich a few people at the expense of the whole earth. The effects of exploiting the Canadian tar sands, according to climate scientist James Hansen, could well be of biblical proportions.

Canada’s tar sands, deposits of sand saturated with bitumen, contain twice the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by global oil use in our entire history. If we were to fully exploit this new oil source, and continue to burn our conventional oil, gas and coal supplies, concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere eventually would reach levels higher than in the Pliocene era, more than 2.5 million years ago, when sea level was at least 50 feet higher than it is now. That level of heat-trapping gases would assure that the disintegration of the ice sheets would accelerate out of control. Sea levels would rise and destroy coastal cities. Global temperatures would become intolerable. Twenty to 50 percent of the planet’s species would be driven to extinction. Civilization would be at risk.[iv]

Hansen concludes that Keystone and its aftermath “will be game over for the climate.” The apocalypse was defeated today in the Senate, but there will be another vote early next year, when many of the “no” votes will be out of office. Alarmingly, the next head of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will be a climate change denier who believes in a god who would never allow earth’s climate to be affected by the actions of mortals. If the senior senator from Oklahoma were to study his Bible, he might find that God takes human freedom far more seriously than he does. We do have the power to destroy God’s creations and disrupt the fragile balances of life.

The prophets are trying to make us renounce that power before it is too late. When Zephaniah warns of “a terrible end” he isn’t simply condemning us; he’s trying to save us. The “day of wrath” will not be an arbitrary vengeance from the sky, but the sum of innumerable bad choices here on earth. Zephaniah and his fellow prophets hold before us a chillingly graphic picture of where those choices are headed. What has been called the wrath of God is really something bearing our own signature.

Will God ride to the rescue? In a poem called “Emmanuel’s Nightmare,” African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks wonders what it might be like if we were simply left to our own devices. She imagines the Second Coming of a Christ who would “clean the earth / of the dirtiness of war.” But the Savior finds himself thwarted. Humans love war too much. It is “what they lived for.” So God’s Son gives up and goes home. Mission not accomplished. “He had not the heart / To take away their chief sweet delectation.”[v] 346

The prospect of being abandoned to our own suicidal impulses is not a happy one, but – thankfully – it is not in fact the story we tell. God has destined us not for wrath but for salvation.[vi] The means of that better destiny will turn out to be quite surprising, not at all like the terrible clamor of the Dies Irae. But that is a tale for another day.

[i] Zephaniah 1:17

[ii] Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament: Testimony, Dispute, Advocacy (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1997), 625

[iii] W.G. Sebald, After Nature, q. in Colin Riordan, “Ecocentrism in Sebald’s After Nature,” in W.G. Sebald – A Critical Companion, eds. J.J. Long & Anne Whitehead (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 51

[iv] New York Times, May 9, 2012

[v] Robert Atwan, George Dardess, Peggy Rosenthal, eds., Divine Inspiration: The Life of Jesus in World Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 346

[vi] I Thessalonians 5:9

God and the imagination are one

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HS dove

Following this blog’s inaugural series of dispatches from the Camino de Santiago last spring, readers of The Religious Imagineer may have noticed a curious diversity of topics: saints, seasons, nature, culture, theology, Scripture, liturgy, art, theater, circus, classic cars and cinema. And perhaps they wonder, what ties all this stuff together?

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. When Isaiah Berlin explored the implications of this ancient Greek saying in his celebrated 1953 essay, he argued that Tolstoy was by nature a fox but by conviction a hedgehog. His interests were wide and his eye for the particular was acute, but he sought to contain the world’s multiplicity within a single defining idea.

I can relate. And the one big thing for this blog is found in a line from Wallace Stevens:

We say God and the imagination are one …
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

This might be taken as a secular celebration of the human mind, reducing God to one of its creative fictions. But if I read Stevens with the hermeneutic of a believer, “God and the imagination are one” is not necessarily a matter of either-or. It might also mean both-and. God dwells both in the mind and outside it. Imagination is both a way we reach beyond ourselves, and a means by which the transcendent finds a home in us, enabling us to see with the eyes of God and the mind of Christ, and to act accordingly. To say that God and the imagination are does not mean for me that they are identical, but that they participate deeply in one another.

The Creator’s “Let there be light!” and Jesus’ refusal of the tomb’s finality are the supreme biblical examples of divine imagination. But there have been countless imagineers engaged in the work (or is it play?) of bringing the new heaven and new earth into being. The activist imagining peace, the oppressed imagining justice, the forgiver imagining reconcilation, the mourner imagining joy, the saint imagining a new way of being, the theologian and the artist imagining the beauty of the infinite in the particular, are all practitioners of the holy and transformative task of conforming the world more closely to God’s image.

When Jesus quoted Isaiah 61 in his hometown sermon, he embraced such prophetic imagination as his own vocation.

The Imagination of God is upon me,
for she has sent me to bring good news to the poor.
She has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind;
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of divine favor.

So to return the original question about The Religious Imagineer’s diversity of topics, I would say that imagination is the unifying subject of this blog. How do we say the unsayable, see the invisible, dance the impossible in our images, rituals and stories? How do we attend to the traces of God amid the chronic unknowing of secular modernity? How do we imagine the really Real and the not-yet?

Video artist Bill Viola, the subject of an earlier post, has observed that “in the Middle Ages they painted the sky gold in the paintings … It was realism they were after – reality of the divine effused through everything in the physical world.” That is my theme as well.

As ever, thanks for reading.

God’s not fair!

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Sign at Occupy LA city hall encampment, October 2011

Sign at Occupy LA city hall encampment, October 2011

If any have toiled from the first hour,
let them receive their due reward;
If any have come after the third hour,
let them with gratitude join in the Feast!
And those that arrived after the sixth hour,
let them not doubt; for they too shall sustain no loss.
And if any delayed until the ninth hour,
let them not hesitate; but let them come too.
And those who arrived only at the eleventh hour,
let them not be afraid by reason of their delay.
For the Lord is gracious
and receives the last even as the first.
Christ gives rest to those that come at the eleventh hour,
as well as to those that toiled from the first.

This famous passage from the ancient Paschal homily of St. John Chrysostom is a marvelous riff on Jesus’ parable of the Workers in the Vineyard (Mt. 20:1-16). It’s certainly good news to the latecomers, but rather disconcerting to those of us who have a strict idea of who’s in and who’s out. You never know what kind of people you’re going to run into at God’s place. You may have to break bread with some who haven’t earned their place at the table the way you have, who haven’t paid their dues the way you have. It’s not fair. The kingdom of God is not fair.

That’s the trouble with mercy and forgiveness and grace. They are so undiscriminating. How are we supposed to know where we stand, how can we measure up, how can we hold others accountable, if the standards are so loose and slippery?

Let’s face it. Jesus was a terrible bookkeeper. He didn’t maintain accurate accounts of how everyone was doing. He was too busy throwing a party for God’s friends. Y’all come. Everyone’s welcome!

The first disciples who listened to this story undoubtedly needed to hear its message. They were anxious about where they stood with Jesus and with God. Lord, who’s going to sit at your right hand and who’s going to sit on your left? What are we going to get for following you? Whom do you love the most? This anxiety about status and privilege continues in the Book of Acts, when some of the original Jewish believers resent the influx of Gentile converts. And we have our own versions of this calculating mentality today. Who’s in, who’s out? Who’s better, who’s worse? Who belongs, who doesn’t? Who’s saved, who’s not?

But with this parable, Jesus tells us:

  • Stop worrying about wages. The kingdom isn’t something you earn. It’s a gift. Be glad you are one of the recipients.
  • Don’t worry about how much you’ll get. You’ll get what you need. You really will.
  • Stop comparing yourselves to others. God loves everyone equally.
  • Don’t be envious or resentful of someone else’s good fortune, even when you think it’s undeserved. Be glad that God is so generous, even if it’s not always about you.

Once the whole idea of a bookkeeping religion has been exploded by this parable, we begin to realize that it’s not a story about wages at all. It’s a story about the vineyard. Everyone gets invited to the vineyard, and ending up there together is the whole point. The latest have not come too late, and the earliest have not come too early. In the end, everyone is there, no one is missing.

Now if you don’t want to be part of this vineyard collective, just take what you’ve earned and go. That’s what the master tells the complainers, the bookkeepers, and to me it’s the most chilling line in the story. You don’t want any part of the kingdom’s undiscriminating generosity? OK, fine. Go off and be by yourself, or with your little circle of the like-minded. But you may find it rather lonely. And you’ll miss one hell of a party.