18th Sunday After Pentecost
26 September 1999
St. George’s Episcopal Church
Le Mars, Iowa
The Rev. Karen Wacome, Celebrant
Dr. Donald Wacome, Lay Preacher
Matthew 21.28-32
Down and Out with Jesus of
Nazareth
When I was a boy the kids across the street had the deluxe model Sears Roebuck chemistry set. I never had one, probably because my father, being a chemist, knew better than to trust me with one. My friends and I spent hours messing around in their basement, trying to manufacture explosives and to synthesize something called red fuming nitric acid because it, according to the Guinness Book of World records, is the world’s most foul smelling compound. At the time that rendered the desirability of having some self-evident. Sometimes we speculated about things we had heard of only by way of apocryphal schoolboy lore. One of them was universal acid. The idea of universal acid is that it’s an acid that can dissolve anything. No matter what sort of container you put it in - lead, diamond, kryptonite - it eats right through it. Nothing even momentarily resists its corrosive power. This also sounded like wonderful stuff to have, though we couldn’t figure out where we’d keep it.
Today’s parable, Jesus’ story of the two brothers, is about universal
acid. If Jesus is right, God’s grace is a kind of universal acid.
It eats right through any scheme we come up with to contain it. It dissolves
every attempt to turn it into a way of keeping score, of saying who’s in
and who isn’t; it disintegrates all the systems we devise for counting
ourselves as worthy of God’s approval and others as unworthy.
By the time we arrive at the 21st chapter of Matthew’s gospel, we’ve seen it all. In the eyes of the religious leaders, the chief priests, the elders, the Pharisees and the scribes, Jesus has been getting away with murder. He has gotten mixed up with everyone who’s on the outs with God, with just about every kind of person on the wrong side of the law. If there’s someone who is tainted or second rate or outcast or plain bad, Jesus has managed to hook up with them: lepers, children, epileptics, the blind and the lame, the demon possessed and the hungry, the poor and the paralyzed, foreigners, tax collectors and prostitutes, a hemorrhaging woman, the deaf and even the dead, everyone unclean, ritually or literally. Those who patently don’t measure up to God’s exacting standards are just the sort of person this Jesus wants to be with. Jesus is down there, living it up with the down and out. For the religious authorities keeping tabs on this disreputable troublemaker from Nazareth, being in God’s good graces is all about drawing lines and staying on the right side, of keeping a sharp eye on who’s in and who’s out, who’s a Jew not a dirty gentile, who’s a diligent keeper of the law and who’s one of the ignorant and unwashed mob. In their world, it’s guilt by association: Jesus is as bad as these characters he spends his time with; he is unclean, a sinner.
Things soon get ugly. The chief priests and elders are out to trap Jesus; they question him, hoping to catch him saying something so incriminating that they can put him away. But Jesus asks them a question. It’s one with an obvious answer: which of the two sons did the will of his father, the one who said he’d obey but then reneged, or the one who refused to obey but then repented? Of course they say it’s the one who really obeyed. They’re not stupid; they know that real obedience isn’t a matter of talk but of action. Having pulled them in now Jesus slaps them hard: the lowest of the low, the tax collectors and prostitutes, they’re like the first son, the one who really does God’s will. You chief priests, you elders: you are the second son, the one who pretends to obey God but really doesn’t. What Jesus says is outrageous: the tax collectors, those cheaters who have sold out their fellow Jews to the Roman occupiers, and the prostitutes, those despised women reduced to selling themselves, are God’s children, and indeed, they will enter God’s kingdom ahead of you! Fighting words: if the religious authorities didn’t already want to have Jesus killed, they do now.
Most of the commentators on this passage say the “ahead of” here means “instead of.” That Jesus is saying the religiously proper will be excluded from the kingdom while the scum of the earth are allowed in. At face value our English text suggests that he says they will be let in, but they’ll follow behind these despised outcasts. I don’t find the commentators’ arguments compelling. Which would have made the religious authorities angrier: Jesus telling them the cheats and hookers will go into God’s kingdom but that they will not be allowed in, or that they will get in, but only in utter humiliation: on the heels of these despised outcasts? My bet is that Jesus’ words are supposed to be ambiguous. Whichever way of taking it that most shocks their religious and moral sensibilities, that’s how Jesus wants them to hear it.
Flannery O’Connor wrote a short story called “Revelation,” a contemporary retelling of this parable. Mrs. Turpin, the wife of a pig farmer who above all craves, and is convinced she has earned, respectability, is sitting in the waiting room of a doctor’s office. She’s looking her fellow patients up and down, categorizing them, inwardly judging their faults. In her heart she thanks Jesus that she isn’t like the blacks and poor white trash, the disreputable, lazy and unattractive slackers she sees all around her. One of the waiting patients is a young girl who has been angrily glaring at Mrs. Turpin all along. Suddenly she goes berserk, she leaps on Mrs. Turpin and tries to strangle her. As the other patients, the doctor and nurses struggle to pull her off, the demented girl whispers into her ear “Go back to hell where you came from, you old wart hog!” Surprisingly, Mrs. Turpin does not dismiss this as the raving of a psychotic. She takes it as a message from God, from the Jesus to whom she has just been happily praying. She goes home and broods; she feels she has been betrayed, she gets angrier and angrier with God for calling her a pig out of hell.
The story climaxes as Mrs. Turpin has a vision:
She saw...a vast swinging bridge extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire. Upon it a vast horde of souls were rumbling toward heaven. There were whole companies of white trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of black Negroes in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs. And bringing up the end of the procession was a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself..., had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right...They were marching behind the others with great dignity, accountable as they had always been for good order and common sense and respectable behavior. They alone were on key. Yet she could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away.
O’Connor doesn’t tell us if Mrs. Turpin’s revelation led her beyond shock, anger and horror to faith. We do know how the men who heard the parable of the two sons reacted. They set in motion the wheels of murder to silence this outrageous revelation.
Time and familiarity have, perhaps, blunted the sharp edge of this parable. It’s easy enough to mishear it, to hear something that isn’t as alien and hard as what Jesus actually said.
It’s not that the tax collectors and prostitutes are O.K. in the end because, having gotten off to a bad start, they’ve at last straightened themselves out, nor is it that the religious authorities, after appearing to be straight arrows, are revealed as having gone rotten within. What we find here is not the hooker with the heart of gold. nor is it the hypocritical televangelist who buys her services. What we find here does not confirm and soothe our moral and religious sensibilities; it confounds them. The point is that nothing matters except God’s willingness to accept us as we. The way of reckoning that declares some screwed up and undeserving and others good enough is cast aside.
Jesus is down there with the outcasts, but the parable’s point is not that the respectable and conventionally good are really wicked while the down and out are really good and just waiting for God to vindicate them. There’s a world’s difference between correcting the accounts so things come out right and true justice is done and giving up on every way of keeping score forever in favor of absolutely free love. The point’s not the hidden virtue of the outcasts; it’s that the outcasts and the respectable are all, at the door to God’s everlasting celebration, just the same. The down and out aren’t better; they’re just luckier: it’s easier for them to believe that they have nothing to bargain with God, that their situation is hopeless. For them, it can be easier to accept the gift of being accepted by God no strings attached. It’s a bit harder to think you can deal with God on the basis of how good you are if the whole world tells you you’re a worthless bum.
The kingdom of God is at hand or, to shift the metaphor, the invitation to the mother of all parties have been sent out. Everyone’s invited. God announces he’s not in the business of keeping score, just in case anyone thinks he ever was. No more drawing lines, no more separating the clean from the unclean, the sinners from the saints, the good from the bad. The judge has dismissed all the charges, closed up court forever and invited all the felons out for a great time.
There’s no way to be kept out of this party. It’s impossible to be turned away. There’s just the possibility of keeping yourself out by self-righteous sulking. Remember Jonah in last week’s reading: sitting in his little hut petulantly watching the city of Nineveh as he nurses his offended sense of justice. Remember the prodigal son’s big brother missing the festivities because he’s ticked off at his father’s profligate love. Or those early-rising vineyard workers in last week’s sermon burned up at their boss’s crazy idea of fair play.
If it doesn’t sometimes stick in our craws we probably haven’t really
heard it. Not a loosening up of the rules, not a lowering of the standard
so the likes of us might, with effort, get by: that’s someting we could
easily accept. What we see in Jesus is not God giving the outcasts a break
and letting them slip in the back door so long as they’re on their best
behavior. We see God’s love breaking in, nailing all the scorekeeping to
a bloody cross and throwing open the doors to everyone, each as a guest
of honor. When the Romans killed Jesus God killed off our wisdom,
he assassinated our sense of justice. God’s grace comes to us no strings
attached but, as Rein Vanderhill said last Sunday: we keep trying to tie
strings to it.
The thing about this is that it’s about impossible really to believe it, at least not steadily and not for long. There’s a tenacious little scorekeeper down inside each of us; a little judge, a would-be god. That’s my candidate for original sin. Each of us has two mental lists hidden away somewhere: one is the list of those we condemn as self-righteous, as the Pharisees and hypocrites of the day. The other is our list of who’s deserving and who isn’t, of who doesn’t really measure up and who’s good enough. This is the list that shows we belong on the first list! We are as much the self-righteous sulkers as we are the losers and outcasts. There’s no place safe to stand: God’s grace dissolves all the ground on which we would try to justify ourselves.
Once we realize that about ourselves the jig is up. There’s no hope. We don’t even fit in completely with those lowlifes Jesus hung out with. We have to identify ourselves with the lepers and outcasts and with the religious rulers, with the prostitutes and tax collectors and with poor Mrs. Turpin. There’s nothing to do but trust that Jesus meant exactly what he said, and that he was telling the truth when he said it. Our only hope is believing that God really does love us with a love that breaks down all our defenses, a love that cuts every string our sneaky hearts try to tie on to his good news.
In the end the grace of God is universal acid. In its presence all the subterfuges of our self-righteousness dissolve and we’re left with nothing but the living, dying and resurrected Jesus. Back in the 60’s Leonard Cohen wrote a song that calls this to mind:
Jesus was a sailor
And he walked upon the water
And he spent a long time watching
From his lonely wooden tower
Until he knew for certain
That only drowning men could see him
And he sank beneath your wisdom like a stone.
Our only way out of the kingdom of judgement and condemnation is to go down and out with Jesus and with him to God’s kingdom of everlasting joy. Amen.