Marginal Christianity

A Parable about a Wedding Banquet (Mt.22:1-14) The issue of Jesus’ authority, his political authority as Messiah of God’s heavenly kingdom continues to be at issue here. Ancient peoples, Jews among them, did not know the separation our modern world has erected between religion and political. For them everything had political significance and everything had religious significance. Jesus had occupied and announced the destruction of the temple, disputed with the Jewish leadership over his authority, and retold Israel’s sad history of default on their calling to be God’s Abrahamic people, which had finally led to this moment of final crisis with Jesus. It was him or the Jews as other than this Abrahamic people given over to bearing God’s blessing to the world. And Jesus’ authority as God’s agent in dealing with the Jews bookends this section (21:23-22:46). Within these “authority” bookends Matthew tells two sequences of three: three parables (the two sons, the vineyard and a ...

The Entry (Mt.21:1-10) Jesus’ strategy now takes a quantum leap forward. The conflict brewing throughout his ministry with the Jewish religious leadership reaches full boil. He provokes it with a piece of strategic   messianic street theater we’ve come to call, rather ironically, the Triumphal Entry.   But strategy is hand in glove with scriptural fulfilment here. No surprise in that with Matthew. Jesus moves according to the Father’s will. The essential props come first. Jesus sends out two disciples to fetch his ride. And this ride resonates not only with the explicit text Matthew provides but implicitly with other Old Testament texts that speak to Jesus’ identity. The props Jesus wants are a donkey and a colt (v.2). The prophecy from Zech.9:9 foretells this: a royal arrival for the people, a king humble riding on a donkey and a colt. Now donkeys are not highly thought of in our time and place but in that time they were royal steeds (cf. Judg.10:4; 12:14; 1 Sam....

More Parables (Mt.13:44-50) Throughout this centerpiece of Matthew’s gospel [1] we have met parables, designed to gather those “with ears to hears” to Jesus’ way of being Abrahamic Israel and separate those who clung to other ways of being Israel as destined for judgment. The people by and large do not get what these riddling stories are about. Neither do the disciples but they at least ask for explanations which Jesus gives them. Jesus is presented as a Solomonic sage at this point in Matthew’s narrative. He embodies the wisdom he extols at the end of this chapter. He is the “master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old” (v.52). Notice the “new” -what is happening and coming into reality in and through Jesus, the “kingdom of heaven” – comes first, them in its light the “old” may be brought forth as interpreted by the arrival of the kingdom. It may, indeed, will, be different from everyone’s accumulated expectations, but it will prove, ...

The Wheat and the Weeds and Its Explanation (Mt.13:24-30; 36-43) Jesus offers another parable of the kingdom. This one is split into the parable proper (vv.24-30) and its interpretation (vv.36-41) in between which are two more parables of the kingdom (vv.31-33) and another explanation of Jesus’ use of parables (vv.34-35). Jesus’ parable compares the kingdom of heaven to one who sows wheat in a field. While everyone slept an enemy sowed weeds in that field.   When the field grew both wheat and the weeds together filled the field. The owners’ slaves asked him if he wanted them to de-weed the field of the enemy’s work. The owner declines fearing some wheat would be cleared out with the weeds. Wait until harvest time, he instructs them, then the two can be separated, the weeds for destruction, and the wheat for storage and later use. The question about the proper understanding of this parable has to do with the timing of the harvest Jesus talks about in it. [1] ...