Working with Unjust Wealth

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There is much puzzlement about the parable of the mid-manager who is dismissed from his office. (Lk. 16: 1–9) Not least is the question as to whether we should called him “the Dishonest Manger,” as does the NRSV, or the “unjust manager” as many other English translations have it. The Greek word here is adikaios. This is in the dikaios word group which normally is translated as “justice “ or “righteousness.” Here, it is preceded by the alpha privative so that literally it means a manager without justice or righteousness. Dishonest mangers do have that lack, but since the word dikaios occurs frequently in the New Testament meaning justice and/or righteousness, I think it is preferable to say that the manager is unrighteous rather than dishonest. The unjust Judge who would only do justice for the widow when pestered by the widow was also described by the word adikaios, which is clearly best translated as “unjust.” (Lk. 18: 6) There is a significant difference in the two English terms and since this parable is very opaque, we can use all the clarity we can get. This understanding of the word gains more credence when we note that the unrighteous manager is not accused of embezzlement but of squandering the property of the rich man who had hired him. There is also the matter of the rich man acting on hearsay without apparently doing any independent investigation.

The unrighteous manager’s inner dialogue is realistic and pragmatic. He is quite clear about the ulterior motive behind his scheme of lowering the debts of his former boss’s clients: that these people will welcome him into their homes for what he has done for them. It appears that the unrighteous manger is cheating his former master, but it is possible that he was receiving a commission on the notes and was deducting what would have been his share. That the former master chuckles over what his fired employee has done suggests that he had not suffered further loss over these transactions. It’s hard to see how the Kingdom of God can be like this sort of moral muddle, and Jesus does not, in fact, say the Kingdom of God is like this. So what does a parable like this have to do with the Kingdom of God?

The parable suggests that handling money is intrinsically problematic, and the greedier one is, the more problematic it is. Both the rich man and the people who owe the rich man material goods come across as wanting best value for their money. Almost all of us do that and that is why this parable mirrors our involvement with money and other material goods. Calling the wealth “unjust” rather than “dishonest” better captures the systemic injustice of the world’s economic system. The unrighteous manger is the only one in the parable who acts generously even if that is only under duress: unless the “squandering” of the rich man’s property involved being generous with the goods he was responsible for. Given recent events, I can’t help but think of the refusal of some politicians to “squander” money on helping those most in need of assistance.

Indeed, Jesus shifts the focus from handling money in this world to the relationship between how generous we are with money in terms of our eternal destiny: “And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone they may welcome you into the eternal homes.” (Lk. 16: 9) Jesus then goes on with a few other comments, the most pertinent being “No slave can serve two masters, for a slave will either hate the one and love the other or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.” (:Lk. 16: 13) The rich man and the clients who owe the rich man goods are caught in serving wealth, while the unrighteous manager seems to have freed himself from it to some extent. By mirroring the morally chaotic life of pursuing wealth, Jesus alerts us to the need to escape this rat race by aiming for “the eternal homes.” So where is the Kingdom of God? It isn’t here unless we all practice the generosity of the unrighteous steward which disrupts the system he was living in up to the time he was fired.

The Real Cripple

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It is often said that we learn a lot about a person by how a person takes adversity. Some become embittered while some show amazing patience. In the story in today’s Gospel (Lk. 13: 10-17) we have a woman who was been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. If that isn’t adversity, nothing is. How patient has this woman been? One important clue is that the woman was present at the synagogue. In spite of her pain and handicap, she was participating in the worship of Israel. Even if she had help from others, she had made quite an effort to be there. The leader of the synagogue seems to be a healthy, vigorous man. If he is suffering in any way, it doesn’t show. Jesus is also there. He soon suffers abuse from the leader of the synagogue, but it is later in the story of Jesus that we learn how deeply he endures suffering. Also present are The People. If the eighteen years the woman has been crippled is an illusion to the eighteen years Israel suffered under Eglon before they were delivered by Ehud (Judges 3:12-25) then the crippled woman stands for all of The People suffering in the present time under the rule of Rome and the Jewish leaders.

We also learn a lot about a person by how that person reacts to the suffering of another. The leader of the synagogue shows not the slightest sympathy to the crippled woman, while Jesus shows such a profound sympathy the he goes up to her and heals her, knowing that the leader of the synagogue was sure to berate him for what he had done. This is the kind of act by which Jesus deflected the suffering of another to himself, the kind of act that would lead to the cross.

Yet another way we learn a lot about a person is by how that person reacts to the good fortune of another. The formerly crippled woman rejoices, another sign that she had taken adversity well. An embittered person might not have rejoiced so strongly. The leader of the synagogue creates a very bad impression on that score. At least this isn’t a case of a person who gloats over the misfortunes of others and is upset over their good fortune as a result. What is chilling , though, is that the man’s sense of values gets in the way of human sympathy and an ability to rejoice in the woman’s healing. The leader of the synagogue has a vision of the perfect sabbath, something that could be and actually is a good thing. The sabbath is a gift of God, a day of rest where one abstains from work because even God renounced God’s creative work so as to simply rest. But this vision has become corrupted in to a notion that one cannot accept a wondrous gift of healing that happened on that day. A sad irony of all this is that Jesus doesn’t seem to have done any work beyond laying hands on the crippled woman. The counter example of untying a donkey to bring it to water takes more effort.

This story, then, invites us to examine our values and how we use them. The leader in the synagogue has good values but he uses them wrongly. The sign that he uses his values wrongly is his inability (unwillingness?) to rejoice in the healing of the crippled woman. What Jesus shows us in this story is that each individual person is important and no value should be allowed to override this significance. Every crippled person is Israel and every healed person is a cause for all Israel to rejoice. The leader of the synagogue seemed to be a healthy person, but while all of The People were rejoicing, he alone showed himself to be severely crippled by a spirit. Can this cripple allow Jesus to touch him on the sabbath and cure him? Can we take the healing of this crippled woman as a sign for the healing of all of us, all of Israel?

The Call to Contemplation

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The brief story of Jesus visiting Martha and Mary, when Martha serves Jesus and Mary sits at his feet, listening to him, (Lk. 10: 38-42) has been interpreted as contrasting the active and contemplative lives since the early church. The contrast between Martha being so frantically active and Mary so still a listener firmly calls for attention. In any case, the relationship between activity and contemplation is one with which Christians have struggled since the Early Church. Although the Desert monastics embraced an ardent contemplative lifestyle, there are stories about the need for Martha, such as the amusing story of a visitor to a monastery who said he would not help with the work because he had, like Mary, chosen the better part, but was upset when he wasn’t called to dinner.

On the face of it, though, the contrast of action and contemplation doesn’t seem to be an issue for Luke or the other Gospel writers, which raises the question of whether or not the use of this story for evaluating the relationship between action and contemplation might be a bit anachronistic, even if congruent to the story. So I thought about what the story might have met to Luke–-but came up empty. I couldn’t think of any other meaning than the traditional one, which raises the question of whether it is so anachronistic after all.

First, I reflected on the pace of each of the four Gospels. Mark, considered the earliest, is very fast paced, breathlessly narrating the healing miracles and overwhelming the reader (or listener) with the power of Jesus’ ministry. Matthew and Luke slow the pace considerably, mainly by including long episodes of Jesus’ teaching, teachings that require reflection to begin taking them in. Although Luke’s pace is roughly the same as Matthew’s, it is instructive that he stresses more the times Jesus went off alone to pray, suggesting that Jesus had to balance his active life with contemplation. John, most likely the latest Gospel, is much the most contemplative Gospel as it unfolds at a very slow pace and suggests deeper meanings to the events in the narration. Such a progression suggests a growing awareness of those who developed the Gospel traditions of the need to contemplate the meaning of Jesus’ life that culminated in the shocks of the crucifixion and Resurrection, as well as absorbing the teachings which seem to have puzzled Jesus’ closest followers at the time. So, the traditional interpretation of this brief story doesn’t seem anachronistic after all.

When we look at the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, we encounter profoundly contemplative insights on the part of Paul, or whoever else might have written the epistle. (I favor Pauline authorship, but if somebody else shared the same contemplative insights as Paul demonstrated in his undoubted epistles, that attests all the more to the contemplative development of the early church.) Paul connects Jesus, whom he encountered on the Road to Damascus, to the Creator of the world, (Col. 1: 15–17) perhaps sensing the same creative activity on the part of God in Genesis as in the re-creation Paul experienced when Jesus called him out. This same Jesus is also the head of the Church, (Col. 1: 18) the specific group of humans who have responded to Jesus as Paul has. All this convinces Paul that the fullness of God dwells within Jesus. (Col. 1: 19) Most important, Paul realizes that Jesus’ reconciliation with him, who had formerly been hostile to Jesus, is part of a general reconciliation Jesus has made with all people, a reconciliation made not through the military, political, and cultural force of the Pax Romana, but the Peace of Christ who suffered at the hands of the Roman Empire. (Col. 1: 20) The very persecution Paul engaged in was flipped to a reconciliation by the suffering of Jesus. In this dense passage, we see the fruits of profound contemplation, a sitting at the feet of Jesus in quiet prayer. This gives us all the more reason to believe that Luke, probably writing two or three decades later than Paul, was passing on a caution traced back to Jesus that the action required by charity, such as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan that directly precedes this story of Mary and Martha, and the need to proclaim the Kingdom of God, be grounded in quiet contemplation of what the Kingdom ix really about.

In Genesis, we have the incident when Abraham and Sarah welcome three men who turn out to be angels. (Gen. 18: 1–10) Although there is much activity, we don’t see the frantic movements of Martha, and certainly not a trace of the resentment on Martha’s part. Starting with the Early Church, there has been a tendency to interpret the angels as the Holy Trinity come to visit the patriarch and matriarch. That interpretation really is anachronistic, but Paul’s proclamation that “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints” (Col. 1: 26) suggests that some interpretations of scripture will transcend time. The well-known icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev, inspired by this scene, leads us into the deep contemplation, not only of the hospitality of Martha, Sarah, and Abraham, but also of the hospitality of Mary who invited Jesus deeply into her heart. Such a presence of God within us can never be taken away from us and will remain with us for all eternity.

On Being Migrant Citizens

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Migration is one of the major themes in the Bible. Abraham was called out of Ur of the Chaldees and Isaac and Jacob were constantly on the move. In Deuteronomy, Moses gives a retrospective account of their migration from Egypt to the Promised Land of Canaan that they are about to enter. In contradistinction to the Egyptians, Moses insists that the God who lead them out of Egypt demands good treatment to helpless people, especially the widow and the orphan, and the stranger, since they were strangers in Egypt. (Deut. 10: 19) Later, there we are migrations of the Jewish people at the hands of power politics that lead to the Babylonian Exile and the Return from Exile under the rule of Cyrus. With the prophets’ conviction that God was at the root of these movements, there is the suggestion that God, rather than any particular piece of land, is their true home. The author of Hebrews reviews all of the biblical migrations to teach us that, no matter how much we may think we feel “at home” in this world, this world is not our true homeland but that God has prepared a better homeland, “a heavenly one.” (Heb. 11: 16) Hardly surprising since the Son of Man had no place to lay his head. (Mt. 8: 20) If everybody’s true Homeland is a heavenly one, then there is no land on earth where anyone should be considered a stranger and treated the way the Egyptians, the Assyrians or the Babylonians treated the Jews. (Or the ways the Jews treated the Canaanites when they entered the Promised Land.) From these considerations, it follows that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us, as Jesus teaches us in Matthew. (Mt. 5: 44) After all, if we are all aliens, then nobody is an alien, and there is no reason for anybody to be an enemy.

On Independence Day in the U.S., one may be prompted to use these reflections for guidance as to how our nation should conduct itself. That is, we should be welcoming to people seeking entry into our country, nurture the vulnerable, and do what we can to cultivate good relations with other countries. Bad governance by these guidelines would be to pursue a policy of enmity, either against people within the country or with other countries, or both. Usually the two go together, as the more enemies one finds, the more enemies one finds. Such governance is a disquieting escalation that will have no end until, like the serpent Ouroboros, we devour our own tail. After all, hatred of others tends to be rooted in hatred of self. Ouroboros is considered a symbol of infinity, but it is the infinity of the closed circle, and thus a vicious cycle. Such closed circles represent the policies of most sovereignties since the foundation of the world, with Egypt, Assyria,. Babylon, and Rome being biblical examples. It is the infinity of God, the maker of Heaven and Earth, who specifically commands the Israelites to open their circle, and with Jesus, this true infinity becomes a human being who breaks the circle we keep trying to close again. So it is that closed-circle rulers such as in Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Rome, and the Jewish leaders of Jerusalem crucify Jesus, only to have the Risen Victim open to us the way to an open system for all time, if and when we will have it.

With a political observance such as Independence Day, it is tempting to keep the focus on what the government should do, making ourselves armchair coaches with no responsibility–America’s favorite blood sport–but it is all the more important to realize that when political leaders show a need for enemies, they need for us to need enemies ourselves. When we put the matter this way, we begin to see how difficult these teachings are for ourselves. We ourselves tend to find excuses to consider some people to be aliens and others to be enemies. Life seems to lose its meaning without them. But if we have it in us to envision a country living by biblical principles, living as migrants wandering towards a heavenly homeland, then we need to open the closed system of enmity and open ourselves to the Holy Spirit who lovingly tears down these barriers. If we want a loving, peaceful country, we have to be peaceful, loving selves. That would be a cause for celebration.

Eating a Story

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Corpus Christi is an odd feast. Almost all of the other feasts celebrate an event in the life of Jesus or the life of a saint. Corpus Christi is focused on the doctrine and devotion to the Eucharist. Only the Feast of the Trinity has a similar focus insofar as it celebrates a doctrine fundamental to Christianity. The trouble with celebrating either feast as primarily doctrinal is that doctrines in themselves seem lifeless. Who besides mathematicians can get excited about the paradoxes of one and three, and who but scholastic theologians can get excited about what the Real Presence in bread and wine is all about?

The Trinity, of course is not a doctrine, and it isn’t really a mathematical puzzle for that matter. The Trinity is a story of creation and redemption and sanctification. Not that each person of the Trinity is confined to one of those roles. All three Persons do all three and much, much more. The sacrament of the Eucharist also celebrates a story, the same story that is told about the Trinity. (See Trinity as Story and Song.) The Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, is one important incident in the story of Jesus coming to earth as a helpless child, living a life of a human vulnerable to whatever other humans choose to do to him, dying on a cross when that is what humans chose to do, rising from the dead, and being seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places. We have celebrated this story one step at a time, starting with the expectations of Advent all the way through to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Trinity Sunday puts the whole story together in one big celebration and then Corpus Christ does the same from a different angle.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God relates to God’s creatures according to their mode of reality. In the case of humans, this means that God relates to us, material creatures that we are, through the material world in time and in history. The Eucharistic rite takes place in time. It incorporates past times, most particularly the times when Jesus suffered and died and then rose again, but also the time when the Israelites were delivered from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, an event recalled at the Passover for the Jews. The Eucharistic rite also takes place in the present moment when it is celebrated. Whatever events on both local and world fronts are incorporated into the celebration and offered to God. Moreover, God’s promises for the future when all will be made one in Christ are present as well. That’s a lot of time and history to be contained in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Discussions of real presence and dolling the sacrament up in a monstrance for Benediction both have some danger of reifying the Body and Blood of Christ. However, use of one’s intelligence to perceive some intelligibility in the holy Mysteries is part of what it means to be an embodied human being. This is salutary as long as one is willing to allow what intelligibility that emerges to remain surrounded by mystery. Dressing up to celebrate is another facet of our embodied way of living. It is the kind of celebration we engage in to honor people we love and respect. The important thing to realize is that we are eating and drinking some powerful stories when we partake of the bread and wine, and we are celebrating these same stories deep in our hearts as we pray before the dressed-up sacrament. These stories of deliverance from slavery and the suffering of the Prince of Peace inform the way we prayerfully incorporate contemporary events and they prepare us for how we should live out our stories as parts of the greater stories embodied in the sacrament. These same stories have prompted many liturgical theologians to stress the importance of social concerns and outreach as necessary outcomes of the Eucharistic celebration.

There is a human expression about eating our words. The implication is that our words come back to haunt us in some way. It is perhaps worth thinking about whether or not what we say is worth consuming for others, let alone ourselves. In any case, eating the words of Jesus is profound nourishment, nourishment to eternal life. When we receive the bread and wine at the altar and consume it, we are swallowing the story of Christ hook, line, and sinker. By swallowing this story, we live our own life stories within the life story given us by the Word made Flesh.

It Was Necessary that Jesus Ascend

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With the celebrations of Christmas and Easter and, to some extent, Pentecost, the celebration of Ascension seems to get lost in the shuffle, something of an afterthought if it is thought about at all. Part of the trouble is that it isn’t all that easy to get an idea of what the Ascension is all about, so we wonder: What ‘s the big deal? We celebrated Jesus’s birth at Christmas and his rising from the dead at Easter. What more do we need? Isn’t the Resurrection enough? According to Luke and John the answer is: No.

Another part of the trouble is that the Ascension is a downer with Jesus leaving his disciples. The first aria in J.S. Bach’s Ascension Oratorio is a long lament over Jesus’ departure. Hardly a cause for celebration. If Jesus loves us enough to come to earth and spend time with us, why would Jesus leave us?

Distance as well as closeness, however, typifies our relationship with God. It is put succinctly in the Psalm verse: “For though the Lord is high, he regards the lowly.” (Ps. 138: 6) In theological terms, God is radically transcendent, but also radically imminent. God’s immediate presence wouldn’t be all that awesome if God were not transcendent as well, and a god who remains aloof from humans doesn’t exactly catch the heart of humans. Moreover, God’s distance gives humans space to live by decisions humans make while God’s closeness offers guidance to those who are open to it.

Luke describes a forty day period during which Jesus talks about the Kingdom of God and the forgiveness of sins. Most importantly, Jesus opens up the scriptures to the disciples by explaining why it was “necessary” that he suffer and rise from the dead. (As Luke and the other Gospel writers make clear, the “necessity” is human, not divine.) All of these are good thing, such good things that it is puzzling why Jesus would leave rather than continue with them. So what was the problem?

On the road to Emmaus, Cleopas and his companion told Jesus (while not recognizing him) that they had hoped he would “redeem Israel.” (Lk. 24: 21) In opening the scriptures to these two companions, Jesus shifted their lost hope to the need for Jesus to die and rise again. But after opening the scriptures for another forty days, Jesus was still asked: “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” (Acts 1: 6) At this point, it was clear that, as long as Jesus was with the disciples, they would be distracted from his opening the scriptures to them. The temptation to triangle Jesus into their human agenda seems to have been irresistible as long as Jesus was physically present. Only if Jesus left them would they have the space to let the scriptures be opened to them so that they could understand the need for Jesus to have died and risen again. Jesus’ leaving also left the disciples as vulnerable to other humans as Jesus himself was while on earth, putting them, and us, in the position of suffering at their hands.

A second reason for the need for Jesus to ascend after a relatively brief time after his Resurrection builds on the first reason but also reinstates the dialectic of transcendence and imminence that had been temporarily compromised by Jesus’ Incarnate presence on earth. In John, Jesus says that only if he goes away can he send the Paraclete to guide them in all truth. In Luke, Jesus promises the disciples that the Holy Spirit will soon come if they wait in Jerusalem. Sure enough, ten days later, the Holy Spirit comes in tongues of fire, giving the disciples the gift of tongues so that they can communicate with other peoples. More importantly, the Holy Spirit guides the disciples into understanding the scriptures that Jesus had opened up for them so that not only did they finally understand that Jesus had to die and rise again, they were inspired to preach this truth along with proclaiming the forgiveness of sins.

In Ephesians, Paul proclaims the reality of the crucified, risen, and ascended Lord, seated at God’s right hand “in the heavenly places.” (Eph. 1: 20) Jesus may be exalted, with “all things under his feet,” but this exalted Jesus remains the crucified Lord who had to die before being so highly exalted. That is, we are not under the rule of a powerful deity, we are under the rule of the crucified one who rose with total forgiveness of those who tortured and killed him. It is this crucified, risen and ascended Lord who appeared to Stephen when he was being stoned for preaching what the Holy Spirit had inspired him to preach, and it was the exalted Jesus who filled Stephen with the same forgiveness of his persecutors. The ascended Lord may be infinitely up on high, but this same Lord sends the Holy Spirit deep into our hearts with the same apostolic message of forgiveness he gave to the disciples.

Dwelling in Sacred Space

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When I read Mircea Eliade as a college student, one of the first things I learned from him was the importance of sacred space, of a designated space being the center of the world. The designation might seem arbitrary in that it could be any space, sort of like Winnie-the-Pooh and Christopher Robin planting a pole in the ground and proclaiming it the North Pole. But once a space was designated as sacred, it truly was sacred ground and treated as such. Although the sacred space could be anywhere to begin with, there is a tendency to see certain landscapes, such as tall mountains and luminous lakes, as more likely to be considered holy space than others.

The early humans who designated sacred space didn’t have any notion of confining God to a certain spot. They instinctively knew that God is everywhere, but they also felt the need to focus. Solomon shares the same insight in his prayer at the dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem when he says: “But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built! “ (1 Kings 8: 27) Although the Israelites knew that God is everywhere, the temple was a focal point for Jewish piety. The Psalmist exulted in dwelling in the temple with God and longed for it desperately when torn away from it when taken into exile. I have the same sort of experience with the churches I worshiped in while growing up and with the Abbey Church where I have worshiped for more years than I can count. During the Eucharist, I keep getting the sense that the Abbey Church has become the center of the world as the bread and wine is consecrated. Not that the abbey is the only center of the world. There are countless more. As a practical matter, it is much easier to appreciate the fact that God is everywhere and act accordingly when a particular place is entered at a specific time to focus on God. By practicing decorum and reverence in a designated place, we are more apt to practice decorum, and reverence elsewhere.

Stemming from the insight of early humans and Solomon that the Temple cannot contain God are the various prophetic critiques of misuses of the temple for personal advantage of one sort or another. Jeremiah, for example, warned against trusting in words such as “This is the temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord! The temple of the Lord.” (Jer. 7: 4) Hosea insisted that God preferred mercy to burnt offerings. (Hos. 6: 6) Jesus’ act of driving out the money changers was a climax of such prophecies. In Matthew’s version of this story, Jesus then heals the blind and the lame, (Mt. 21: 14) suggesting that such healing is much more in line of what the temple is for than changing money to keep the sacrifices going. Matthew’s placing of these acts of healing seem out of context, but they allude to an odd incident when David attacked the Jebusites and took the city. The defenders taunted David by saying that even the blind and the lame would be able to stop him. (2 Sam. 5: 6) David was believed to hate the blind and the lame as a result of the taunt, but it is more likely that David hated the able-bodied defenders who taunted him. One could say that Jesus was fulfilling David’s conquest of Jerusalem by healing the blind and the lame. In the end, nobody is going to stop Jesus.

John adds that Jesus implied that he himself is the Temple when he said that if the Temple is destroyed, he can rebuild it in three days. (Jn. 2: 19) St. Paul and St. Peter famously extended the human temple to everybody. St. Paul said that each of us is God’s temple, (1 Cor. 6: 10) and St. Peter said we are all living stones “built into a spiritual house.” (1 Pet. 2: 5) Jesus was a particular person who lived on earth at a particular time and place, but he has extended his sanctity as a temple to each of us, not least the blind and lame whom he cured in the temple. In his climactic teaching in Matthew, Jesus said that what we do and don’t do for the “least” of people is done, or not done, to him. (Mt. 25) Peter adds depth to this teaching by reminding us that Jesus was the stone rejected by the builders which has become the cornerstone. (1 Peter. 2: 7) God continues to build God’s house, God’s temple with stones rejected by those who would build human culture.

Just as sacred space can be, and is, anywhere and everywhere, everybody can be, and in fact is, a temple of God. We should treat ourselves and each other accordingly with decorum and reverence.

Resurrection in Miniature

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One of the oldest instinctual human acts is to reverence the bodies of the dead. Only in the most recent years have there been any signs of attenuation of such customs. There are no pragmatic reasons for it. As Søren Kierkegaard noted, the dead can’t pay you back for what we do for them, which makes reverence for the dead a profound act of disinterested love. Why do we have this instinct? Why was it important to the women to bring spices to the tomb at the dawn of the day after the sabbath at great expense? In answering these questions, it occurs to me that there is something awesome about death. How is it that the life that used to fill this body is no longer there? Where did that life go, if it went anywhere? Finding the tomb empty was bewildering to the women. How could they reverence the body if the body was not there? Worse, what sort of disrespectful act might have been committed on the body of a man who had died a criminal’s death?

Suddenly seeing the two men in dazzling clothes only compounded the bewilderment. These “men,” presumably angels, teased the women for looking for the living among the dead. (Lk. 24: 5) True, if one is looking for a live person, a tomb is not the best place to look, but the women had come to reverence a dead person who had meant much to them, and a tomb is the right place to look for that. As it turns out, the women who came to the tomb are the first to be told that Jesus is risen. They are also derided for not having expected this outcome, but since this is the only time in the history of the world that a dead person has risen bodily from the dead, they can be pardoned for not expecting it, Jesus’ prophesies of dying and rising notwithstanding. After all, the disciples didn’t believe Jesus when he said he was going to be killed. How could such a great man come to such an end? And if they didn’t believe Jesus was going to die, they would hardly have gotten to the notion he would rise again. Given the reaction of the women at the tomb, they hadn’t believed these prophesies any more than the disciples did.

It is highly significant that the first persons to be told about Jesus’ rising were not the disciples, but this small group of women who came to care for a dead body by anointing it with spices. One could say they got a lot more for their kind action than they bargained for. What if nobody had come to the tomb to reverence the body of Jesus? Would the resurrection have been made known? The story following in Luke gives us the first resurrection appearance of Jesus himself, but it isn’t straight-forward. The two disciples on the Road to Emmaus don’t recognize Jesus, but they invite him to stay with them when they come to an inn at eventide. If they had not kindly invited the stranger to stay and share supper with them, would they ever have seen the man as Jesus resurrected from the dead?

When the two disciples run back to Jerusalem to tell the other followers of Jesus, they are told that Jesus had appeared to Simon Peter. Although one would think this appearance the most momentous of all, it is mentioned almost in passing. Even Paul gives it more prominence is his list of appearances. (1 Cor. 15: 5) Luke then concludes with Jesus appearing to all of the disciples. It all seems low-key and very quiet. Hardly earth-shaking as the Resurrection is in Matthew.

I suggest we think further about how closely tied the Resurrection appearances in Luke are to small acts of human kindness. In Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri tells of how a man’s small act of giving him a bag of nuts made a deep impression on him. Such acts may seem to accomplish little, but they are the stuff of the resurrected life that abides.

The Prodigal Parable

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The Parable traditionally known as The Prodigal Son (Lk. 15: 11–32) is obviously a story of estrangement and reconciliation and forgiveness. So clear is this message, there should be no diluting or compromising it with violence, discord, or unforgiveness. However, the United States, a country filled with active churches, has the highest rate of incarceration in the world by a large margin. On top of that, we are seeing a spirit of vengeance in politics that seems to keep on growing. Does this parable’s meaning just disappear at the church door on the way out to the “real” world? A lawyer, Preston Shipp, author of Confessions of a Former-Prosecutor is an example of this disconnect. While raised in the church, he dreamed of being a prosecuting attorney from a fairly young age to protect society from the bad guys who victimized the good people. For many years, he fulfilled this dream by working at the state attorney’s office in Nashville. All this time, Jesus’ parable was in a totally alien universe, to judge by his own account. So, somehow, the simple and clear message of the parable is extraordinarily difficult to hear and believe in and act out in life. Why is this? Does the Parable itself give us insights into these difficulties? Let us take a look for ourselves with the help of Preston Shipp.

The elder brother’s relationship with his younger brother is not brotherly, although I suppose a cynic might say that’s what brotherhood is. Given the outrageous way the younger brother left home (demanding, not requesting his half of the inheritance) there are understandable reasons for this attitude. In any case, the elder brother’s calling his younger brother “that son of yours” in speaking with his father, suggests a highly depersonalized relationship with his brother. Preston Shipp writes about how he realized that the justice system is designed to prevent a prosecutor from having any personal awareness of the person he was prosecuting, let alone a relationship. This changed when a professor he had in college asked him to teach some law classes for college credit in a woman’s prison. This experience of bonding with incarcerated persons lead him to leave the prosecutor’s office. He now works for the Campaign for the Fair Sentencing of Youth. Clearly, the way we manage relationships has a lot to do with how forgiving, or not, we might be. The second time Preston taught a course, he was highly impressed by a woman named Cyntoia Brown. She was underage when convicted of murder, but was sentenced as an adult. As he learned of her exposure to sex trafficking from an early age and other factors, he saw a person in a way that a prosecuting attorney is not encouraged to see a defendant. Imagine his shock when he received a copy of a court document he had filed while still working as a prosecutor, showing that he himself had rejected her appeal of a 51-year sentence and had never recollected it after meeting her in class.

Although the elder son is dutiful in the sense of staying home and working on his father’s farm, the way he berates his father for receiving his younger brother suggests he has little love for the work or for his father. Serious dissatisfaction with one’s work and family situation can harden the heart and make one less inclined to forgive. However, when the father tells the elder brother that everything he has, his elder son also has, we gain the suspicion that perhaps the elder brother was surrounded with blessings, like fattened calves, that he did not see or appreciate. Such lack of appreciation also dampens a sense of forgiveness of other people. The elder brother may have stayed with his father geographically, but his mind and heart seem to have been miles away.

The trauma of abuse or violent crime can make it difficult for the victim to forgive. Preston Shipp encountered many such crimes and knows what they cost the victims, although he also realized that the justice system did nothing to assist such victims except to feed any vengeance they might have. There is nothing in the parable to suggest that the elder brother had suffered any such trauma. The father, on the other hand, was surely traumatized by his younger son’s departure, and yet he welcomed him back with open arms. Cyntoia Brown was traumatized when she saw that her appeal had been denied and that Preston Shipp had been the one who reviewed it and rejected it. Preston expected to be skewered by her when he came to the next class, but he found her deeply forgiving, in spite of her hurt. This particular story has a happy ending in that, with the help of some celebrities taking up her cause which brought her into the public eye, Cyntoia was finally released from prison and has become an activist for many social causes, hoping to prevent what happened to her from happening to other people.

Shipp explains in many ways how vengeance is systemic in our judicial system and throughout our country’s cultural system. This system of vengeance is greatly exacerbated by systemic racism that has characterized American culture since colonial times and continues unabated to the present day. Racism, of course, entails much depersonalization of the other. More important, participation in such as system skews our perception of reality where many things taken for granted shouldn’t be. Will we ever bottom out of this collective sin the way the younger brother bottomed out of his sensual sins? On the other hand, this parable depicts a party being celebrated by an entire household, except for the elder brother. We can take this party as an image of a society transformed by forgiveness and reconciliation, an eschatological vision, we might say. Surely this party is an image of God, in Christ, “reconciling the world to himself.” (1 Cor. 19) Does this image attract us in any way, enough for us to desire to enter into it? Or are we more attracted to a society governed by the elder brother as he berates his father for such a celebration?

.When the father says to his elder son that the younger son had been dead and has come to life, (Lk. 15: 32) the story shifts to the Paschal Mystery. Such radical forgiveness makes one vulnerable, as the father was vulnerable. Who would want to be treated as the younger son treated his father? Who would want to be treated the way the older son treated his father? It is sobering to recall that the person who told this beautiful and edifying story was crucified as a criminal. Can we trust that this victim is risen and is still inviting us to the party?