Introduction
This week’s Adult & All Age Bible notes makes the point that Jesus’ stories in this week’s Gospel reading, like other parables in the Gospels – and many modern jokes – involve the use of exaggeration. How legitimate is it to use exaggeration to make a point?
Context
The US President persistently attacks the mainstream news media for peddling what he calls ‘fake news’, while others make the opposite attack. As I write, a UK Cabinet Minister has demanded a meeting with the BBC because, he claims, it often says ‘despite Brexit’ before reporting good economic news, while he is attacked for attempting to intimidate the BBC. And, in a verse omitted from both this week’s Gospel passage and last week’s, Jesus himself speaks of his use of parables as being about proclaiming ‘what has been hidden from the foundation of the world’ (Matthew 13.34). How much does all this matter? Are there theological issues here? And how might kingdom values cast light on recent news about pay inequality relating to gender and ethnicity at the BBC, or for that matter elsewhere in our deeply unequal society.
Reflection
Exaggeration is a feature of many of Jesus’ stories; for example, think of the camel going through the eye of a needle, even if that was in fact a small gate. And this week Jesus exaggerates the smallness of a mustard seed, the size of the resulting tree and the impact of yeast. But think also about the way some jokes involve exaggeration. I have often thought that many of Jesus’ stories would have been heard in the original Aramaic as jokes – and because we miss the joke, we sometimes miss the point of the story. As an international negotiator many years ago, I was trained to avoid jokes because so often they turn on the similarity between different words – and therefore rarely translate well. We were told the (possibly apocryphal) story of an interpreter saying: ‘the speaker is telling an untranslatable joke but it would be polite if you laughed…now’. Given that we do not know what Jesus said in Aramaic, but only how the Gospels writers interpreted it in Greek, and then we read the stories through yet another translation into English, do we sometimes miss the point of Jesus’ parables because we fail to understand the joke?
Is exaggeration the same as a lie? Sometimes the answer is yes; if a factual statistic is exaggerated, we can draw false conclusions. But many preachers have, like Jesus, at least sometimes used an exaggeration to emphasise a point.
Today’s parables are about the kingdom. The kingdom as Jesus understands it is a whole new way of living in which many, perhaps all, of the world’s values are turned upside down. In the kingdom world, we need to see things very differently. The poor (in spirit and in the things of this world) will have priority; justice will be universal; women and children will be respected; the kingdom values (love God and love neighbour) will be primary. So much of this message is radical, especially in a deeply traditional culture.
We live in different times but deeply traditional values are still to be found, perhaps especially in church. Valuing the poor and universal justice remain deeply unpopular; recent news about BBC pay differentials highlights the degree to which our society’s values are different from kingdom values. And as to the kingdom values about pay differentials, you might want to recall the story later in Matthew’s Gospel about the workers who laboured all day and those hired for the last hour who were all paid the same full daily rate (Matthew 20.1-16).
Prayer
In your intercessions remember that many families with children at school will be, or preparing to go, on holiday, while others who cannot afford holidays may be struggling to manage the long school break. Many churches will be holding holiday clubs or similar activities for children during August. But there are also children for whom school can be a respite from difficult home lives; for them the school holidays can be a time of loneliness or even fear. Teachers and other involved in education may be benefitting from a much needed break from routine. In areas which receive holiday visitors, work may be more plentiful at this time of year but traffic may be problematic.
Two short prayers on kingdom values, which could be used to end a sermon or included in prayers of intercession:
Creator God,
in these uncertain times
help us to live by the values of the kingdom,
and always to work for the coming of your kingdom by word and deed.
Amen.
Lord, give us grace to learn to live by kingdom values,
and the wisdom to understand how to apply those values
in the everyday issues we face in today’s world.
Amen.
Questions
- In the musical Godspell Jesus was portrayed as a clown introduced by the ringmaster John (the Baptist) who, in the original theatrical production, came in from behind the audience singing ‘Prepare ye the way of the Lord’. If at least some of Jesus’ stories were originally jokes, can you imagine how today’s Gospel stories might have sounded to their first hearers?
- Thinking about today’s parables, how would you illustrate the same points today? What would be a good contemporary illustration of the small becoming large (parallel to the mustard seed story from Jesus)? And what would be a good contemporary illustration of good and evil being mixed up as the fish were in Jesus’ story?
Action
- Read the whole of Matthew chapter 13 and ask yourselves what these stories might have meant for those who first heard them and what they might mean for us.
- When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we pray ‘your kingdom come’. What does it mean for us? Is it a call to live out our lives as far as possible in accordance with kingdom values as illustrated by the stories in Matthew 13 (and elsewhere in the gospels)?
Young people
- Listen to one or two tracks from the musical Godspell, which is based on Matthew’s Gospel. Explore the implications of Jesus as a clown. Are we called to be jokers or clowns for God? And, if so, what might that mean in our everyday lives?
Dudley Coates is a Local Preacher in the Yeovil and Blackmore Vale Methodist Circuit and a former Vice President of the Methodist Conference.
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