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Commentary: The President’s Celebration

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Image by Jordan Stimpson from Pixabay

The President’s Celebration is an adaptation of Matthew 22:1-14

The Kingdom of God and the Wedding Banquet

The imagery of God’s Kingdom as a wedding banquet draws on Isaiah 25:6-8, where God invites Israel to a banquet, as well as Hosea’s and Jeremiah’s extended metaphors/parables about Israel as God’s unfaithful wife. Jesus seems to have combined the two images – the Kingdom is a wedding banquet; unfaithful Israel is being called to start again.

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The President’s Celebration

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Image by Jordan Stimpson from Pixabay

The President’s Celebration is an adaptation of Matthew 22:1-14

God’s nation is like a President who organised a celebration for the President-Elect. He sent ambassadors and messengers to everyone with an invitation telling them to come, but they refused.

So, he tried again, sending out more messengers, saying: “Tell them everything’s ready. The best chefs, the finest food, they’re all waiting for you. Come celebrate!”

Some of the invitees, they paid no attention, busying themselves with their businesses and their jobs. The other invitees, they even kidnapped the messengers and then killed them! The President, he was furious and sent in the troops. They got the murderers and their city was burnt to the ground in the fighting.

Then the President said to his messengers: “The President-Elect’s celebration is all ready, but the people I invited didn’t deserve their invitations. So now go out into the streets and invite anyone you find.” The messengers did just that. They went out and they invited everyone, good or bad, so the banqueting hall ended up full.

But when the President came in to greet the guests, he noticed one guy who’d turned up in shorts and a t-shirt. “My friend,” he said, “how did you even manage to get in without a suit?” The guy was speechless.

Then the President told his security guards to restrain the guy and throw him out, out into the dark with its whimpering and resentment.

“Because everyone was invited, but not everyone gets to stay.”

Commentary on The President’s Celebration

Previous Parable: Goldmines and Pearls

Next Parable: Growing From Seeds: Two Parables (Mark 4: 26-34)

Commentary: Goldmines and Pearls

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Image by Mugwe Thomas from Pixabay

Goldmines and Pearls is an adaptation of Matthew 13: 44-46

God’s Nation

I’ve changed ‘The Kingdom of Heaven’ to ‘God’s Nation’. What’s God’s nation?

The Kingdom of Heaven has quite a few centuries of baggage attached to it and, in my opinion, most people in our era hear the phrase and promptly shorten it to ‘Heaven’. The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ is ‘Up There’ and ‘Not Yet’.

Now, this is an entirely possible reading for these two parables, where Jesus is describing something people find. But Matthew doesn’t just use the phrase ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ in these parables; he repeats it in other parables that suggest something a bit more earthly. Something that starts small (one guy and his twelve followers, perhaps?) and then grows.

Given that I live in the United Kingdom, I’m familiar with a ‘Kingdom’ as a place, a people and as an idea, a sense of belonging. The Kingdom of Heaven, then, might also represent a place (God’s Kingdom-not-on-earth-but-in-Heaven), or a people who do God’s will on Earth, running their lives as if they were being ruled from Heaven, or a sense of belonging. Or all three. It’s not simply ‘Heaven’.

There are several possible synonyms for Kingdom, including ‘country’ and ‘nation’. Calling the Kingdom of Heaven ‘God’s Country’ reminds me rather strongly of C.S. Lewis and his ‘Aslan’s Country’, which would drag the parable into something otherworldly and a bit fairy-tale. Calling the Kingdom of Heaven ‘God’s Nation,’ on the other hand, brings the Kingdom ruled by God firmly back to this world. However, it does also give a good image of a group of people who have a sense of belonging to God and who are trying to do God’s will.

On a side note, it also helps modern hearers realise why the Judean and Roman authorities might have heard Jesus preach about the ‘Kingdom of Heaven/God’ and started to panic. ‘God’s Nation’ has far more in the way of political implications, so much so that Jesus might well have to spell out: ‘My Nation is not the type of nation you get in this world’ and that political insurrection is not on the agenda.

Hidden Treasure

One of the problems with retelling the Parable of the Hidden Treasure as if it were happening today is that our legal practices are not the same as Roman legal practices. The Kingdom of Heaven will be like someone who finds treasure in a field – and then gets into a years long legal process that includes having to offer the treasure to a museum. This doesn’t sound very like the Kingdom of Heaven.

Jesus wasn’t telling a fairy story in this parable; he was using the reasonably common practice of people hiding their savings or treasure by burying it. If they were never able to come back to reclaim it, someone else might find it years later. It was a bit like winning the lottery and it was common enough that there were laws establishing who had the ownership rights over the found treasure.

What similar event could happen today? Well, goldmines do exist in the UK and very valuable gold nuggets have been found as recently as 2018. Finding a new gold mine would certainly be cause for astonishment and joy – and yes, people do keep the location of these discoveries a secret.

The Problem of the First Owner

One of the interesting points about this parable is the first owner of the field. The finder of the treasure hides it again, then buys the field. By the law of the day, found treasure was split 50/50 between the finder and the owner of the land. In a sense, you could say that the finder is swindling the field’s owner out of the half share that is legally theirs. Yes, they’re paying a fair price for the field itself, but they didn’t mention the incredibly valuable treasure it contains.

So what about the original owner? Is Jesus talking about people who’ve had the Kingdom of Heaven available to them all this time – but who never went out and really looked?

The Pearl of Great Price

The Pearl of Great Price doesn’t really need any kind of retelling beyond minor modernisations of the wording. Pearls may no longer be the gem of choice, the way they were in Jesus’ time, but you can still find rare pearls that cost millions to buy. Swapping it to diamonds, the current gem of choice, wouldn’t really work because diamonds aren’t really rare; their cost is partly due to market demand and partly to the careful control of supply.

Natural pearls are still extremely rare and even cultivated pearls can still fetch high prices. This is one of the parables where the puzzle/metaphor is still instantly accessible. We do still have ‘pearls of great price’.

Previous Parable: The Lost Van

Next Parable: The President’s Celebration

Goldmines and Pearls

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Image by Mugwe Thomas from Pixabay

Goldmines and Pearls is an adaptation of Matthew 13: 44-46

What’s God’s Nation like? It’s like someone checking out an ordinary field, and suddenly realising there’s a gold mine underneath. They’re so thrilled, they sell everything they have to buy the mining rights.

Or, God’s Nation is like a jeweller, searching the world for the finest pearls. When they found one that was uniquely valuable, they sold everything they had to buy it.

Previous parable: The Lost Van

Next Parable: The President’s Celebration

Commentary: The Lost Van

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Image by PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay

The Lost Van is based on Luke 15:3-6

Sheep and Shepherds

There are two main questions with this parable. Firstly, if we have to tell it to people who aren’t familiar with sheep at all, should we keep ‘sheep’? Secondly, what do we do where there’s a prevalent metaphor of ‘sheep stands for people?’ If we drop ‘sheep’ we lose the many biblical images of God (or Jesus) as the shepherd and his people as sheep. However, in the UK, ‘sheep’ has an extremely negative connotation when the word is applied to people. Calling people sheep, or sheeple, is not a compliment.

Part of this is the difference between our style of shepherding and the style of shepherding practiced in the Middle East. Shepherds in the hills of the UK will gather their sheep with the aid of a highly trained dog. The sheep will be driven before the shepherd, possibly with some sharp nips from the dog to make sure they’re going in the right direction.

In the Middle East, Jesus would have been familiar with a system where sheep learn from birth to trust their shepherd to lead the flock. The shepherd is walking in front of the flock, leading them to drinking water, to grass, to the safety of their enclosure at night. So for Jesus and his listeners, the image of the lost sheep is that of a creature who should have trusted and followed their shepherd – but instead has wandered off on their own path. Knowing sheep, it’s probably stuck in a ditch somewhere. Or it’s found its way to a high ledge with some tasty grass and is now wondering why it can’t get down as easily as it got up.

But for people in the UK, the image of sheep is primarily of a stupid animal being driven forward to places it doesn’t want to go. ‘Sheep’, or ‘sheeple’, is a byword for people going forward blindly because someone (usually a malicious someone) is pushing them to go that way. With those negative connotations, maybe it might be worth trying the parable with another image than ‘sheep’.

Children or van?

One possible image would be ‘children’ and ‘teacher’. A group of children trustingly following their teacher – that’s pretty close to the image of the sheep trustingly following their shepherd. And Jesus himself was a teacher, so that image does keep some biblical echoes. But while we’d certainly make every effort to find the lost child, leaving the other ninety-nine alone ‘in the wilderness’ wouldn’t exactly be good practice…

However, in Luke’s Gospel, Luke has Jesus tell this parable with another story – one about a woman losing one of her silver coins, her ‘rainy day money’. So in this case, Jesus seems to be thinking about valuable things. To God, sinners are valuable, not worthless. They are just as valuable as the shepherd’s sheep (their means of making a living) or a woman’s silver coin (her emergency money).

Which is why I ended up using ‘van’. They’re a means of making a living. They’re valuable. They get lost. And while they don’t have any biblical connections (vans being in short supply in first century Galilee), they do have drivers. We can hear a story about a lost van and make the connection with a lost person. We’d also realise that the other ninety nine vans-and-drivers will likely be okay while the boss is out searching.

And it keeps one of the original meanings of this parable; that even though the shepherd has a hundred sheep, he cares about each and every one. The owner of our van fleet isn’t leaving this to subordinates. He’s out there searching, towing the van back if he has to, leading his lost van home.

Previous Parable: The Smart and Stupid Builders

Next Parable: Goldmines and Pearls