The Blind Man and the Bureaucrats

The Gospels contain many accounts of Jesus healing the sick and the lame and other miracles; but they rarely speak much about what happens next. It's just sort of assumed that the person healed lives happily ever after and that Jesus moves on to a parable or another guy with some other affliction.

An exception to this comes in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of John, in which Jesus gives a man a wondrous gift of healing, and it turns out to wreck the guy's life. Or pretty close.

Jesus is visiting Jerusalem for Sukkot, the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the major holy feasts of the Jewish calendar. He happens upon a man who has been blind from birth. The text does not name him, but Tradition has given him the name Celidonus. Jesus' disciples ask him about the man: “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” (John 9:2)

This seems like an odd question. How could it be the guy's fault at all? Bible commentators have suggested that the disciples were thinking he might have committed some wickedness in a previous life, for which he was suffering in this one. I can't think of any place in the Bible that mentions reincarnation, even to reject it. Then again, the Hebrew Scriptures tend to be vague on the subject of the Afterlife. The Sadducees, who accepted only the Books of Moses as authoritative scripture, rejected any flavor of Life After Death; but the Pharisees, who were big on following the Law, liked the idea of a Divine Judgment of Souls in the World to Come. Some Greek philosophers taught the Transmigration of Souls, so it's not impossible that the disciples might have heard of reincarnation, even if the priests and rabbis didn't teach it.

Or it's possible that the disciples were wondering if the man could have sinned prenatally, which apparently some Pharisees thought possible. There's a remark in Genesis about Jacob and Esau fighting even in their mother's womb. Or perhaps they thought the guy was being punished retroactively for something he was yet to do.

If all this sounds convoluted, yes it is; which is no doubt why the disciples wanted Jesus to clarify the matter. But all these suppositions are based on the assumption that misfortune must be a punishment for some sort of failing.

It's a moralistic assumption which seems to seep into people's beliefs. We like it because it seems to agree with our sense of justice; people get punished for their bad behavior; and because it seems to fit with our experience: bad actions lead to bad consequences and karma is a bitch.

Except that taking the principle to its logical extreme we wind up saying that misfortune is always the result of wickedness and that anyone who suffers must have done something to deserve it.

Which brings us back to the disciples' question: whose sin is the blind man being punished for; his own, or someone else's?

“Neither,” Jesus says. The man was born blind, he says, “...so that the work of God might be displayed in his life.” (John 9:3) And then he goes about to heal the man's blindness.

Hold on a moment, perhaps you're saying, is that any better? That God permitted this poor guy to suffer blindness his entire life just to make Jesus look good?

No. That's missing the point. The question isn't “Why is this guy afflicted?” because when we fixate on that question, we think it absolves us from any obligation to relieve that affliction. The right question, or at least the question Jesus asks, is: “What am I going to do to help?”

In this instance, Jesus makes a mud-pie. He spits in the dirt and mixes into a mud pat which he puts on the blind man's eyes. Jesus sometimes uses a mundane action like a catalyst to trigger the miracle and he does so in this case. He tells the man to wash in the Pool of Siloam, a rock-cut reservoir that is part of the city water system built for Jerusalem by King Hezekiah centuries earlier.

The man does so, and for the first time in his life, he can see.

Which is when the problems start.

His neighbors, who have been accustomed to seeing the guy out on the street begging for alms are surprised that he can now see and some of them insist this must be some other guy who just looks like the blind beggar they knew. The guy insists that he truly is that man and tells them about his encounter with Jesus.

They bring him to the Pharisees. The text does not make clear whether they brought him to the Temple, or to a local synagogue within the city; I'm guessing the latter, but I could be wrong. Once again, he tells the story about how Jesus made some mud and how he washed his face in the Pool of Siloam.

The Pharisees who examine the man are divided in their opinions. The miracle had taken place on a Sabbath; and by healing the blind man on that day, Jesus had violated the Law of Moses about working on the Sabbath; therefore he can't be a man of God; Q.E.D. The Pharisees really got bent out of shape over the whole Sabbath thing, because this is not the only place in the Gospels where this comes up.

To be fair, though, not all Pharisees were as strict on this subject. In another place, Jesus asks “If any of you has a sheep and it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will you not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable is a man than a sheep! Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.” (Matthew 12:11-12) Here Jesus is using an argument that some pharisaic schools had used in discussing this matter. And on this occasion some of the other Pharisees argue that, regardless of the day on which it happened, the healing of the blind man was still a miracle. “How can a sinner do such miraculous signs?”

Finally they ask the blind man what he thinks of this Jesus. “He is a prophet,” the man replies. The text does not say that he added, “Duh!” but it would seem pretty self-evident.

The Pharisees remain unconvinced. How do they know the man was really blind in the first place? They call in his parents for questioning.

The parents are scared. They don't want any trouble with the leaders of the Synagogue. Yes, they say, that is their son. Yes, he had been blind since birth. No, they have no idea how he came to be healed of his blindness. “Ask him. He is of age; he will speak for himself.”

So they question the man again, this time giving him a strong hint as to the answer they want to hear. “Give glory to God,” they say: a solemn charge to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but; “We know this man is a sinner.”

The man doesn't know anything about that; all he knows is that he was blind, but now he's not. They tell him to go over the story one more time. “I have told you already and you did not listen,” he says. “Why do you want to hear it again? Do you want to be his disciple too?”

Ooo... that really gets their ephods in a bunch. “We are disciples of Moses!” they sniff at him. They don't even know who this Jesus guy is. They insult the blind man and accuse him of being a follower of Jesus; which is ironic, because he wasn't one at the beginning of the day, but as the pharisees continue to badger him, we can see him becoming more and more emphatic in his defense of the man who healed him.

The man answered,”Now this is remarkable! You don't know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. He listens to the godly man who does his will. Nobody has ever heard of opening the eyes of a man born blind. If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” (John 9:30-33)

A reasonable point, and one which the more open-minded of the pharisees have already made. But the synagogue officials are offended. They say “how dare you lecture us!” and chuck him out.

So here he is. He has no job because he's been a blind beggar all his life. He's just been thrown out of the synagogue, so he's an outcast in his community. Although the text does not come out and say so, I wonder if his parents didn't disown him as well, for fear of being ostracized themselves. He could well be forgiven for thinking that he was better off blind.

Jesus hears about what happened to the formerly-blind man and goes to find him. “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” Jesus asks. “Son of Man” is an expression that appears a few times in the Old Testament, usually bearing the sense of “mortal man.” In the Book of Ezekiel, God addresses the prophet as “Son of Man”. The Book of Daniel, however, describes “One like a son of man” who will be given dominion over the nations of the earth. Some of the Apocryphal books written shortly before the time of Christ, such as the Books of Enoch and of Esdras, use the title for the Messiah-to-Come, and that is the sense in which Jesus used it in the Gospels.

“Who is he, sir?” the man asks. “Tell me so that I may believe in him.”

“You have seen him; in fact, he is the one speaking with you.” Jesus rarely in the Gospels comes out with any claims of divinity; some readers have said he never does; but in this brief private moment with the man whose life he has upended, he definitely, if a bit indirectly, acknowledges that he is indeed the Man of Prophecy about whom he and the prophets before him have preached.

Jesus goes on to draw a comparison between that day's miracle and his greater ministry:

“For judgment I have come into this world, so that the blind will see and those who see will become blind.” (v.39)

And that is where the text leaves the blind man. We don't know where he went from there. Did he join the followers of Jesus? Did he go back to his family? Did he make a new life for himself with his new circumstances? We don't know. We don't even know if his name was really Celidonus. (Odds are, it wasn't). But despite the problems that came with the gift of sight, he does not seem to have regarded it as a curse. It was a thing of joyous wonder.

The religious authorities of his day thought their vision was perfectly accurate, yet they were so focused on their preconceptions and priorities they could not see things that were obvious to a blind man.

The Woman Who Bled

One thing I find striking about the miracles recorded in the Gospel accounts is how much variety we find in them. Some instances are dramatic: Jesus commands the storm on the sea to be still; he tells the cripple to arise and walk; he calls out to Lazarus, four days dead in the tomb, to come forth. In others, he doesn’t seem to do anything at all, as in the case of the Centurion’s servant or the Canaanite woman’s daughter: he just tells the person requesting help that their loved one has been healed. In yet other cases, Jesus tells someone to do something completely mundane and seemingly irrelevant, and in the course of doing it the miracle just seems to happen, as in the Wedding at Cana, or the various miracles involving St. Peter and fish.

Then there’s the story of the Woman Who Bled, which might be the most peculiar one of all.

The story occurs as a kind of interruption in the middle of a completely different miracle. A man named Jairus, one of the administrators of the local synagogue, comes to Jesus with an urgent request. His daughter is dying and he pleads with Jesus to come lay his hands on her and heal her. (Mark 5:21-23). Luke’s telling of the story adds the details that the girl is only twelve years old and is Jairus’ only daughter. (Luke 8:40-42) Matthew’s version does not name the father and says that the girl has already died, but I think Matthew is anticipating things here. (Matthew 9:18).

Jesus arrives too late; the girl has already died and the Professional Mourners have already arrived, weeping and wailing fit to wake the… well … the dead. When Jesus says that the girl is not dead but merely sleeping, the mourners laugh at him, perhaps mistakenly believing him to be quoting a Monty Python skit.

Jesus elbows his way into the house to the child’s bedside, just him, the girl’s family and a couple of his closest disciples. He takes the girl’s hand and says, “Little girl, arise,” (Mark gives it to us in Aramaic: “Talitha koum.” ) And the girl gets up and begins to walk around.

That, briefly, is the story of Jairus’ daughter (Mark 5:35-43); but as I mentioned, there’s another miracle inserted in the middle of the story; one that sometimes gets omitted in the telling, but which appears in each of the three versions from the Gospels. It seems irrelevant to the story of Jairus, except maybe to build some suspense, and one could look at it as a minor miracle compared to Jesus’ demonstration of power over Death. Yet to me this other, digressive story carries a sense of mystery, possibly even greater than the other.

So, backing up a bit. A crowd had gathered around Jesus when Jairus got to him -- heck, just his disciples alone were already a crowd – and the crowd grew into a veritable parade as they followed Jesus to Jairus’ house. In that crowd was a woman who was suffering from a terrible condition causing excessive bleeding.

When I was a kid, I assumed this must be something like hemophilia, because back then people really didn’t talk openly about menstruation; at least not to pre-adolescent boys. The text doesn’t give us much specific information, but we can guess that it was The Menstrual Period From Hell, except that it had lasted for twelve years. Mark tells us, “She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better, she grew worse.” (Mark 5:26)

(Some commentators have noted that this woman had been suffering for twelve years, and that Jairus’ daughter was twelve years old. A coincidence? Or was the number chosen symbolically to link the two stories together? I couldn’t say.)

I suspect that a lot of guys don’t really understand menstruation. As I said, it’s not something that’s really talked about openly. It’s mysterious to us, maybe a little bit freaky, and it makes women crabby once a month. Yeah, guys tend to only understand the aspects of it that directly affect us. But I understand from the people I know who do experience it, that a menstrual period is at best, agonizing, and at worst can be incapacitating. In Jesus’ day, it was even worse for women because of the Jewish Laws regarding blood.

A goodly chunk of the Law of Moses deals with cleanliness issues. Certain things were considered Unclean and contact with them would render a person contaminated and they would be required to undergo ritual purification These things included pork, dead bodies, “discharges” of various kinds, and semen, but a biggie was blood. Several verses in the Book of Leviticus are devoted to avoiding contact with blood and purification should you, by necessity become contaminated by it. When I first tried slogging through reading Leviticus, I thought all these cleanliness regulations were rather excessive, until years later when I had to sit through OSHA training seminars on Blood-Borne Pathogens.

So was Moses trying to establish principles of hygiene and sanitation couched in religious terms for a culture that didn’t understand the germ theory of disease? Or were these rules simply based on the idea that there was something sacred or mystical about blood? Or was it a little of both? I couldn’t say.

This principle that contact with blood rendered one ritually unclean necessitated special rules for those subject to menstruation:

“’When a woman has her regular flow of blood, the impurity of her monthly period will last seven days, and anyone who touches her will be unclean till evening. “’Anything she lies on during her period will be unclean, and anything she sits on will be unclean. Whoever touches her bed must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. Whoever touches anything she sits on must wash his clothes and bathe with water, and he will be unclean till evening. Whether it is the bed or anything she was sitting on, when anyone touches it, he will be unclean till evening.’” (Leviticus 15:19-23 NIV)

A large section of the Mishnah, one of the foundations of the Jewish Talmud, is devoted to elaborating on the Levitical laws regarding menstruation, considering various contingencies, and even case studies of rulings made by rabbis based on the evidence of stained article of clothing.

Things were even more complicated for a person like the woman in Mark chapter 5, whose period lasts longer than usual. In such a case, the woman was required to remain quarantined for seven days past the last day of menstruation, and also to bring two doves or young pigeons to be offered as a sacrifice in addition to the standard ritual washing; something not required after a normal period.

So what with the unending bleeding, (no doubt accompanied by cramps that felt like her uterus was trying to eat her from the inside); the isolation from the rest of the community; the worthless doctors who didn’t know squat about women’s health but nevertheless charged her up the hoo-hah; not to mention the expense of having to buy two young pigeons each time it looked like the bleeding had finally ceased… well, this woman was pretty desperate. But she’d heard about this teacher who could heal people…

She makes her way through the crowd around Jesus and comes up behind him. If she can just touch his cloak, she thinks – the hem of his garment, Luke’s telling of the story says in the King James Version – she’s certain she’ll be healed. And so she does.

Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. (Mark 5:29)

When I was little, I wondered how she would know; but if her uterus had been tying itself in knots, and then suddenly the pain ceased, that’s something she certainly would notice.

Jesus notices too:

At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” (v.30)

Let’s stop here and take a look at this. I usually think of Jesus’ miracles as him doing something: rebuking the winds, and they obey him, commanding demons and driving them out; laying on his hands, and curing the illness; even just saying that something will be so and it is so. Like a Fifth Level Wizard saying “I cast Magic Missile.”

But in this case, the miracle just sort of happens, without his active participation at all.

There’s an old doctrine in Christian theology which states that Christ was both True God and True Man, but even Christians who hold this doctrine don’t really think about it a whole lot, nor dwell on what this might mean. It means possessing both limitless Divine Power, yet also human limitations. How can this be? I have trouble wrapping my mind around it. This is truly hot ice and wond’rous strange snow.

And yet perhaps it’s what we’re seeing here, where Jesus seems unaware of the miracle he’s just performed; or rather, that the miracle performed itself without his conscious participation, as if he were merely the conduit of Divine Power and not its wielder.

The only active party in this miracle is the woman herself, who takes the initiative to grasp his garment and draws the healing power into herself. It’s a mystery.

As far as the Disciples are concerned, though, the only mystery is what Jesus means. After all, he’s in the middle of a crowd of people, all jostling and bumping into each other, trying to get close to him; and he asks who touched him?

No doubt Jairus was annoyed by the interruption too. His daughter was dying, and Jesus stops to ask such a stupid question?

But no, the question was an important one. Jesus wants to see and to talk to the person he had healed. 

he woman is scared. Was she going to get in trouble? After all, she was considered “unclean” and wasn’t supposed to go around touching other people. Would Jesus be mad at her for stealing a miracle from him? The woman falls at his feet and admits what she has done.

Jesus isn’t mad at her at all. He commends her for her faith: “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” (v.34)

We don’t hear what happened to the woman after this. Jesus has this brief moment with her to reassure her and affirm her healing; then he gets yanked back to the other crisis at Jairus’ house. We don’t even learn the woman’s name. Then again, the text doesn’t say if Jesus had to take a bath to purify himself afterwards either. Healing the two women who needed help was a higher priority for him.

But although I called this an atypical miracle for Jesus, in one way it’s not unusual at all. Jesus often showed the most warmth and affection for those who took the initiative: the guys who opened a hole in the roof of the house Jesus was staying in so they could bring their crippled friend in for Jesus to heal; the Canaanite woman who, when challenged by Jesus on her right to ask for help, refused to be intimidated and gave a ready answer; the leper who, finding that he and his nine comrades had been healed of their disease while going to see the priest as Jesus commanded, took the time to return to Jesus and thank him.

And then this woman, denied contact with the rest of the community, who just wanted to touch him.

Clothes Encounter

If, like me, you are a child of the ‘70s, you might recall an athletic form of exhibitionism from that era called Streaking.  It was one of that decade’s contributions to Western Civilization, like Disco, Pet Rocks, “Whip Inflation Now!” Buttons and the Bicentennial Minute; and it involved young male college students dashing across a public space while buck naked.  I’m not exactly sure what the point of this was, unless maybe to encourage young female college students to do the same

One might not expect the Bible to have anything to say about this type of behavior, but there is a venerable tradition among Bible pedagogues like myself of trying to make Holy Writ seem hip and relevant by seizing on some popular trend and purporting to find mention of it Scriptures.  This doesn’t always work, but sometimes it’s interesting.  At least to other pedagogues.

Now, granted Streaking has not been trendy since the Ford administration; but being out-of-date has never stopped me before.  With that in mind, let’s take a look at the story of the Bible’s Streaker.

The story comes in the account of the Passion Narrative found in the Gospel of St. Mark.  It tells how Jesus was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane by group of thugs, “a crowd armed with swords and clubs”, sent by the chief priests and guided by Judas, who identified Jesus to them.  The disciples  who were with Jesus ran off in fear.  The guards escorted Jesus to the high priest, and it is on the way there that Mark inserts this peculiar little incident:

A young man, wearing nothing but a linen garment, was following Jesus.  When they seized him, he fled naked, leaving his garment behind.  (Mark 14:51-52 NIV)

Evidently, this young man was a follower of Jesus, but not one of the Twelve Disciples.  Perhaps he heard about the arrest while he was taking a bath and threw something one to run and see.  Or perhaps he had just heard that Jesus would be in the Garden and only wanted to see him, but arrived as Jesus was being taken away.  He showed more courage than most of the other disciples, following the armed escort; but when the guards spotted him and tried to lay hold of him, he too ran away.

Who was this impetuous young man?  The text doesn’t really give us much about him.  It’s been suggested he might have come from an affluent family because he wore linen, instead of the more common wool outer garment.  That’s not really much to go on.  But Tradition offers an interesting supposition:  that the young man was Mark himself.

John Mark, traditionally considered the author of the Second Gospel, was a young man mentioned on a few occasions in the Book of Acts.  His mother, who was named Mary, but probably unrelated to any of the other Marys of the New Testament, had a house in Jerusalem which served as a meeting place for believers in the early Church, (Acts 12:12).

John Mark accompanied Paul and Barnabas on their First Missionary Journey, but he bailed out about the time they got to Pamphylia.  Perhaps he was homesick.  Possibly he just felt like he was in over his head.  Maybe he just wasn’t working out. The text gives no details; it just says he left Paul and returned to Jerusalem.  (Acts 13:13)  When Paul was organizing a second journey to visit the communities he’d started in Asia Minor, Barnabas asked Paul to give the kid a second chance.  Paul refused and the disagreement broke up their partnership.

Barnabas wanted to take John, also called Mark, with them. But Paul did not think it wise to take him, because he had deserted them in Pamphylia, and had not continued with them in the work.  They had such a sharp disagreement that they parted company. Barnabas took Mark and sailed for Cyprus, but Paul chose Silas and left, commended by the brothers to the grace of the Lord.   (Acts 15:37-40)

Eventually, though, Paul got over his bad impression of Mark, and mentions him favorably in a couple of his letters.

The Early Church Father Papias, writing around 140 AD, quotes an earlier source saying that Mark became a close associate of Peter,  Scholars believe that Peter had an assistant, because his first Epistle is better written than his second, and it is believed that he had someone with a better grasp of Greek polish up his writing.  That someone might have been Mark.

Papias’s source goes on to say that Mark compiled Paul’s teachings and stories about Jesus into the Gospel which was ascribed to him.  That would certainly explain where Mark got his material, and also why the other Synoptic Gospels, Matthew and Luke, follow Mark’s outline and often repeat him verbatim.

Modern scholars have cast doubt on this traditional view, though, noting that Papias wrote a good century after the fact and that we know nothing about the source he quotes.  And there are some goofs in geography in Mark which no Galilean like Peter would make.  Then again, many scholars date the Gospel to about the time of the Destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, around AD 70.  This would have been after Peter’s death, when he wouldn’t be around to correct the galley proofs.

The incident of the Young Man and his Towel is a peculiar one that seems pointless and irrelevant.  It seems to have nothing to do with the Great and Portentous events of the Passion Narrative; which may be why Matthew and Luke, who otherwise follow Mark’s outline pretty closely, make no mention of it.  I suspect that the reason why the author of Mark includes it must be that it had some personal meaning for him.  That’s why I think Tradition is right and Mark was that young man.  John Mark, the callow and inexperienced would-be-missionary of Acts chapter 13, could have been an adolescent at the time of Jesus’ trial, too young to participate, and only able to view it from a distance.  And he was living in Jerusalem at the time

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps the writer was someone else, and had some other reason for inserting the incident.  We can’t really know for sure.  But I like to think that this was Mark’s Brush With Greatness, the one moment when his own life intersected with that of Jesus, however peripherally.  And that, as embarrassing as it was, when he set down the stories he had heard about the ministry of Jesus, he included his own brief encounter.

The Sleazy Embezzler

There are some passages from the Gospels which are referred to as the “Hard Sayings of Jesus”; sometimes because they are hard to put into practice, as in the case of his admonition “If your eye offends you, pluck it out” or his remark about camels and needles; sometimes because they’re hard to understand and run counter to what we think we know.

The last is the case with a story Jesus told in Luke chapter 16, sometimes called The Dishonest Steward, but which I am going to call the Parable of the Sleazy Embezzler.

A certain rich man has learned that his steward, the servant hired to manage his business affairs, has been doing a crappy job of it.  The way Jesus puts it is that the guy “was accused of wasting [the Boss’s] possessions”, so he might not have actually been dipping into the till.  He might have just made some really bad decisions with the Boss’s money.  The Boss tells him that he’s going to audit the books to find out exactly what he’s been up to.

“The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now?  My master is taking away my job.  I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg…” (Luke 16:3 NIV)

Fortunately, our embezzler comes up with a Cunning Plan.  One by one, he calls in everyone who owes something and restructures their debt. 

“So he called in each one of his masters debtors.  He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’ “’Eight hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied. “The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred.’  (v.5-6) 

He hasn’t been fired yet; he still has the authority to conduct business in his master’s name; and so he uses that authority to forgive a portion of the debt each man owes his boss.  That way, he figures, when he does lose his job, he’ll have plenty of people grateful to him who will be happy to help him out.

The Boss sees exactly what he’s done.  Since the debts were restructured in his name, he can’t very well go back and demand the full payment without looking like a jerk.  The most he can do is fire the dishonest steward – which he was going to do anyway – and it will look to the manager’s new friends that he was fired because he had done each of them a favor.

Some men might be pissed at the way the steward had outwitted him.  This boss seems to have had a sense of humor.  At least he was capable of recognizing the servant’s cleverness.  Jesus says, “The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.”  (v.8)

Commentators have puzzled over this parable for centuries.  Why is Jesus holding up this cheater, this crook, this embezzler up as an example?

Some interpreters have made excuses for him, saying that Jesus only said that the guy was accused of malfeasance, not of actually guilty of it.  Others have speculated that maybe his master had been overcharging his debtors in order to get around the Mosaic prohibition against charging interest, and that the steward was only converting the balance to what it should have been.

Both views are over-thinking things and missing the point.  If the manager had been innocent of wrongdoing, the audit would have exonerated him.  He knew it wouldn’t.  He knew he was toast.  And Jesus repeatedly calls him “dishonest.”  No, the fact that he’s a cheat who got caught and what he had to do to cover his butt is the whole point of the parable.

Another interpretation is that the steward’s reduction of what the debtors owe his master reflects him forgoing what his own commission of the transaction would be, deliberately sacrificing his own cut in order to do the right thing.  Once again, I think this is over-thinking the situation.  Jesus was telling the story to make a point, and if the point was the manager making amends for his misdeeds, Jesus would have said so.

The master does not commend his soon-to-be-ex manager for his virtue, but for his shrewdness.  In effect he’s saying, “You’re still fired, but I gotta admit, you’re a clever scoundrel!”

“For the people of this world are more shrewd in dealing with their own kind than are the people of the light.”  (Luke 16:8)

Elsewhere Jesus tells his disciples, “Be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves.”  (Matthew 10:16)  Or putting it in D&D terms, just because you’re Lawful Good in alignment doesn’t mean you have to be Lawful Stupid.

This next part gets even more confusing, because it seems to say one thing, and then Jesus does a complete 180 turn.  Or does he?  I think this is largely a translation issue.  The King James Version renders it this way:

“And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.”  (Luke 16:9 KJV) 

This makes it sound like we’re supposed to suck up to wealthy and ungodly people in order to gain… what?  Heaven?  This is the exact opposite of what Jesus says elsewhere, and of what he says in the following  verses for that matter.  Other translations, I think, are a little more clear:

“I tell you, use worldly wealth to gain friends for yourselves, so that when it is gone, you will be welcomed into eternal dwellings.” (Luke 16:9 NIV)

This makes it a little more clear that the “mammon of unrighteousness” referred to in King Jim is simply our own secular, material wealth.  As a matter of simple Enlightened Self-Interest, we ought to use our wealth in such a way to “make friends”.  Another commentator goes back to the parable of the Sheep and the Goats in Matthew 25 in which the Son of Man judges the people gathered before him based on how well they treated their neighbors, because “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.”  (Matthew 25:40)

Jesus concludes this discourse on money with a more famous remark: “No servant can serve two masters …  Ye cannot serve God and mammon.”  (Luke 16:13 KJV)  Mammon is a Semitic word for money or riches, and Jesus uses it as a personification of materialism.  In the Middle Ages the word was used as a name for a demon of greed.

And if this sounds like a bunch of anti-capitalist hippie crap, the Pharisees thought so too: 

The Pharisees, who loved money, heard all this and were sneering at Jesus.  He said to them, “You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of men, but God knows your hearts.  What is highly valued among men is detestable in God’s sight.  (Luke 16:14-15)

I guess even a sleazy embezzler can be smart enough to keep an eye on the changing exchange rates.

Goofus and Gallant in the Vineyard

My parents never subscribed to Highlights for Children -- I preferred Children’s Digest because it ran Tintin adventures – but occasionally I would read the magazine when I was little in the waiting room of the doctor’s office.  On for the regular features that use to run in Highlights – (and probably still does; Highlights will exist as long as there are pediatrician clinics) – was a cartoon called “Goofus and Gallant”.

If you’ve ever read Highlights, I’m sure you’ve seen it.  Gallant and Goofus are two brothers; at least I’ve always assumed they are related.  The first panel would show Gallant doing something polite and respectful; say, helping an old lady across the street; and the second panel would show Goofus in the same situation doing something stupid; like taking cell phone video of the old lady getting hit by a car to post on YouTube.

There was no plot to these cartoons; just the salutary example of the Good Boy contrasted with the deplorable example of the Bad one.  Sometimes Goofus would go first, sometimes Gallant; but the strip always gave us this nice contrast between the Right Way and the Wrong Way.

This kind of dualism is a natural way to convey a moral message: Good vs. Evil; Virtue vs. Vice; Minneapolis vs. St. Paul.  It’s not surprising that Jesus used this kind of comparison in one of his parables.

What is surprising is that he did it wrong.

“What do you think?  There was a man who had two sons.  He went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work today in the vineyard.’ “‘I will not,’ he answered, but later he changed his mind and went. “Then the father went to the other son and said the same thing.  He answered, ‘I will, sir,’ but he did not go.” (Matthew 21:28-30 NIV)

That’s not how it’s supposed to go!  He mixed the brothers up!  It’s as if Goofus set the table for dinner and Gallant stuck lima beans up his nose.  How could Jesus make such a mistake?

Maybe because Jesus wanted to convey a different message.

Let’s back up a bit and look at the context.  On the occasion he told this parable, Jesus was teaching in the temple courts in Jerusalem, one of the plazas within the walls of the Temple, but outside the building itself.  There he encountered some of the chief priests and elders of people who wanted to know where the hell he got the idea he could set himself up as some kind of a prophet.  “By what authority are you doing these things … And who gave you this authority?” (Matthew 21:23)

Perhaps they were genuinely curious as to the source of his teachings, but given Jesus’ response, I suspect they were hoping he’d say something they could use against him.

Jesus answers with a question of his own:

Jesus replied, “I will also ask you one question.  If you answer me, I will tell you by what authority I am doing these things.  John’s baptism – where did it come from?  Was it from heaven, or from men?”  (Matthew 21:24-25)

He threw the “Gotcha” question right back at them.  John the Baptist had died only a year or two before and was widely regarded as a prophet.  If the authorities agreed that he was a messenger from God, Jesus could reasonably ask why they ignored him.  On the other hand, if they said that John was just a guy with no divine mandate, they’d be going against popular opinion.

Unwilling to commit themselves, they replied “We don’t know.”  And so Jesus said “Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things.”  (Matthew 21:27)

Now, at first glance, this exchange doesn’t seem to have much connection to the parable Jesus tells immediately afterward; but considering who his audience at the time, it’s pretty obvious whom Jesus intended the second son to represent:  the religious elites, the self-righteous ones who uttered pious platitudes, but whose lives reflected neither God’s justice, nor his compassion.  And if the priests saw this pointed at themselves, well, if the funny hat don’t fit, you don’t gots to wear it.

At the end of his parable, Jesus asks these priests, which of the two sons did what his father wanted?  They had to answer, “The first.”

Who, then, does the first son represent?  Jesus tells them, and brings the parable back to the point he made earlier:

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, the tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God ahead of you.  For John came to you to show you the way of righteousness, and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes did.  And even after you saw this, you did not repent and believe him.”  (Matthew 21:31-32)

“Prostitutes and tax collectors” are often used in the Gospel as a shorthand for people considered social outcasts for their wickedness:  prostitutes because they lived outside the approved sexual mores, and tax collectors because they were essentially collaborationists, private contractors hired by the occupying Romans to collect taxes, who profited by collecting more than Rome required and pocketing the difference.  The Gospels often lump “sinners and tax collectors” together in the same group.

TO me this parable says two things.  Most obviously, it condemns the hypocrite who talks the talk, but who shows far less nimbleness in the walking department.  Christians like to call this type of behavior pharisaical, although that’s grossly unfair because it paints a simplistic view of what the Pharisees taught and because it lets the Sadducees, who also opposed Jesus, completely off the hook, not to mention the Herodians.  Singling out the Pharisees also lets us pretend that we today aren’t also guilty of obsessing about the letter of the Law while blowing off the spirit.

But Goofus and Gallant are all about compare and contrast.  While the Parable of the Brothers in the Vineyard condemns the hypocrite, it also commends the person who outwardly seems to be ungodly, at least by the prissy, external criteria of the hypocrite, but who nevertheless strives to be charitable, decent and ethical in his personal life.

I have to admit that a lot of Christians have trouble with this.  I was raised in the Lutheran tradition, which emphasizes that we are saved by God’s Grace, not by our own Good Works, and which regards the doctrine of “Works Righteousness” as an anathema.  We like to quote the passage from Isaiah that “… all our righteous acts are like filthy rags…” (Isaiah 64:6)

But I think we make too much of that verse.  My own Good Works may indeed be worthless – for the purposes of buying my way into Heaven – but they have value in other respects.

For one thing, we are told that it pleases God when we do his will, even if we don’t wholly succeed in our attempts.  That in itself is a biggie.  For another, the Good Works that we do are how we respond to God’s love for us.  As James puts it:  “Show me your faith without deed, and I will show you my faith by what I do. … As the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without deeds is dead.” (James 2:18,26)

But perhaps most importantly, from a strictly practical point of view, doing Good Works makes our world a better place.  You don’t need to believe in the Gospel of Christ to understand that; you don’t even have to believe in God.

I’ve heard some Christians express the perverse notion that Good Works are only virtuous when they are performed by Bible-believing Christians, and that works performed by anybody else, no matter what the intention, is self-serving and sinful.  I can’t agree.  An act which helps my neighbor helps my neighbor and this is true whether I am trying to follow God’s Law or the promptings of my own conscience.  It certainly makes no difference to my neighbor.

“But surely,” one might say, “it is better still to respect God AND to obey his Commandments!”  Well, there is that.  That’s the problem with dualistic examples like Goofus and Gallant; they provide two contrasting examples with no gradations of nuance in-between.  But by focusing on this particular contrast in this particular parable, Jesus is telling us to look at the results rather than what color jersey a person is wearing and if they’re on “our team”.

“By their fruit you will recognize them,” Jesus says in another place,  (Matthew 7:20)  That’s how you can really tell Goofus from Gallant.

God Hates Figs?

Biblical scholars tend to be suspicious of passages in the Gospels that dovetail too neatly with Church Doctrine.  “Did Jesus really say that?” they ask, “Or did the Gospel writer or even a later editor invent it?”  And I have to admit, they may have a point.

But there’s a flip side to this reasoning too.  By the same logic, a passage that’s embarrassing to a respected figure, or conflicts with some aspects of established theology, is more likely to be authentic, because presumably the Early Church Fathers would have edited it out if it weren’t firmly established.  It’s sort of like Tertulian’s famous statement, Certum est, quia impossibile - It is certain because it is impossible.  Although in this case it’s more a matter of “It’s certain because if they had made it up they would have invented something less weird.”

If there’s any truth to this theory, then certainly the most authentic passage in the Gospels would have to be the story of Jesus and the Fig Tree.

The story is found in Mark, chapter 11.  Mark is kind of like the Cliff Notes Gospel; it’s the shortest of the four, and it’s pretty fast-paced, going from incident to incident without nearly as many of the parables and discourses which we find in the other Gospels.  Both Matthew and Luke follow the same outline as Mark, often quoting it word-for-word, which leads most scholars to believe that Mark was written first and that the other two Synoptic Gospels used it as a framework which they supplemented with additional material.

But there are a couple places where Mark digresses from his straightforward narrative to mention a side-incident which seems irrelevant to the main story.  The Fig Tree Story is one of these.

Jesus and his disciples have come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover.  They’re staying, however, in the nearby town of Bethany, perhaps with Jesus’ friends, Mary and Martha and Lazarus, because the hotels in Jerusalem are always booked up on the holidays.

While leaving Bethany the next morning to go up into the city, Jesus is hungry and sees a fig tree in the distance.  But when he goes to the tree to check out if there’s any fruit on it, he finds nothing but leaves.  This pisses him off.  “May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” he says.  (Mark 11:12-14)

And that’s where Mark leaves it for the moment.  He goes on to describe Jesus driving the moneychangers from the Temple.  And come to think of it, this might be why he’s so hard on those moneychangers; he’s hungry and the whole fig tree thing put him in a bad mood.  After a busy day of Occupying Temple Mount, he and his disciples return to Bethany for the night.  The next day they pass by the fig tree again, only now it is withered.  “Rabbi, look!” Peter says, “The fig tree you cursed is withered!”  (Mark 11:20-21)

The Gospel of Matthew, chapter 21:18-21, also tells this story, but in Matthew’s version, the tree withers immediately.  It’s more dramatic that way, and from a plot point of view tightens up the narrative better, but I think I prefer Mark’s telling.)

Jesus responds by telling his disciples to “Have faith in God” and that if they believe hard enough, they’ll be able to do all sorts of crazy stuff like making mountains jump into the sea or forgiving sins.  But the story has always left me dazed and wondering what the heck that was all about.  Probably much the way the Disciples must have been.

This is not the moral I was expecting.  I would have expected him to say something like “So too will perish those who bear not Fruits of Righteousness” or something along those lines.  Nope.  Instead he talks about Faith and the Power of Prayer.

Why did Jesus curse the stupid tree?  A pious impulse wants me to say that it was a sinful fig tree and therefore deserved to be cursed.

Hm.

Yes, that seems just as stupid when I type it out as it does in my head when I think it.  What’s more, Mark comes right out and tells us that the reason the fig tree didn’t have any figs on it was because it was the wrong season!  (“… When he reached it, he found nothing but leaves, because it was not the season for figs.”  Mark 11:13)

So then the question becomes, why did Jesus expect there to be figs in the first place?  My study Bible tries to finesse this by noting that fig trees in that region normally begin to leaf out around March or April, but do not bear figs until their leaves are all out in early Summer.  So maybe Jesus, seeing that the tree already had a lot of leaves on it, thought that it might have some early figs too.  I’d say that was grasping at straws, except that you won’t find straws on a fig tree at that time of the year either.  Jesus still comes off seeming like a jerk for cursing a perfectly innocent fig tree that was minding its own business.  I don’t have an answer for that.  This is the story we have.

Why did the Gospel writers include this curious story?  Perhaps as a demonstration of Christ’s Divine Power over Nature.  Or perhaps to illustrate his words about the Power of Prayer.  But I think it was something that stuck in Peter’s mind because it was just so dang freaky.

Backing up a little, the Gospel of Mark is traditionally ascribed to John-Mark, a young man who served as an assistant to the Apostle Peter in his later years.  (We know Peter had a secretary, because of the two Epistles credited to him, the Greek in the first one is much better than the other.  Since Greek wasn’t Peter’s primary language, it’s believed that he had an assistant polish up his prose).  If this is true, than Mark’s Gospel would have been based on Peter’s reminiscences.

This would explain how Mark, who was not one of the Twelve Disciples, nor is ever mentioned by name in any of the other Gospels, got his material; and why Matthew and Luke defer to Mark’s version of the story in their own Gospels.  Modern scholarship has cast doubt on the Peter-Mark connection, though, noting places in Mark’s gospel where he gets details of Galilee geography wrong; mistakes that presumably Peter would not make.  Then again, it’s possible that Mark did not set down the final version of his Gospel until after Peter’s death; (most scholars date the Gospel after the destruction of the Temple in AD 70); and so Peter would have been unable to correct these goofs.

But supposing tradition has it right about Peter and Mark, I can picture Peter telling stories to his own disciple about his experiences.  “I remember this one time … man, it was the freakiest thing … we were leaving Bethany and there was this fig tree…”  He would have told about the things that stuck most in his memory.

What strikes me the most about this story, though, is not the demonstration of Christ’s Divine Power over Deciduous Plants, but glimpse we get of Jesus the man, with human needs and human frustrations.

The Church has traditionally taught that Jesus was True God and Also True Man.  So how can he be both?  I don’t know.  How can light be both a wave and a particle?  From observation we know that light acts like both.  And the Doctrine of the Dual Nature is one of the ideas Christians have developed to explain this aspect of Christ.  The way Luther explains this is that if Christ were merely a man, his sacrifice would be insufficient to redeem all humanity; but if he were merely a god, (if that makes sense), then his life on earth would be meaningless; he’d just be a poseur pretending to be one of us.

Christians tend to put more emphasis on the “True God” part, though, because Christ’s humanity can make us uncomfortable sometimes; as in this story.  He knew hunger; he knew aggravation; he got frustrated when his disciples missed the point; he got sarcastic when his enemies tried to trap him in word games; he wept when his friends suffered bereavement; he crashed in the bottom of a fishing boat when he’d had a long, tiring day; and there were some times when the world got too much for him and he just needed some time by himself.

Here he got pissed off and yelled at a tree.  As someone who frequently yells at inanimate objects myself, I can wholly empathize.

Family Connections

In 2002, a stone ossuary, a casket used to contain the bones of the dead, was discovered in Israel bearing the inscription:  “James, son of Joseph, brother of Jesus”.  Public reaction broke down into roughly three categories:  there were those who celebrated the find, because it’s always nice when archaeology corroborates something in the Bible; there were those who questioned it, suspecting that the inscription was a hoax; then there was the vast majority of Christendom whose reaction was:  “Jesus had a brother???”

James, like Mary, is another of those names which occur frequently in the New Testament, to the reader’s confusion.  The best-known one is James the son of Zebedee and the brother of John.  The bar-Zebedee brothers, along with Simon Peter, seem to have been Jesus’ closest friends among his twelve disciples.  Jesus had another disciple named James, who is called the son of Alpheus, or sometimes James the Lesser, either because he isn’t as prominent in the Gospels, or possibly because he was shorter.

But who was the brother of Jesus?

The first mention of Jesus’ siblings comes in the third chapter of Mark:

When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said “He is out of his mind.” … The Jesus’ mother and brothers arrived.  Standing outside, they sent someone in to call him.  A crowd was sitting around him, and they told him, “Your mother and brothers are outside looking for you.” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” he asked. Then he looked at those seated in a circle around him and said, “Here are my mother and my brothers!  Whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother.”  (Mark 3:21, 31-35 NIV)

His first mention comes in the book of Matthew where Jesus returns to his hometown of Nazareth and preaches in the local synagogue.  The people who here him are amazed.  “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son?  Isn’t his mother’s name Mary, and aren’t his brothers James, Joseph, Simon and Judas?  Aren’t all his sisters with us?” (Matthew 13:55-56)

Catholics have long found this passage problematic.  The Catholic Church has traditionally maintained that Mary was sinless and that she remained a virgin her entire life.  Saying that Jesus had brothers and sisters strongly suggests that she and Joseph … well … Did It.

Some scholars have gotten around this by saying that the word “brother” used here in the text may also be translated as “relative”, meaning that James was a cousin of Jesus or maybe even a wacky uncle.  Although “wacky” is not an adjective that really suits James.

Another popular explanation, and this one actually seems plausible to me, is that Joseph was a widower when he wed Mary, and that James and the other siblings were children of his previous marriage.  This makes a certain degree of sense.  The Gospels don’t mention Joseph after Jesus’ childhood, and so it seems reasonable to guess that he was much older than Mary and had died before Jesus started his ministry.  And the brief mention in Mark chapter 3 of the family trying to bring Jesus home to me carries the strong vibe of the Responsible Older Brother trying to get the Rebellious Kid to settle down.  I might be reading into it, though.

Despite at first thinking his brother was crazy, James did come around.  Later on in his ministry, Jesus’ brothers came to him again, this time to give him advice on public relations:  “You ought to leave here and go to Judea, so that your disciples may see the miracles you do.” (John 7:3)

Jesus ignored their advice and didn’t go down to Jerusalem until he was good and ready.

After Jesus’ Resurrection, James seems to have become more closely associated with his Disciples, becoming a prominent leader of the Early Church, called by later tradition “James the Just”.  When Peter was imprisoned by Herod in Acts chapter 12 and then miraculously freed, Peter told his friends to “Tell James and the brothers about this.”  (Acts 12:17)

James came up with the compromise that settled the circumcision crisis at the Council of Jerusalem in Acts chapter 15, and he is mentioned in some of Paul’s letters as an important figure in the Jerusalem Christian community.  I always assumed that this was James the brother of John, but James bar-Zebedee was already dead by this point, executed by Herod Agrippa I (Acts 12:1-3).  Paul identifies the James he knew as James the brother of Jesus in Galatians 1:19.

So how did James wind up a respected figure in the Church?  He wasn’t one of the Twelve; he wasn’t even one of the larger group of followers who gathered around Jesus.  He didn’t even approve of Jesus and his ministry at first.  Well, obviously he eventually came around to support his weird little brother the rabbi.  If, as has been suggested, James was an older brother, perhaps the Twelve deferred to him as an elder.  Or it might have simply been a matter of family connections; as Jesus’ oldest living male relative,  he took over the family business, so to speak.  At least taking on an administrative role.

James and Paul had an interesting relationship.  I get the feeling it was a combination of cautious respect and mutual antagonism.  After Paul’s conversion to Christianity, he went to Jerusalem to meet with Peter and James, who confirmed his bona fides and gave him further instruction in the teachings of Jesus.  In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul cites James’ approval as one of his credentials as an apostle.

Yet there was friction between the two as well.  A split was growing between the predominantly Jewish church in Jerusalem – the Home Office, so to speak – and the newer communities starting up outside Judea, like Paul’s home base in the Syrian town of Antioch, which were becoming more predominantly Gentile.  A disagreement arouse over how the Church should treat these Gentile converts, which led to the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts chapter 15.  In this case, James brokered a compromise between the two factions, but elsewhere we get a strong impression that he wasn’t exactly on Paul’s side.

In his epistle to the Galatians, Paul tells of an incident where Peter was visiting the church in Antioch.  Peter had no problem hanging out with the gentile members of the community until “certain men came from James.” (Galatians 2:12).  Then, for political reasons, Peter decided it was expedient to keep kosher.  Paul called him out on this hypocrisy.

Granted, this is Paul’s version of what happened.  Some scholars have noted a discrepancy between the story Paul tells in Galatians and the Acts account of the Council of Jerusalem where Peter was strongly on Paul’s side.  I’m not sure if this is an inconsistency in the Bible as much as an inconsistency in Peter.  I suppose a lot depends on when the two incidents took place in relation to each other.

A greater conflict lies between the epistles of Paul, Galatians especially, and the Epistle of James, traditionally attributed to James the Just.  Martin Luther strongly considered leaving that book out when he was compiling his German translation of the New Testament, and grumbled that it was “an epistle of straw”.  The Book of James seems to run counter to the doctrine of Salvation by Grace which Luther derived from Paul and which forms the core of Lutheran understanding of the Gospel.

Luther was far from the first reader to notice this tension between the two Apostles.  “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith” Paul says, “not by works, so that no one can boast.”  (Ephesians 2:8-9)  Yet James counters:  “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? … In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.  But someone will say, ‘You have faith, I have deeds.’  Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.”  (James 2:14, 17-18)

I think what was happening here is that James was speaking from the long tradition in Judaism – which continues to this day – that good deeds, moral actions, are an essential component to the godly life.  It has been suggested that James’ letter was written in reaction to early reports of what that nut Paul in Antioch was teaching, or to people who were misunderstanding Paul.

Luther eventually figured out how to reconcile the two, at least to his own satisfaction.  Paul is not saying that Good Works are unimportant; only that they are not the means by which people draw near to God.  In fact, in the verse immediately following the famous Ephesians 2 passage, Paul adds:  “For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works…” (Ephesians 2:10)

In other words, we shouldn’t be doing Good Works to try to get into Heaven; we should do Good Works because they’re the right thing to do.  Which is what the Atheists have been telling us all along.  I’ll have to think about that a bit.

When Paul made his last trip to Jerusalem, he met again with James to report on his travels.  Apparently rumors had come back to Jerusalem that Paul was teaching Jews to turn away from the Laws of Moses, which wasn’t exactly true, but close enough that it was re-opening the schism that the previous council had averted.  James and the elders of the Church recommend that Paul perform a public act of ritual purification to show that he still respected the Law.  It didn’t work; and in the resulting riot, Paul wound up arrested.

Scriptures does not say what happened to James the Just after that.  According to the First Century Jewish historian Josephus, the High Priest took advantage of a vacancy in the Roman governorship of Judea in AD 62 to condemn James and have him stoned.  Some of the Early Church Fathers stated that James died during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in AD 69.

But where was James buried?  Maybe in that ossuary with the controversial inscription.  The collector who revealed the James Ossuary to the world was accused of being part of a forgery ring.  Although the box itself was genuine, dating back to the First Century, the Israeli Antiquities Authority, which investigated the discovery, decided that the words “brother of Jesus” had been added to the inscription at a later date.  Other experts who have examined the ossuary have disagreed.  And so the argument goes on.

James probably wouldn’t have thought it important.