Faith

The parable of the lost sons. Yup, both of them! – 4th Sunday of Lent – Luke 15: 1-3, 11- 32

So the unanswered question of the parable is, “Did the elder brother go in to the banquet or not?” This is the question we should be asking ourselves, because the Bible says nothing on the matter. But we don’t, because the problem lies in the fact that we have got caught up with a beautiful parable, turned it into an allegory and lost the plot! The parable of what has come to be known as the ‘prodigal son’ is not about the younger son or about this amazingly forgiving father’. It’s all about this elder son, equally lost and horribly hate filled. Incidentally, the word “prodigal” is an adjective that means wasteful or spendthrift. Luke doesn’t actually call his character the “prodigal son”. It’s a modern title, that’s all.

A parable is starkly different from an allegory. In an allegory, we assign meaning to each of the characters and compare them to the spiritual categories in our head, where the ideas in the story are symbolized as people.  So you can have as many ‘ideas’ as you can have characters. For example, the father stands for God; the younger son is wayward humanity and so on.  A parable on the other hand, is designed to present a moral with a single point agenda; in this case the agenda is the Pharisees. It is to them that the parable is spoken in verse 2, for their angst against Jesus is splattered all over the gospel pages.

So what’s the background to all of this? The cause of ‘the grumbling’ of the Pharisees is plain; Jesus is ‘hanging out with the wrong crowd’ (5:29-32; 7:37-39; 19:7). But Jesus has never changed His agenda! He repeatedly insists that He has come precisely for such “sinners”, as well as other social outcasts, who are coming out in droves to listen to His teaching (15:1-2). To this moral outrage of eating with sinners, the Pharisees found themselves at the receiving end of, not one, but three parables in Luke 15. So what did they do so wrong?

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Faith

 Blood in the Vineyard – not written by Agatha Christie- Friday, 2nd Week of Lent -Matthew 21: 33-43, 45-56

How you see this parable will all depend on if you’re a Christian in the year 2021,  or a Pharisee of the first century. So let’s place this parable in perspective.  Jesus is at the gates of Jerusalem engaged in a verbal battle with the Pharisees. He has cleansed the temple and now, these leaders challenge His authority.  His reply to them is reiterated over three parables; today’s text being the second.

As I said before, it all depends on which point you stand, in order for you to understand the meaning of the text. For us today, God is the owner of the vineyard, the prophets are the servants, Jesus is the Son, the Pharisees are the wicked tenants and we are the new tenants who will inherit the vineyard. This scenario would have panned out quite differently for the Pharisees, who never got the point. Why? Because they were land owners! And so they understood the story with a first century Jewish mind-set. For them, this was a drama and they mistook themselves to be in the lead role.

Many of the Pharisees would have been in reality, what they came to be called, ‘absentee landowners’. Such landowners would lease out the vineyard to tenants and then make their way to the city. The payment to the landowner was made in kind, namely a percentage of the produce. If the landowner did not receive his due, he would simply lease the land to other tenants. The Pharisees, themselves landowners, could not identify even for a second, the role of being a tenant.

The point of the narrative is to highlight that there is nothing wrong with the harvest, but with the attitude of the Pharisees who in this case were the tenants.  In response to a seemingly naïve landlord, their arrogant and violent response make little sense. Assuming they succeeded in killing the land owner’s son, which they do, they still won’t inherit the land as the father is still alive! But Jesus, in portraying what seemed to be a naïve response of the landlord, to send his only son, was actually exposing the evil thoughts in the hearts of the Pharisees.

By the time the penny dropped for the Chief priests and Pharisees, it was too late. Their realization that Jesus was speaking of them as the wicked tenants and not the absentee landlords, was slow to come. They stood exposed and because of the crowds who regarded Jesus as a prophet, refrained from arresting Him or even worse, killing Him right there! What was worse, was that in answering His question, they had condemned themselves with their own words, “He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time” (verse 41). In their many attempts to trap Him, they now get trapped themselves. This constant run in between Jesus and the Pharisees is a swan song of the gospel of Matthew.

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Musings

Go and do likewise – Luke 10:37

When I first met Theresa seven years ago I was shocked at the condition in which she lived. Appapada is lost somewhere in what should have been part of the national park( now happily encroached upon). She along with about thirty families live on this hillock which has no running water or electricity.

What touched my deeply this morning were the accompanying photographs from the community animator, Robert Dsouza. Theresa along with three other financially challenged women (Aveline, Chitra and Philomena)got together and cooked a meal for the poor of the area and fed them in her hut. The poor ministered to the poor.

This post is not written to make you feel guilty or to remind you how privileged you are; In a way, I myself am tired of ‘religious guilt’. This post is to empower you to do likewise.

Perhaps you may feel like cooking a meal in your house and feeding people who live around your residence. Or perhaps you could tip your hardworking postman, offer a glass of juice to your courier boy, offer a cup of chai to the one who collects your garbage, give a Lenten bonus to your domestic help, reach out to the office assistant and share your lunch with them; the list is endless.

Just for today become another Theresa to some one (like Mother Teresa did) And if you were deeply touched by the gesture of these women then share this ‘GOOD NEWS’ with others.

#pottypadre #ShareHisWORD #StJudeChurchMaladEast #LentenLunches

Fr Warner Dsouza

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Faith

The colour purple- Thursday, second week of Lent- Luke 16:19-31

The question that needs to be answered after reading this text is, will the five remaining brothers and us, who read the text in the modern world, follow the example of the rich man or heed the teachings of Jesus and that of the Old Testament about the care for the needy.

If you read the text carefully you will see that the rich man has no name, though in the tradition of the Church he came to be called ‘Dives’, which means “rich” in Latin. And besides the fact that he was rich the text does not tell us that he committed any moral wrong. It almost seems to appear that his condemnation stemmed from the fact that he was ‘merely rich’, which technically is no fault of his nor is being ‘poor’ a reason to be taken to heaven. Did Jesus simply have a preferential option for ‘Lazarus,’ which by the way is the only name given to anyone in Jesus’ parables (It means El-azar, “God has helped.”)

There is no condemnation in being rich per se; the condemnation is in not being sensitive to the needs of others. The narrative leaves little threads of this charge against Dives. We know the man is rich, it is told to us clearly but what is also told to us is that he dressed in purple and fine linen. Purple was a colour that was reserved for royalty. There is ambition in the man, an ambition that blinds generosity; for while he dressed in purple and linen he did not notice the poor man ‘at the gate’.

 Luke makes clear that the poor are a focus of Jesus’ ministry. In his inaugural sermon, Jesus declares that he has been anointed by the Spirit of the Lord “to bring good news to the poor” (4:18; see also 7:22). Jesus admonishes his followers not just to invite to their parties the friends and neighbors who can repay them, but to extend their invitations to “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (14:13). This is echoed when Jesus describes the kingdom of God as a wedding banquet where the invitation has been extended to “the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind” (14:21). ( crf  Lois Malcolm)

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Faith

My boys- Wednesday. 2nd Week of Lent – Matthew 20:17-28

Honestly, what was this woman thinking? Jesus has just finished telling his disciples that he must suffer a horrible death and she pips in, curtsey et al, to ask for a ‘ public declaration’  of  positions and power, for her boys. Cleary she had heard that Jesus had given the keys of the kingdom to Peter and now she must have been wondering, ‘what are my boys going to get?’ Perhaps she may have noticed that Jesus’ inner circle of three consisted of her boys and Peter. It was this trio who were always around the Lord at those special moments, like the transfiguration. Would her boys loose out to the ministerial positions in the kingdom of Jesus? And so she moves in to outflank the rest, in favour of her boys. But has Mrs Zebedee put her foot into her mouth?

St Matthew, writing to a Jewish Christian community about forty years after Jesus’ death, does not want to embarrass James, the ‘hero of the Jewish Christians’ with such an embarrassing narrative. By the year seventy AD, James has become a house hold name among the Jewish Christians and to portray him as power seeking  monger and that too behind the skirt of his mother, would be outright embarrassing.  So Matthew, unlike the Gospel of Mark (written before Matthew) simply does not even mention the name of James and John in this passage. We only know later, in Matthew 27:56 that the sons of Zebedee mentioned here are indeed James and John. 

But before we run this poor woman to the ground for her ambitious dreams of glory for her sons, we must see in her, all mothers, who would like the same for their boys. It seems like the scriptures simply leave Mrs Zebedee in the poorest of light; not true. In Matthew 27:56 she is mentioned again, this time after Jesus’ death, as one of the three women who had ‘followed him from Galilee providing for His needs’. She does this respectfully from afar. This same woman filled with aspiration for position and power is now a humbler servant of Jesus. She has become a servant disciple, yet a courageous woman of faith who stands close to the cross of Jesus. What an amazing transformation and so unlike the disciples who struggled to understand the master till the bitter end.

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