Jesus

by James Martin

  Wit is another important element of Jesus’s parables. This may seem surprising to those of us who read his parables with a straight face, but we often miss the earthy humor inherent in the stories. Humor is culture bound and time bound; since we don’t live in Jesus’s day, we can’t fully appreciate the humor embedded in the parables, which would have made them memorable to those who first heard them. Father Harrington told me that for people in first-century Palestine some of Jesus’s stories would have been “hilarious.” The idea, for example, that someone would build a house on sand instead of solid ground would have struck people as terribly funny.16

  We may also overlook the humor because, unlike the first audiences, we’ve heard these passages multiple times—often delivered in dry and didactic ways. And even if we recognize the humor, we’re still too familiar with the stories. So we are probably underestimating the surprising and amusing impact they would have had on the first-time hearers in first-century Palestine.

  The parables, however, are not simply stories, or even funny stories. As Harrington notes, in each parable something unusual surfaces: a huge harvest, an immense mustard bush, an enormous amount of bread, a pearl discovered by accident.17 There is always a twist, often a shocking, jarring, or even incomprehensible turnabout. Some parables are hard to grasp; and some, once grasped, are hard to accept. But Jesus meant them to be provocative—the kingdom of God demanded an urgent, all-or-nothing, do-it-now response—so the parables retain their power to provoke and shock.

  And confuse! Even today the most familiar parables may baffle us. There is strong evidence that Jesus himself did not expect all his listeners to grasp the parables. One of the most difficult passages in the Gospels, much discussed by Scripture scholars, comes in Mark, when the disciples ask Jesus bluntly why he speaks in parables. His answer was most likely as mysterious to them as it is to us:

  “To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables; in order that

  ‘they may indeed look, but not perceive,

  and may indeed listen, but not understand;

  so that they may not turn again and be forgiven.’”18

  Here Jesus is quoting a passage from Isaiah, which speaks of those who are deaf and blind to the word of God.

  Some scholars say that “in order that” is better translated as “because.” In other words, some do not grasp the parables because they are hard-hearted. But even given that translation, it is still a troubling passage. An almost identical explanation occurs in Luke and Matthew.19

  Did Jesus not want people to understand him? I put that question to John Donahue. He noted that those mysterious verses in Mark may best be understood in terms of the Messianic Secret—that is, an example of Jesus’s teaching his disciples privately. Father Donahue explained that in the ancient world there were many instances of private teaching to “insiders.” Also, Jesus exhibits a kind of restraint, holding back, as it were, from fully revealing things to everyone at every opportunity. But it was still hard to imagine Jesus not wanting most of his listeners to understand.

  “Most likely,” he told me, “Jesus did not expect everyone to understand his teaching.” Donahue noted that the first use of the word “parable” comes in the third chapter of Mark, in a setting where his family thought he was crazy.20 “Then Jesus tells a parable to his adversaries, and the section concludes with his saying that his mother and brothers are ‘outside,’ while the true family ‘inside’ are those who do the will of God.”21 It is an indication that the parables were meant to be understood mainly by his inner circle.

  Donahue reminded me that parables are never fully “understood” anyway. Speaking about “understanding” is a bit rationalistic, he said. “A better phrasing would be ‘enter into the mystery of the kingdom of God.’ Remember C. H. Dodd’s saying that a parable ‘teases.’ To my mind, a parable is a question waiting for an answer, and it does not really ‘exist’ until it is ‘appropriated,’ but it is never really ‘understood.’”

  Adding to the often baffling quality of the parables is another striking feature: we encounter characters Gerhard Lohfink terms “immoral figures.”22 In the Gospel of Matthew, for instance, Jesus tells the story of a man who discovers a treasure hidden in a field.23 Upon discovering it, he sells all he has in order to purchase the field. Preachers often use this parable as a way of stressing the overriding value of the reign of God—we should be willing to part with anything to attain it.

  We may be so familiar with this parable that we overlook something: the man does not tell the rightful owner of the field what he has found! As heroes go, he is a devious one. Lohfink points to several such immoral figures whose presence underscores the urgency of the reign of God. Some of the characters in the parables stop at nothing to get what they want. Jesus seems to be saying that one must be single-hearted in one’s pursuit of the kingdom, even as much as the unscrupulous man pursuing that treasure—no matter what.

  OVER TWO THOUSAND YEARS after parables were introduced to the crowds in Galilee, debates over their meaning continue. Not long ago, Barbara Reid, a Dominican sister and professor of New Testament at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago, provided a unexpected explanation about one of the most familiar Gospel parables. In the process she provoked my Jesuit community into a lively conversation about a story we thought we knew.

  In the Parable of the Talents, in both Matthew and Luke,24 a wealthy man entrusts his servants with his fortune before going away on a journey. To the first servant (or slave), he gives five talents, to the second two, and to the third one. As Matthew recounts the story, the wealthy man gave each one funds “according to his ability.” By the way, here is a possible instance of Jesus’s playful use of hyperbole: a talanton was a huge amount of money, equivalent to roughly fifteen years of wages, so the man is turning over to his servants a ridiculous amount of wealth. The audience would have perked up upon hearing about the largesse of such a generous, trusting, or possibly naive master.

  When the master (kyrios, or lord) returns, he discovers how well each servant has cared for the money. The first one proudly reports that he has invested the money and has earned five more talents. The master praises him lavishly, “Well done, good and trustworthy slave; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.” The second slave has likewise invested, turning his two talents into four; he is similarly praised by the master.

  The third slave, however, did not invest the money at all. In fact he buried it—literally, in the ground. Why? “Master,” he says, “I knew that you were a harsh man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you did not scatter seed; so I was afraid, and I went and hid your talent in the ground. Here you have what is yours.”

  The master is enraged. Not simply because he’s been insulted as a “harsh” man (sklēros, hard or severe), but because the servant has failed to increase the man’s wealth—even though he was not instructed to invest it. The master taunts him: “You knew, did you, that I reap where I did not sow, and gather where I did not scatter? Then you ought to have invested my money with the bankers.” He instructs the other servants to take the man’s one talent and give it to the one with ten. “For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.” The master then punishes the slave, throwing him into “outer darkness,” where there will be “weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

  Why is the servant punished so cruelly? After all, he didn’t lose the money; and no one told him he was supposed to invest it. Besides, he might have lost money if he had. For most readers today, the harsh treatment is shocking. It’s also poignant, writes Donahue: the poor man is describing what he thought was a prudent action and then almost proudly returns the original to the master. How sad it is to imagine someone who thinks he is doing a good deed punished instead and to see his world shatte
red.25 Is Jesus holding up this unfortunate person as a model of foolishness? What’s going on?

  The most common interpretation, which you will hear advanced in most sermons and homilies, is that the parable is a warning to those who do not use their “talents” in life. Perhaps because the word “talent” in English automatically carries that meaning, most preachers inveigh against “burying our talents” and encourage us to do the best we can with our “God-given talents,” or there will be hell to pay.

  But most parables cannot be exhausted by a single interpretation. For his part, Donahue surmises that the problem with the third servant is the way he reflexively judges his master, assuming he is a “hard” man, when the master has done nothing to justify this charge. Indeed, to entrust such a large sum demonstrates an almost exorbitant level of generosity and trust. Additionally, the third servant names his motivation for hiding the talent as fear.

  “It was timidity that spelled his downfall,” writes Donahue in The Gospel in Parable, “which was not warranted by anything known directly about the master.” The servant views his master as “hard” though he had been treated fairly. Falsely imagining himself as a victim, the servant created a situation in which he became “with tragic irony” a real victim. In a sense, the man created a “master” of his own making, rather than letting the master be himself.26 Perhaps we are to take from this story not the idea that we are to “use our own talents,” but rather the idea that we are to let God be God.

  That same lesson can be drawn from a similar parable, in which a master pays laborers who have worked only one hour the same wage that he pays to those who have worked a full day.27 Many current-day readers also find this parable, usually called the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, nearly scandalous. That someone working for just an hour would be paid the same as someone working many hours more seems unjust. The story never fails to annoy the capitalist mind. But the master has an answer to those who question him: “Are you envious because I am generous?” The lesson here may be: Let God be generous. As with the timid servant in the Parable of the Talents, the angry laborers have already decided the master is ungenerous.

  But the interpretation of the Parable of the Talents that prompted discussion in my community was even more unusual than Donahue’s. Barbara Reid believes that a key to the parable is remembering that Jesus was not operating in a capitalist system in which wealth could be increased by investment.28 At the time, she suggests, people would have believed in a “limited good,” where there was only so much wealth to go around and where increasing one person’s wealth meant taking it away from another. “One who amassed large amounts for himself would be seen as greedy and wicked,” she writes. The third servant, she believes, is the honorable one, because he refused to cooperate with a system in which the master continues to accrue large amounts of money while others are poor.

  Reid sees the parable as a warning “about the ease with which people can be co-opted by an unjust system,” while also encouraging disciples to expose unfettered greed. She believes that the last verse shows what happens to those who “blow the whistle” on the rich and powerful. The disciples therefore are not to take the man going on a journey as a stand-in for God and not to take the parable as an encouragement to use their “God-given talents.” Although this is an important lesson, Jesus’s listeners may not have understood the parable in that way, since “talent” did not have the connotation that it does in English.

  In Reid’s view, this parable, like many other parables, is about the need for the disciples to be faithful during the time between Jesus’s departure and his coming again and to go against the prevailing attitudes. “In contrast to slaves, who live in servile fear of a greedy master who metes out cruel punishment to those who will not go along with this program for self-aggrandizement, Jesus’s disciples live with trust in God, whose equitable love emboldens them to work for justice here and now while awaiting ultimate fulfillment.”

  When I first came upon Reid’s interpretation I had to read it three times. It was almost the opposite of the traditional explanation.

  So which is it? While my money is on the traditional explanation, the parables will never give up all their meaning. That’s why I enjoy preaching about them. Nothing so riles up an audience as a parable that they don’t “get” or “like.” That’s what C. H. Dodd meant when he said they “tease” the mind into active thought.

  “That parable really seemed to bother the congregation,” I once told the pastor of a church after a homily I had preached.

  “Good!” he said.

  Saying that the parables may be difficult to grasp, however, does not mean that Jesus did not intend for listeners to get the point. Even the most open-ended parable was designed to convey a message, if only to his inner circle, and even if they failed to grasp that message on the first hearing.

  To that end, let’s look at perhaps Jesus’s most famous parable and think about how it might tease our minds into active thought about the reign of God. Perhaps you can imagine yourself standing by the Bay of Parables listening to Jesus, alongside the original hearers of these stories, surrounded by the rocks and the grass and the bushes and the thorns and saying to your companions, “What in the world does he mean by that?”

  “THERE WAS A MAN who had two sons,” said Jesus, in the best short-story intro in history.29 “The younger of them said to his father, ‘Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.’” Immediately Jesus’s listeners would have perked up. The young man is asking for an early distribution of his inheritance, which is tantamount to saying to the father, “I wish you were dead.” Rotten son! the listeners would think.

  Sometime later, the son moves to a far country, where he squanders all he has “in dissolute living.” The Greek asōtōs is sometimes translated as “careless living,” but “debauchery” is closer to the mark. After he spends his wealth, a famine grips the land, and the now impoverished man hires himself out to a swineherd, who gives him a job feeding pigs.

  Tending the pigs of a Gentile would have meant that the man was as alienated as a Jew could possibly imagine.30 In his poverty, he envies the pigs: “He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything.” Not surprisingly, the man comes to his senses (eis heauton de elthōn, literally, “came to himself”), apparently repents, and remembers his father’s farm, where the hired hands have more than enough to eat.

  Either out of honest remorse or simple hunger, the man decides to apologize and say, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.” The “hired hand” is the misthios, the one to whom wages were due, but nothing more, certainly not a personal relationship. The son is saying to the father, in essence, “Imagine now that I am dead.” Already Jesus’s story is setting up the listeners to think about matters of life and death.

  The son sets off toward home. You can imagine Jesus’s listeners expecting, as in other parables where miscreants are dealt with harshly, that the younger son will be severely punished. If the steward who failed to invest was cast into outer darkness, how much more will a greedy son suffer! But while the son was still far from his home, his father “saw him and was filled with compassion.”

  Let’s pause here. We may be so familiar with the story that we overlook something that may have surprised its original audience: at this point the father hasn’t heard his son express any remorse yet. Jesus says that the father was “filled with compassion” simply upon seeing him. The Greek is the wonderful esplagchnisthē, he felt it in his guts—the seat of feelings in the Hellenistic world. It’s the same word Luke uses to describe Jesus’s emotions when seeing the hungry crowd before he feeds them in the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, and that was used earlier in Luke when Jesus meets a widow in the town of Nain, whose son has just died. It is also used to describe the Samaritan’s reaction upon seeing the beaten ma
n in the Parable of the Good Samaritan.31 We are meant to feel for people in our guts, to be moved to compassion, and to act.

  Then the father does something marvelous. The English translation says that he “ran and put his arms around him and kissed him.” The original Greek is far more beautiful. Kai dramōn epepesen epi ton trachēlon autou kai katephilēsen auton can be translated, “And running, he fell upon his neck and fervently kissed him.” It recalls the tender scene in the Book of Genesis where Joseph, in service to the Pharaoh, is overcome with emotion at being reunited with his brothers (who had sold him into slavery), falls upon them, and kisses them. Joseph cries so loudly that all of Pharaoh’s household can hear him.32

  The scene of the father weeping over his wayward son is a beautiful, human scene. But it must have awakened complex emotions in Jesus’s listeners. Who could fail to think of one’s own father’s embrace and the deep-seated human need for parental love and acceptance? At the same time, who could not feel confused by the father’s apparent approval of the son’s leave-taking and debauched living? What was going on?

  For the shocked, more shock follows. The father calls for a special robe to be brought out—prōtēn, the first, the best one—and placed on the son; and he offers a ring for his finger. He orders the “fatted calf” brought out, that is, the calf fed specifically on grain (rather than left to graze in the field) and marked for special celebrations. “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found!” Luke Timothy Johnson rightly calls these “extravagant” gestures.33

  In Luke’s Gospel, this parable follows the Parables of the Lost Sheep and the Lost Coin, so early readers would have made the connection to God’s seeking out and welcoming the lost. The shepherd carries the sheep around his neck in a tender gesture; the father rushes to kiss the son’s neck in a tender gesture. You can feel the father’s joy and his relief: My son is home! The father is prodigal—lavish, extravagant, and overly generous. The story could easily be called the Parable of the Prodigal Father.