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Christianity retold

Commentary

People of God, Kingdom of God: Time to Change?

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On Earth As It Is In Heaven

Heaven isn’t a place on Earth. And yet, it is. But, very often, Western Christianity spends its time talking about ‘Heaven’ as a different place, God’s place. When Jesus talks about ‘the Kingdom of Heaven’ or ‘the Kingdom of God’, he’s often talking about Earth, right here and now – but we frequently miss that. He’s not always talking about ‘how we behave to get into Heaven,’ he’s often talking about ‘how we behave like people in God’s kingdom.’

Which is why I often translate ‘The Kingdom of Heaven/God’ as ‘God’s nation.’

Heaven is a Place Far, Far Away

One of the defining tropes of our secular age is – God won’t help. In horror movies, ghosts, demons and vampires exist, but God? God is on holiday. Or heaven can’t affect anything here on Earth; it’s where you go when you’re dead and finished with Earth. To help the people on Earth, or to truly live their lives, the hero often has to reject Heaven.

So God and Heaven are ‘up there’ and we’re ‘down here.’ Yet in Jesus’ parables about the Kingdom of God/Heaven, he’s often talking about right here on Earth. Mustard seeds, pearls hidden in fields – the people in Jesus’ parables find the Kingdom, grow the Kingdom right here.

Dual Citizenship

How can we see ‘heaven’ as here? One way is to think of ourselves as having dual citizenship. After all, lots of people have dual citizenship; they have two passports and two countries. Two sets of obligations.

In my country, the United Kingdom, there are four ‘home nations’ – the four countries that make up the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. It makes us an ‘and’ nation. English and British. Welsh and British. Irish and British. Scottish and British.

You can see how the Kingdom of God might work. Christian and British – or Jewish and British; Muslim and British. We live in two kingdoms, two nations. People have a dual citizenship.

Christendom

There’s an academic tendency, right now, to use ‘Christendom’ to refer to the time when almost everyone in Western Europe was Christian. Often, the reason almost everyone was Christian was because the Jews and the Muslims had been killed or forced to leave.

So there was no ‘dual citizenship’. Being a Christian outweighed any loyalty to an earthly king, but your faith encouraged loyalty to that earthly king. The downside is that this meant that Jews, Muslims and ‘other’ types of Christian were objects of suspicion. If you didn’t share the majority faith, what might that loyalty to your Kingdom of Heaven lead you to?

The Kingdom and Politics

The idea of dual citizenship can help us understand why the Romans panicked so much. After all, Christianity was only a small Jewish sect. The problem was that religion could be (and was) politically suspect. For example, the Romans connected Judaism with the desire for independence in Judea and Galilee. After the Jewish revolts of AD66- 73 and AD 132-136, the Romans banned Jews from Jerusalem.

Yet Christianity, with its references to ‘the Kingdom’ and its Jewish-style refusal to sacrifice to the Emperor, was even worse. God’s nation; the Kingdom of God – it’s all very much pointing towards an alternative system of government. This is not what a Roman administrator would want, especially if they were familiar with the recent rebellions and civil wars.

So What is God’s Nation?

Well, according to Jesus’ parables, we can find it on Earth. It’s often hidden – but hidden amongst things you see every day. It grows – in a quiet sort of way. And it’s beneficial because it adds benefits; it doesn’t take them away (though getting these benefits may cost you everything you have).

It’s a nation where people are still expected to do their jobs, but status doesn’t apply. All are equal; the only ‘status’ in God’s nation is ‘citizen’. A rich householder and their employee will sit down together for a meal. The householder is equal to the beggar and should share their riches with them.

It Doesn’t Just Happen

Like a sourdough starter, God’s nation takes time and attention. The ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ sounds like it’s ‘Up There’ – but God’s nation sounds like something that needs work ‘Down Here’. It’s alive, it’s messy, it’s a bit weird. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s made up of people.

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The Wall

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An Imaginary Parable

A King lived in a castle, behind a high wall. Whenever he tried to come out and meet his people, his tenants added more stones to the wall. So the wall got higher and higher. One day…

What does that mean? – apart from ‘Jesus is a lot better at parables than I am.’

What is modern?

A commonly asked question is: ‘How relevant can a two thousand year old religion be to a modern urban society?’ Yet, Christianity spread in towns. Towns with running water, baths, a social security system … Christianity and towns — ‘modern urban societies’ — have been together since the time of the first apostles.

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Parables that shouldn’t be retold?

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‘I Am’

Between them, the gospels often include several versions of the same parable. The Flower Seeds and the Pots is a retelling of Luke 8: 5-8, but I could have picked the version told in Matthew 13: 3-8 (and elsewhere, I’ve retold Mark 4: 3-9). They’re all obviously the same basic parable – but with different flourishes.

This happens often enough that it suggests that (as I’ve said in other posts) Jesus varied his parables to suit the needs of his audiences. Varying (or retelling) parables to suit the needs of our modern audience follows in that Jesus-tradition.

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Commentary: Goldmines and Pearls

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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

Commentary: The Smart and Stupid Builders

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The Smart and Stupid Builders is an adaptation of Matthew 7.24-27, Luke 6.46-49

To Retell or Not?

The parable of the wise and foolish builders – does it really need retelling? This is always the big question about sacred stories – it’s easy to take a story and recast it, reset it, retell it. But should we?

For the wise and foolish builders, the story is still easy to understand even after two thousand years. We still build houses. We still see rock as strong and stable and sand as shifting, insecure. We don’t need theological footnotes for any of that, so there’s a strong argument that this parable doesn’t need any retelling. Why change the words of Jesus?

Except we do change the words of Jesus and we always have. Even the original Gospel writers made the decision to translate the minority language of Aramaic into more widely understood Greek. Later, the Greek was re-translated into another widely-known language: Latin. I’ve directed the readers of this website to an English translation…

But at each step on the way, writers and translators have been trying to preserve, as far as possible, what Jesus meant.

When should we retell?

Things have changed in house-building in the last two thousand years. But the question is, how much does that matter if we can still understand what Jesus did mean? Most people know he lived a long time ago.

We might choose to retell this parable when our audience is likely to wonder what a two thousand year old parable has to do with them. When we think we need to worry about casting Jesus as someone who lives only in history books, or who wandered around Galilee with a saintly expression, some remarkably clean disciples and a couple of convenient cute animals. When we only have time for one quick parable and need to let it explain itself. When we want it to sound like Jesus was telling it now.

Retelling the parable – choices

I toyed with changing ‘house’ to ‘block of flats’ and ‘foundations’ to ‘hill’ and ‘flood plain’. But all those choices would alter the parable beyond a retelling; instead of a translation, they’d alter the meaning. Jesus is telling a parable about individuals reacting (or not) to his words. A block of flats collapsing, however, impacts on more people than just the foolish builder. Likewise, one of the levels of interpretation in Jesus’ parable is that – whether you act on his teachings or not – the bad times will come. The wise and the foolish both get hit by the same storm. But if I changed things to a hill and a flood plain, even though building on a flood plain is definitely foolish, the image I’d be creating would be that those who act on Jesus’ words can sit serenely (possibly smugly) above the bad things of life.

If you live in an urban environment, you’ve probably seen building works going on. The modern technique is not to build on nice solid rock, but to make that solid foundation with a big hole, strengthening and framing steel rods or mesh and a lot of concrete. One type of shoddy building practice would be a thin layer of concrete without the steel reinforcement and that’s what I went with.

Previous Parable: The Tree, the Fruit and the Gardener

Next Parable: The Lost Van

Commentary: The Parable of the Tenants

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The retold Parable of the Tenants

Retelling a Parable – Choices

The major change in retelling this parable is the change from ‘vineyard’ to ‘house’. The parable of the tenants that Jesus tells (Matt. 21. 33-46, Mark 12.1-12, Luke 20.9-19) is set in a vineyard, probably because Jesus is drawing on the Old Testament image of the land of Israel as God’s vineyard. Changing that to a ‘house’ loses that direct link to the Old Testament imagery.

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