Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time – October 17, 2010 – St. John’s
The parables of Jesus were often meant to startle people, to get them to question their taken-for-granted assumptions about God or about human life, to require a decision as to which world they will live in, the old, familiar and comfortable life they’ve been living or the new world opened up by the coming of the Kingdom of God, the fundamental theme of Jesus’ preaching and teaching. I used to try to get my undergraduate students at Catholic University to recognize this character of the parables by asking them whether there were any that they didn’t like, even wished Jesus had never pronounced. They usually mentioned the parable of the workers who received the same pay for working all day long as the other workers who had worked only one hour, or the parable of the prodigal son–they thought that the older son had a point in his complaint to his father about the big party he was throwing for his younger son when he had never done anything of the sort for himself, the older son. At that point, I would remark that this unhappiness, dissatisfaction, disagreement with Jesus resembled the reaction Jesus often met in his own day and meant that those parables were aimed at them, too, today.
Some of the parables so depart from common assumptions that they work by contrast. A month ago we heard Jesus praise the dishonest steward who gained friends for himself by doctoring the book of debts owed to his master. Jesus was not, of course, praising the dishonesty of the man but his awareness of his situation and his cleverness in meeting the crisis. The message was that those who were listening to Jesus were placed by it in a similar critical situation, and they were not as aware or as decisive as that dishonest steward.
Today we have a similar parable, one that also works by contrast. (more…)
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