A look at the gaps in the lectionary.
This week: the gap between Proper 20C and Proper 21C.
The text: Luke 16:14-18.
Like last week’s lectionary reading, some scholars believe these are sayings cobbled together, making a true meaning too difficult to parse. That seems cowardly to me.
It’s not that I don’t sympathize, but it seems like a way of wiggling out of the work. Particularly when there is a through-line.
Luke 16 begins with a parable about money and power. But Jesus tells it slant, so some of us have trouble getting to its root, it’s so tangled.
But remember that Jesus is speaking about shrewdness, relationship, and exploitation. He’s not telling a parable to get people to make money dishonestly or to launder other people’s money and pretend that’s OK.
That’s why I don’t think we should be surprised when he says in verse 13 that “You cannot serve God and wealth.” He’s actually saying You cannot serve God and Mammon. He was teaching his disciples not to make an idol of money anyway. Now, in the midst of discipleship, he’s bringing us back to our governing belief system and the centrality of God.
Which may be broken down into a couple of related ideas for the context:
- As disciples, don’t exploit people.
- If you’re in the exploitation business, get out.
- It isn’t too late to receive God’s mercy.
- And be decent to others trying to get out.
While many Christians like to burrow down into philosophical theology about the nature of mercy and our relative states of grace, the pointed telling of parables like this one make these into extra-scriptural affairs at best.
But I think it’s important to highlight that Jesus told this parable specifically to the disciples. And the two things Jesus just preached to the crowds were about the cost of discipleship and the mercy of God. I can only conclude that this is one of those moments when the prof turns to the TA and says “It’s kind of like this…”
Loving Money
Our in-between passage begins with verse 14:
“The Pharisees, who were lovers of money, heard all this, and they ridiculed him.”
Now, I really would’ve loved having this be in the lectionary for Proper 20C. But as always, I get why we save it for the Director’s Cut. Especially because 15 is almost just as juicy:
“So he said to them, ‘You are those who justify yourselves in the sight of others; but God knows your hearts; for what is prized by human beings is an abomination in the sight of God.”
I’d love to see how many preachers would squirm at having to parse the idea of “what is prized by human beings”. How many would #notallhumanbeings? Again, this is where the philosophical-theological tangent too often derails a whole conversation just to clarify what “Jesus is really trying to say.”
And to avoid doing that ourselves, we must keep the thread of power and discipleship in focus.
I think it’s likely to be far more troubling for some to hear that Luke is really describing a kind of partisan divide. Verse 14 highlights two very potent critiques at once.
First, it names that the rich and powerful are “lovers of money.” This directly responds to Jesus’s words in 13, saying that “You cannot serve God and Mammon.” Luke is intentionally saying that since one can’t serve two gods, their religious leaders have chosen to love the God of money.
Luke has slipped this in as a clause, almost like an aside, an “oh, by the way”. But it certainly explains what they did when they heard Jesus call the exploitation of people the exploitation of people. They ridiculed him. They thought Jesus was funny! Get a load of this guy!
This isn’t insignificant.
Why did they think Jesus was mockable here?
It is quite likely that they are like any insulated in-group. They are the rich and powerful; the 1%. Here, the secret recording of Mitt Romney mocking half of the country comes to mind.
While that kind of meanness isn’t surprising, many of us try not to think less of any in-group. Perhaps because we don’t want to generalize or offend. And sometimes simply pointing out an in-group’s bad behavior feels like its own kind of bad behavior. So we have a way of willfully refusing to see it. We would rather willfully ignore the bad behaviors of many of these in-groups to see the best in them.
But Luke isn’t revealing this to us so that we can defend them.
He’s showing how the rich and powerful refused to listen to Jesus. And worse. They mocked him. This matters precisely because their ignorance and willful refusal to honor God’s convictions around usury laws oppressed the people in front of them!
Their mockery is a mask of avoidance AND a means of influencing the crowds to maintain political power.
Think about what bullies do in meetings when they grandstand. Or perhaps when leaders use epithets or derisive nicknames when referring to political opponents. Beyond the objective truth of what these individuals are saying, do you see what these acts do in a room? Notice the dynamic: powerful people ridicule the less powerful prophet who has just spoken.
It isn’t just gross and dehumanizing someone in a universal and abstract sense. They use derision to silence another person and change the subject. Don’t look at the man behind the curtain.
Don’t listen to this man, while standing in front of self-contradictory evidence.
And it must be said that this isn’t an abstract nothing. This is powerful people silencing a prophet who is telling the truth about them. And that truth is exposed by the deception!
So when Jesus says that what is in the human heart is an abomination, this is really, really, really not the time to hashtag about human nature.
Which is why we don’t want to listen either.
This story is really hard for us to hear. Jesus responds to their mockery by naming our avoidance strategy. And it sounds really familiar.
Then he turns the attention to God again. And it is almost like he’s giving a little bit of cover to us. As if he’s saying, OK, I get what’s going on. You’re still thinking along the old lines. (Even though I’m totally nailing you using the old lines, but whatever.) But we’ve got this new thing going on.
And if he stopped there, we’d all nod and go Yeah, of course. But he doesn’t.
He says that
“everyone tries to enter it by force.”
[Note: There’s a bit of a textual discrepancy which really transforms how you read it. It may mean “everyone is strongly urged to enter it”. But that seems a bit too easy to say when he’s speaking of how humans avoid God. So I’m inclined to go with the harsher text, especially in a context like this. But it’s worth considering.]
So Jesus is being mocked by powerful people for telling a story about how powerful people exploit the powerless. And he critiques how they publicly justify themselves.
But where he goes next, with this part about entering by force, the letter of the Law and divorce feels quite surprising. So I totally get why people might abandon ship here and skip to the next parable.
I suspect the Protestant impulse to see gospel “completion” in Jesus might have resonance here. But then he turns away from that. More important to Jesus is God’s sovereignty and the cost of discipleship.
By force…
These religious leaders aren’t just trying to distract people from listening to Jesus. Their version of faith leads them to hurt people—which runs counter to the central tenants of the faith they are protecting. So could it be that they are trying to enter heaven “by force” through a brutal legalism? Or perhaps even more morbidly, as the last ones standing?
This may seem terrible to suggest, and yet it isn’t far from “rapture ready” Christianity and those who want to arm Israel so that they will go to war and die to initiate the Second Coming. Many of our own are literally hoping billions of people die so that they might be chosen as special.
By force is a phrase that evokes both violence and pressure. So it brings my mind back to the way the religious leaders are pushing the people rather than speaking publicly as Jesus does. They aren’t trying to win an even debate “in the marketplace of ideas”. They’re trying to rig the debate. Remember, they’re still looking for opportunities to “eliminate the threat.”
And now, divorce.
We’ve spent all this time talking about the motive behind these short verses. And I’ve specifically warned us not to get distracted by the philosophical theology. Now Jesus drops a bomb on us which really causes pain in the 21st Century. What should we do?
Well, first off, Jesus doesn’t give us all the material around this that he does elsewhere on the subject. And it would be really fair to say that it sounds like Jesus is not supporting every letter of the law.
So if you’re totally confused, I would understand. I feel it, too.
And yet, there’s also something really strange about Jesus’s turn on the law that doesn’t make sense. In short, it almost sounds like he’s making the opposite point from the one he made a couple of chapters ago.
Every previous statement regarding the law in the first 15 chapters of Luke have all essentially said you leaders break God’s law by trying to enforce all this junk you’ve made up to protect God’s law. So rather than illustrating a reversal of everything he’s ever said (for what reason exactly?) I think this builds on all of that teaching.
Isn’t it more likely that he is now speaking to God’s purpose in relationship and commitment? And in this case, going back to the central command to not commit adultery. In other words, Jesus is deconstructing the laws the Pharisees hope to protect to get to the heart of God’s commandments.
So the laws which govern divorce are not in the core laws. They are human laws. So it becomes a far stickier wicket.
And here is where I’m going to tap out. Not because I’m afraid or because the truth is inconvenient. I’m dropping out because of something more important.
Focusing on divorce is a trap.
Where this would lead us is exactly the theological death spiral Jesus always condemns in the religious leaders. Every statement about adhering to the law will cause real pain to real people that will prevent them from the mercy and love of God.
Jesus doesn’t condemn people for divorce.
Following this path will literally unravel everything that Jesus claims to care about.
I’ve written several times about Jesus and divorce, which is pretty complicated and uncomfortable. If you want to dig into what it says in Matthew, check these out.
Otherwise, the better thing to do is dwell on precisely how this ties us in knots. How we will suddenly turn into the Pharisees here when Jesus starts talking about the law and divorce or why we might refuse to listen to what he is actually saying to defend this one thing he’s saying now.
Verse 14 begins with the Pharisees condemning Jesus and in just four verses, we find ourselves in their shoes. That is profound.
Which makes me wonder how much of us we’ll read into the parable which ends the chapter? Perhaps we will see ourselves as the rich man trying to get Lazarus to do our work for us…