Episode 113: Jesus’s Parables

0:08 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a philosophy podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 113 is something like, what philosophical insight can we draw from reading Jesus's parables? And we read the parables themselves and looked at secondary sources about. About how to read them, including Paul Ricoeur, Listening to the Parables of Jesus from 1974, and a couple other things. This is Mark Linsenmayer, like unto a grain of a mustard seed in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:40 Wes: This is Wes Alwan. I guess I'm more like the mustard seed. Are you the mustard seed? What kind of seed are you?

0:46 Mark: That's. I just said that. Think of a different one.

0:48 Wes: Oh, I'll be the lost sheep or something. I don't know.

0:51 Mark: All right.

0:51 Dylan: Lawrence Ware, participating in participatory pedagogy in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

0:58 Mark: All right. We're down to a trinity today.

1:01 Dylan: Oh, you just had to go for it. You had to go for the Christological

1:05 Mark: stuff not mentioned in the parables at all.

1:08 Dylan: No, that is a Pauline thing.

1:11 Mark: Yeah. So I had long thought about since we started this podcast, really, like, well, what if we actually did part of the Bible? And it seems simplest in a way. Voyaging into the many secondary readings about this found that it was not the simplest, but at least on the surfaces. You know, the parables, they're children's stories. They're supposed to be easy to understand. A lot of them are one line long. And we could sort of put on hold a lot of the issues like the resurrection and the miracles and the stuff that people often argue about Christianity, because these are just a bunch of sayings.

In fact, there's documents. The Gospel of Thomas that was found, what, in 1945, sometime recently like that, somewhere in there that is thought maybe to be older than the gospels that we have in the Bible and was just a collection of sayings. And so maybe that's even how it started, is that what was recorded was what he had to teach in those couple of years that he was being active. And so if that had been the end of the story, it would have been like Heraclitus, you know, that we just have a bunch of sayings. And so even looking at it that way, what would we get out of it if we take it out of the context of the larger story?

Or is that even possible? So that's one of the questions. The quagmires that I found myself wading in here, we picked a couple of secondary sources. I actually posted to Facebook and people started recommending many, many, many things, many more than I could look at in many whole books, recent books that I couldn't get copies of in time for Here somebody recommended John Dominic Crossan's the Power of Parable How Fiction by Jesus Became Fiction About Jesus. So putting aside the second half, whether there's fiction about Jesus, the first half of the book is fiction by Jesus.

And in chapter three of that, I found a particularly useful breakdown of the. The types of parables talking about the different structural elements. And then we had a few other articles here that I just found that I'll link folks to. So for instance, one is called Mark L. Bailey's Guidelines for Interpreting Jesus's Parables. Introduction to the Parables from a guy named Brian Purfield, a Mount Street Jesuit adult faith formation class. It's like this is one of his class materials, those two I just threw out there, because at least they cover the range of literature they give a little overview of.

Some people are more symbolic and some people are less symbolic, and they give guidelines. They're supposed to just prepare us to enter on this. Because if you just read them in the abstract, I think the appropriate response is to say, what is this about? Or else just you've got a received interpretation that sort of came with it. And so that removes any interest from it whatsoever. The Good Samaritan is good, help people, and that's good. And that's the whole thing. You know, that's the way I was taught when I was younger. Somebody also recommended Paul Tillich, who is a guy that deserves his own episode.

Would he be officially a postmodern theologian?

3:44 Dylan: He's a philosophical theologian within the existentialist tradition.

3:47 Mark: Chapter one of the New Being. Somebody had recommended the New Being, and he talks about parables from 1955.

3:53 Dylan: That's a book of his sermons. So yeah, the New Being is a great one. Yeah.

3:56 Mark: And then, you know, I chased down a bunch of other leads that didn't really go anywhere and ended up, though I did not inflict this on the guys. I'm actually going to have a not school group about this in April, listening to the entirety of a seminar by Thomas Sheehan, like a whole course for Stanford on the historical Jesus. So in some ways that's just a distraction from what we want to talk about tonight. This is a continuation of last time. It's hermeneutics. How do we read these things? And this is not just a matter of the Historical Jesus class.

Actually, that class used Dominic Crossan as sort of a center and paradigm of good scholarship and seemed to sketch a lot of the same results. But even this, Brian Purfield puts forth the idea that, for instance, if a parable shows up in the Book of Mark and there's an explanation right after that, and then Jesus explained what the parable meant, that might not have been what Jesus actually said. In terms of the explanation that it is commonly thought by scholars that again, we maybe have these isolated stories and those got passed around. You can imagine this is all oral tradition.

And then different faith communities in different areas, when they come up with the Gospels, they develop their own interpretations. The particular gospel has to serve the needs of their community. So you see definite patterns in the various ones of them. That Mark was in Rome, according to Sheehan, and was very concerned with the Christians. He was with being persecuted by the Romans, whereas Matthew was later and he was in a more Jewish community that had a split with Judaism, with what was remained of Judaism after the destruction of the temple, after.

In 60 A.D. something like that.

5:26 Dylan: Yeah. Somewhere in there. 65.

5:27 Mark: Yeah. So anything that makes it sound like the Jews killed Jesus, like that's out of Matthew. Matthew was a Jew and was pissed off at Jews because it was a brotherly conflict. It was not meant to be expanded historically in the tragic way that it has anyway. So once you introduce that notion that you could look through the text archaeologically, it makes it much more complicated, particularly as far as we're concerned with the parables and then the explanations that seem to come with them. Wes, had you read this stuff? I hadn't read any of this stuff since I was being confirmed, since I was 13 or something. I probably was the last time I looked at any of this stuff. What's been your experience?

6:03 Wes: I went to Catholic school in Ireland, although I was never a Catholic, but that's what public school is. It's Catholic school. So I had some exposure. But it's been a very long time and we also we this stuff at St. John's but, you know, I frankly, I don't remember the class. I don't remember discussing the parables, to tell you the truth. So it's really. It's brand new.

6:23 Mark: In a Great Books course, would the focus ever be the parables in particular or is it, you know, generally we're going to read Mark.

6:30 Wes: Well, we read a lot of the Bible.

6:31 Mark: Okay.

6:31 Wes: Old and New Testaments. We read large chunks and I'm sure we covered the parables, but it was

6:36 Dylan: so impactful now that you forgot It.

6:39 Wes: Yeah. Really?

6:40 Mark: Well, you know, give us your. You say you deal with these on a. On a weekly basis. Right? Or some of them.

6:46 Dylan: I've preached some parables. But yeah, you know, the whole idea of the historical Jesus and the tension between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith is how we talk about it. That's Marcus Borg. It's a Borgian kind of way to talk about it. That's not new to me at all. That's something that we wrestle with now. Before I went to school to study religion, I had no idea there was tension between those two things, that the actual historical Jesus was intention in any way with the Christ of faith, you know, the person that we consider to be, you know, the Son of God.

I was unaware of there being any tension before. I just always thought that the Christ of faith was all that there was. And then you go to school and you realize there's a great deal of scholarship there, kind of wrestling with the historical Jesus. You have John Dominic Crossan, and I believe he wrote the book, the Historical Jesus. The actual Long term.

7:31 Mark: Yes, yes, the 1991, which a lot of people bought and didn't finish because it's very.

7:36 Dylan: That book, man.

7:37 Mark: It's a lot of footnotes.

7:38 Dylan: I actually read that freaking book. I had to read it for a class. And it is a challenge to get through all of that. And then I remember when Marcus Borg came out with his meeting Jesus again for the first time, where he kind of deals with all of what John Dominic Crossan is wrestling with, but he deals with it in more of a approachable kind of way. Going through that really brought me to kind of a crisis of faith, if you will, where I was like, okay, so Jesus, the person who is the foundation for my spiritual life, is maybe not historically who I thought he was.

So I had to turn to people like Tillich and Ricoeur to give Jesus back to me. And so it's a joke that we say all the time when you're in seminary where you say, you know, don't take Jesus from people before they're ready, meaning don't introduce all this stuff to them if they're not ready. To wrestle with the difference between historical Jesus and the Christ of faith, what it lets you know is that these Gospels are gospels written to a particular audience, addressing a particular concern, and that they may or may not be these divinely things coming out of the sky that God himself wrote at the tip of a pen, but rather these are things that were molded in a community to address the concerns of that community.

And so they're, they're kind of hopscotching through the life of Jesus and saying, I want to highlight this, I don't want to talk about this to address any particular concern that they have. And so with Matthew, you have him highlighting the kingness of Jesus, right? The, you know, the kingship of Jesus. In Matthew he's preaching, you know, he's doing the Sermon on the Mount, whereas you have in Luke where he's trying to relate to the common people, to the common folk. And so he doesn't preach on a mount, he preaches on a plane. Right. He preaches on a level field.

And so all these things are there for particular purposes. And so that was something that I had to wrestle with going through school and as a young guy going to school, learning about religion, it just kind of really knocked me on my behind.

9:20 Mark: I also read some clerical. It's not that the whole clergy is against historical method. In fact, most of the folks Crossan himself was a priest and then got out of that because he wanted to get married.

9:30 Dylan: A good reason to get out of that.

9:32 Mark: So it seems like the Catholic Church is a little more friendly to that kind of approach. They are, you know, and will allege that these things were meant to be read allegorically a little more friendly to the kind of thing that we see in Ricoeur and Tillich, which is not what I would think. I normally think about Catholicism is very conservative and very rule oriented and stuff. But looking at the scholars in these areas seem to have a lot more tolerant than this than certainly, well, Protestantism. Martin Luther, if his whole thing is based on Sola Scriptura, the scriptures should be readable by anybody, right?

You don't need a priest to interpret it for you. Hermeneutically, that claim is just laughable. Like these things that were written for a first century audience. Just to put it out there, not that we're going to talk about this today, but you know, so Crossan, for instance, and it seems to be reflected by the scholarly community, the people that look into this think that even the idea of resurrection was supposed after the fact. These communities lost their leader. They're trying to make sense of it. And so the way they make sense of it, they're good Jews, they study the scripture and they see in Isaiah and other things all the faithful who've ever been persecuted and killed.

They're immediately exalted. So that's the first interpretation of maybe what Paul meant by resurrection is not. He didn't even use that word, but as soon as Jesus died He was by the right hand of God. Like that's their way of talking that all the saints that would not be unique to Jesus. So there's a pattern of how this sort of gets elevated and elevated. The Christology goes up as the century goes on. Anyway, this is the story. I don't want to get too distracted. If we present stuff that Crossan for instance, has to say here as somehow neutral, scholarly.

It seems like we should acknowledge that anybody who's evangelical at least objects highly to this. And there are folks within this scholarly community even that will say, well there are limits to what we should. You know, the fact is the scholarly investigation of the life of Jesus reveals that we just don't know very much about what his life was like. So how are you going to fill that in? Well, you could fill that in with faith in the fundamental principles of the religion or you could say, well yeah, okay, the vision, the understanding of what Christ was changed over the century and it was the Holy Spirit that was guiding that throughout.

I read that as a response. So you know, there are plenty of ways if you want to hold on to your current beliefs that you could make these sympathetic to the data that we have. Because you know, one of the lessons we're getting here is that there's no such thing as an interpretation free fact. That's sort of been one of Recur's points, the points of hermeneutics is that as these stories get told, then an interpretation grows with them. I had this thought in reading this stuff that I wanted to relate to maybe what we were talking about last time of maybe faith is not accepting a particular unprovable claim, for instance.

But it's something like, you know, how Sartre's idea of freedom means that given any set of circumstances we can have any attitude that we really will to about them. It's not as simple as just willing. If Sartre makes it sound like that, then that's why we hate Sartre sometimes. But it's still a matter like you can be. There's no facts of the matter that make you an optimist or a pessimist, for instance. And so this is entirely, you know, the disconnect we were talking about between science, the data and the interpretations, you know, especially when you bring them out to your big picture of the world, your philosophy, your view of the meaning of life.

Right, so this is back to the Jaspers episode again. So I see that here as well. So is that just to continue one of our threads from last time, Law kind of what does faith have to do more with grabbing onto certain creeds despite lack of evidence, or does it have more with taking a certain attitude toward the world and willfully doing so?

13:03 Dylan: There's a lot going on there with what you said. So first, I think let's talk about the writers first. So you have your John Dominic Crossings. John Donald Crossan is very, what we consider to be a very liberal scholar. Then moving further away from that liberal side, you have your Marcus Borgs, who's kind of more along the lines in the middle. And then you have people like N.T. wright, who was the Bishop of Durham. He retired in 2002. I think he's now a research professor at St. Andrews. So even within the context of people who are wrestling with the historical Jesus, they have a great deal of disagreement about who is Jesus, what does Jesus mean, how much faith should we put in Jesus, things like that.

And so for me, it has more to do with an attitude. I mean, it's more of a kind of an existential disposition of how do you approach these particular things? I think that it's very difficult for me as a philosophical thinker to be comfortable with putting reason to the side and latching on to something only by the means of faith. I just, as a philosopher, that's just not something that I can do. But one thing that I can do is in light of a community of faith, in light of the tradition that I come from, what they bring to the table, I'm able to approach life from a particular disposition that is best articulated in the Christian tradition.

Although for the point of clarity, I would not say is exclusively expressed in the Christian tradition, because I think that there's a lot to be learned from Buddhism and Islam as well. But nevertheless, from the Christian tradition, it's best articulated for me. And so that's the road that I go down. And so faith for me has to do with kind of an existential approach to life as opposed to latching on to a set of doctrines. And so I'm not going to latch on to the Westminster Creed or something like that, but rather I will say that walking in the path of Jesus makes the most sense for me, especially within the ethical framework, as we'll see as we kind of wrestle with the parables here soon, as opposed to intellectual assent to any kind of proposition.

14:56 Mark: And that seems to be what is kind of awesome about the parables.

15:00 Dylan: They open the door for that.

15:01 Mark: Yeah, yeah. When I started reading them, I was just reading them all according to the supplied interpretations. So Parable of the Sower I can read it.

15:08 Dylan: First, Wes, tell me what translation you're reading it from, because that's a very important point.

15:11 Wes: Just the King James reading everything off

15:13 Mark: of Wikipedia, which is the King James,

15:15 Wes: or it's the King James on Wikipedia.

15:18 Dylan: Okay, that's fine.

15:19 Wes: Sorry. Okay. Hearken. Behold, there went out a sower to sow. And it came to pass as he sowed, some fell by the wayside, and the birds of the air came and devoured it up. And some fell on stony ground where it had not much earth, and immediately it sprang up because it had no depth of earth. But when the sun was up, it was scorched. And because it had no root, it withered away. And some fell among thorns, the thorns grew up and choked it, and it yielded no fruit. And other fell on good ground, did yield fruit that sprang up and increased and brought forth some thirty and some sixty, some an hundred. He said unto them, he that has ears to hear, let him hear. So after that, the apostles are confused, naturally.

16:09 Mark: So here's the part in Mark. Here's the explanation which probably was added by Mark later.

16:13 Wes: Yeah, so that was mark 4, 3, 9, and then this is now 10 to 20. And he said unto them, unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God. But unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables that seeing they may see and not perceive, and hearing, they may hear and not understand, lest any time they should be converted and their sins should be forgiven them. And he said unto them, know ye not this parable, and how then will ye know all parables?

16:43 Seth: Ah.

16:43 Dylan: So what he's saying to the disciples is like, yo, homies, you guys are inside. Like, this is inside baseball to you guys. You guys are inside the kingdom. So you know the mystery of the kingdom of God. But the people who are outside of the kingdom, people who don't know the things that you know, I have to talk to them in parables so they can kind of understand what I'm trying to get across to them.

17:02 Wes: That seeing, they may see and not perceive seeing without perceiving. So the idea is the simple preaching. You know, we were talking about the Kerygma last time, so that's relevant, this idea of something that's preached. And then the question is how people receive it and whether it takes root, whether it falls on good ground. And so a straightforward explanation. It's like the Platonic doxosophia or knowingness, the idea that. Oh, okay, I get it. So it's sort of like the Contrast between Aristotelian straightforward discourse and then Platonic talking through the dialogues.

I think it's done for a similar reason, but the idea is to create enough perplexity that curiosity is aroused. And so that's a different kind of relationship to what's being preached as opposed to. Oh yeah, I get it, or something that simply feeds into one's preconceived notions about things. Something that challenges which gets us towards the crossing.

18:01 Mark: Yeah, so I was just looking at him on this. He introduces this in this chapter, one of the power parable when he's giving his three types and the first type, that just as a hypothesis that some people see all the parables as riddle parables. And he gives the comparison to the riddle of the Sphinx, right? Oedipus wants to get into Thebes and the Sphinx asked him the riddle about what's four legs in the morning and two legs in the afternoon and three legs at night. And if he gets it wrong, he, he'll get killed. So riddles could have big stakes. So as a hypothesis, some folks see, and this seems to be what Mark is putting forward in here, that these parables are told as riddles and you kind of have to be in the know.

You have to get familiar enough with the teachings in order to understand that. Oh, so according to this interpretation, it's a parable about parables and that some people I'm going to tell these things to and they're not going to understand. And some people, they're going to think they understand, but later it'll just drift off from that, you know, so he is the sower telling the things, and the different types of soil represent the different hearers. So that's the idea that maybe that that's what this kind of parable is supposed to be. Crossan ends up rejecting that.

But what do you think of that?

19:17 Wes: I mean, there are two different routes we can go here, right? He's I, I just brought up the idea of challenge, and now you're bringing up the idea of it being a riddle and crossing keeps those two things distinct, Right. Challenge is meant, right. To actually disrupt people's preconceived notions in some way present some paradox or something that's seemingly against the prevailing mores of the time. And then the riddle is just something that, it's a puzzle, it requires working out or may involves a paradox or something like that. So I think you could go either way here.

I mean, I think. But what's clear is he wants to provide things that require interpretation. I think we could at least put it at that very general level. And whether the interpretation is a product of the challenge or the riddle. I mean, the third way is simply just taking it like an Aesop's fable and there being a straightforward moral to it. And that, at least in this parable, that seems to be the thing that he's trying to avoid. In a way. This is a meadow parable, right? This is Jesus explaining to you what he's doing with the parables. So, you know, the other part that's interesting to me is just things that he thinks get in the way of the Word being sown in people's hearts, let's say.

So one of them is Satan.

20:25 Mark: This is the paragraph you didn't read yet, right?

20:27 Wes: Yeah. I don't know. Should we read that?

20:29 Mark: The sower soweth the Word. And these are they by the wayside where the Word is sown. But when they have heard, Satan cometh immediately and taketh away the word that was sown in their hearts. And these are they likewise which are sown on stony ground, who, when they have heard the Word immediately receive it with gladness and have no root in themselves, and so endure, but for a time afterward, when affliction or persecution arises for the Word's sake, immediately they are offended. And these are they which are sown among the thorns, such as hear the Word and the cares of this world, and the deceitfulness of riches, and the lusts of other things entering in choke the Word and it becometh unfruitful.

And these are they which are sown on good ground, such as hear the word and receive it, and bring forth fruit some 30 fold, some 60, and some a hundred. That's the long version of the short explanation which Crossan at least just attributes to Mark.

21:18 Dylan: I think he's right, actually. Well, it's a couple of things. Gosh, I'm about to get into trouble with my church, maybe. Anyway, so. All right, so here's the thing about Mark, this particular parable. So in the explanation of the parable, he quotes, and I believe It's Isaiah, chapter 6, verses 9 through 10.

21:35 Mark: You don't have to feel like you have to get any numbers right in this.

21:39 Dylan: He quotes to the disciples Isaiah, and he explains to them the point of the parable. Now, here's the thing, and I think that John Dominic Crossan is right about this. Parables are supposed to be participatory pedagogy. And so what's happening is that you're telling a story to people it's not supposed to be one of those things where you get up, you tell a story, everyone claps and says, good story, and they leave. But rather, you're getting up, you're telling a story, framing it in a way that is understandable to them, and then they engage in dialogue with you about this particular parable.

Right. And so I think that Mark, including here the explanation of what this parable is supposed to mean, kind of undercuts the way that the parable is supposed to be experienced. Right. It's supposed to be one of those things where we read a parable almost in the same way that we read a dialogue by Plato, and we engage the text and we wrestle with the text and we try to figure out what's going on. What does he mean? And I don't like that Mark includes here this explanation at the end that is his really, his interpretation of what's going on here.

But this is a parable that is polyvalent, that it could have many meanings and is applicable to a number of different kinds of situations. And I'm not sure that I like his explanation. I don't want his explanation. I want to wrestle with the parable without having to wrestle with what he thinks the parable actually means. And that's what I like about John Dominic Crossan, where he separates these explanations away from the parables themselves. And he lets us know that these parables are told to a group of people who are expected to engage him.

And he engages in thought and questions, and they argue with him and they disagree. And he says, well, wait a minute, what about this? And so, again, it's participatory pedagogy where ultimately you come out of the other end with some level of enlightenment, having wrestled with a particular story and the meaning therein, as opposed to having this nice TD explanation at the end that I'm not sure I fully buy. Although, sure, this is part of what it could mean, but it could mean other things as well. So that's part of my problem with the way that Mark editorializes this.

I would have preferred this to be without that editorializing there at the end and just that short story.

23:55 Mark: Well, another interesting thing in terms of Crossing's editorializing about this is that, like you said, he expected engagement. In fact, he thought that these things were sermons, that it would be like, this is a story that takes a half an hour, an hour to tell, not this, which makes it difficult for me to. If you want it to remain permanently ambiguous, then it seems more effective to do that in a Zen koan in a short, pithy thing like we actually have here.

24:23 Dylan: Right.

24:24 Mark: But what Crossan is saying is that this is the Cliff Notes already. This is the thing that got passed around as oral tradition that somebody, you know, maybe Jesus himself said, let me just end this by summarizing what I just said and then gives maybe, who knows? But somehow this shorter version came out of it. And I find that difficult to imagine Crosson's vision of this as an hour long participatory lecture, though certainly preachers regularly take short things like this and then talk about it for an hour. So if you're engaging in interpretation, yeah,

25:01 Wes: you'd have to fit this into some larger sermon. But yeah, it couldn't all be one long parable. They have to be by their nature short. Right. Also, it's not easy to craft a good parable. I think parables have a tendency to be lame, and I think these are distinctively not lame. They're actually quite effective. They're emotionally resonant for some of the reasons we'll discuss with the prodigal son. Ricoeur. Ricoeur. Gets at some of those. Some of them, yeah. I mean, I'm not so keen about the eschatological or the.

25:30 Mark: Yeah, that was a question. You know, when I originally read these, before I looked across it and before anything, I read these and I read the explanations and, you know, it sounds like a lot of if you get it, then you're gonna be saved and if you don't get it, then you're screwed and there's gonna be wailing and gnashing of teeth. Some of the other parables actually have that.

25:48 Wes: Some of them are a little harsh.

25:50 Dylan: And it's all about getting it right. It's, it's all about having gnosis. The secret knowledge is all about, you know, getting access to this information, which is. Yeah. Problematic.

25:57 Mark: Well, and it's, it's the same as being on the appropriate team.

26:00 Wes: Yeah.

26:00 Mark: It's not even just like, you could be smart and figure this out. It's, you have to suck up to me. You have to come to me. I am the source. So it was refreshing and then looking at this stuff afterward to think that, no, maybe that was all added after the fact. And that's not actually so. At least I like the Jesus better that Crossan lays out. But that, you know, of course that reflects my preconceptions that I come into

26:24 Wes: this with the parables having to do the kingdom of heaven and redemption and love and forgiveness. Those are the kinder, gentler Jesus Right. And then some of these others eschatological parables.

26:37 Dylan: Yeah, yeah, those are the rough ones.

26:40 Wes: Yeah.

26:40 Mark: Well, let's look at a kingdom because I thought those are in the same category that the kingdom of heaven, you could take that eschatologically. In other words, end times. The kingdom of heaven is what's going to happen after the apocalypse comes. And this was another thing that Sheehan goes on and on about of different communities were differently apocalyptic. And in fact it was John the Baptist was straight up Jewish apocalyptic. And Jesus reinterpreted that according to some folks that we shouldn't read that kind of apocalypticism, end of the world stuff into him.

That the whole point was not that we need to wait around for God to come and strike down our enemies, which is common for a persecuted people to want, but that we have to actually participate in this and that in fact the kingdom of God is a way of being. It is now. It is. We are already entering into it. You just have to turn yourself around and your community around and then the kingdom will be here. And that's very much not end of the world. It still could be eschatological just because eschaton just what means end, Right. So end of persecution, end of all these empires coming in and screwing with us.

Like that's what they want. So that's, you know, Crossan and others argue that Jesus was a political radical and that's what he was pushing for is, you know, that's why he was killed, because the Romans didn't want somebody stirring up the rabble to resent empire. Even if you say you're doing it in a non violent way.

28:08 Dylan: So when we talk about the Greek word apocalyptic, we're just talking about someone who has access to special knowledge. Now, here, now in light of revelations, in light of Apocalypto, the movie by Mel Gibson, in light of 2012, you know, the movie by Roland Emmerich, in light of those things, we now think about apocalypse within the context of like the end of the world. And you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger is going to run around to fight the devil with a pregnant lady around, you know, something weird like that. So, so anyway, so that's end of days, by the way. But anyway, so the idea is that apocalypse just quite simply means an uncovering. Right. It's a revelation.

28:45 Mark: Although it's funny, the word revelation because of exactly crazy stuff in the book of Revelation has also itself been, you know, but it's just revealing.

28:52 Dylan: It's revealing, right?

28:54 Wes: Yeah.

28:54 Dylan: And so you could say that these parables are themselves apocalyptic. Right. Just meaning that they are revealing some kind of special knowledge that Jesus has access to. And so let's just be clear that when we talk about apocalyptic, in one case we're talking about just uncovering. And then on the other case we have of course, eschatological relating to the end of the world and things of that nature. And one of the things that we have post Jesus that is within the context of the Christ of faith, we have people like John the Revealer, you know, the one who went to the Isle of Patmos and had this revelation, if you will.

Right. We have that. And oftentimes people talk about Jesus having these kind of eschatological things and his sayings. And scholars are very deeply divided about what does the second coming mean. Does Jesus himself look forward to the second coming? Right. And I would argue that Jesus is not quite, you know, this whole idea of Jesus riding a white horse, coming with the sword in his hand and whatnot, as we oftentimes see in the revelations, well, that's after Jesus, you know, that's not Jesus himself saying that, that's after Jesus. That's John talking about Jesus there.

29:58 Mark: John channeling Old Testament stuff.

30:00 Dylan: Yeah, he is.

30:01 Mark: To talk about Jesus in that way. Right.

30:02 Dylan: And so one of the things that we have to be careful about when we read these parables is to read these parable without bringing all that other stuff into it. Right? Read the parables on their own terms. We have to remove from our categories, you know, the way that we're viewing these texts, remove all that other stuff and just read the parables as they are presented to us as a first century Jew, as best we can. It's hard for me to do it. I'm a black man who likes to get bop. But the idea is that that's what we kind of need to try to do. That's the best way to understand these parables.

And the thing that many Christians miss is they try to bring all that stuff into this. Right. And they approach the text eisegetically reading out of the text what they want and reading into the text what they think they see there, as opposed to just allowing the text to speak on its own terms. And that's one of the things we have to be careful about as Christians. Now, you guys don't wrestle with this too much, but I do, is making sure that we're listening to the parables on their own terms. What does that mean? And that's why these parables speak more to morality for Me than they do to these larger philosophical theological questions.

31:02 Mark: Well, let's look at one of these kingdom ones.

31:05 Wes: I think we should do most of them, like the treasure.

31:07 Mark: Okay, so the parable of hidden treasure. This is in Matthew again. It starts again. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field which a man found and hid in his joy. He goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

31:20 Dylan: The end.

31:23 Mark: And it is always paired with the parable of the pearl. So I might as well throw that out there, too, because it's basically the same thing again. The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man seeking goodly pearls, who, when he has found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had and bought it. You could interpret these, again, straight up as riddles, like, what does this mean? Because if you take it literally, it seems, especially the treasure one, you found it in a field.

31:49 Wes: Right. So straightforward. Yeah, yeah. That's the interesting part of that one. Right? Yeah.

31:54 Dylan: Why buy the whole field?

31:55 Wes: Yeah, it's straightforwardly right. It's just an exchange. It's just, oh, here's something of greater value. It's like an investment, you know. It's like buying land that you know you're going to find oil on. But of course, once you've applied the metaphor, it's not an exchange of likes anymore. It's an apples and oranges kind of exchange, because it's a selling of the things of this world in the favor of the kingdom of heaven, of something, something else altogether that can't be compared and exchanged, you know, as a like to a like.

32:24 Dylan: And one of the fundamental questions that we have to. To answer. What do you think is the kingdom of heaven? What is that?

32:32 Wes: It's a state of mind, man.

32:35 Dylan: Get out of here, dude. The dude.

32:38 Wes: But there's a mustard seed of truth to that, really.

32:42 Dylan: Oh, my God.

32:44 Wes: Well, we'll see some evidence in some of the other parables.

32:48 Dylan: Yeah.

32:48 Wes: But Tillich will talk in terms of forgiveness and love and things like that. So it's not directly going to have to do with good deeds necessarily, or behaviors. There's two ways to think about it.

32:59 Mark: Maybe I thought it did.

33:00 Wes: That's something that comes after this life, or that's something that happens within this life, whether you call it faith or salvation or forgiveness, whatever sort of dispositions come along with that. So I'm partly serious when I talk about a state of mind law. Do you think that's going too far?

33:19 Dylan: No, I think that's part of it, but I Also would argue that the kingdom of heaven is a community.

33:24 Mark: Yeah. Amen.

33:25 Dylan: Oh Lord. Did I just say oh, Lord? Oh, Lord. Thank you, Lord. So anyways, the idea for that insight, that revelation. So the idea is that it is a community. So it's a state of mind that leads to being in community with people that are of similar minds. And so the kingdom of heaven can be interpreted, sure, as the actual heaven, you know, this metaphysical thing or this metaphysical kingdom of which Jesus is the head or God is the head, whatever. But it is interesting for me to read this in light of what's commonly called as the Lord's Prayer or the model prayer is how I prefer to talk about it.

You know, your kingdom come here on earth as it is in heaven. Right. And so the kingdom of heaven for me is the kingdom of God here on earth. And you can talk about it as far as the beloved community within the context of Martin Luther King Jr. Or any number of things. You know, the community of faith that you participate in here on earth, which could be centered upon Christianity or wherever, wherever you find that community. That for me is what that means there. And so the kingdom of heaven has to do with being both in a state of mind for me, a state of mind of justice, concern about the poor, those who are marginalized, you know, fighting against racism.

That has to do with the state of mind, but also being in community with people who are of a similar mind.

34:48 Mark: There are two sort of translation issues that came up here, or maybe three translation issues that I think, at least in the Sheehan came up. One was that we say on earth as it is in heaven, in the Lord's Prayer. But maybe a better translation word order wise is as in heaven, so on earth. And I think Sheehan made a big deal about that as emphasizing the earth part.

35:08 Dylan: Right.

35:08 Mark: As that's what's about here. So it's not supposed to be otherworldly in the way that Nietzsche objected to. And then the kingdom of heaven versus kingdom of God, those are used. One is used in Matthew, is used in Luke. And I think that the explanation was given that Matthew used kingdom of heaven because you don't use the word God all over the place because Matthew was in a more Jewish center.

35:30 Dylan: You don't say the name of God, right?

35:32 Mark: Yeah. So you say the White House said, blah, blah, blah. Well, you just mean the president, Right. Or the president's administration. So there's no difference. So talking about the kingdom of heaven sounds like you're talking about a place, but you're just talking about the kingdom of God. And then the third translational thing that Sheehan emphasized was that kingdom doesn't necessarily mean like a monarchy.

35:53 Dylan: Right.

35:53 Mark: It means it's not. Jesus is, you know, God is Lord, you bow down to Jesus, bow down to God. Like that's kind of how I was reading these things initially and it really turned me off. But hearing more of these translational interpretations, trying to get at what people thought about it immediately at the time. The idea that instead of kingdom, what is translated as kingdom really means somewhere like state of governance or something more neutral. Like it doesn't mean monarchy. So all three of those together.

36:22 Wes: Yeah, you were saying about the otherworldliness thing. And it goes back to my pointing out that there is obviously a radical difference in kind. What I think is really effective about the parables is that it is a transvaluation of values. One set of values has it that what might makes right and what's good is power and beauty and those sorts of things, the material sorts of things. And the other is you find this treasure that's hidden. And of course it's hidden because it's not going to be obvious that that's the valuable thing. What's obviously valuable is what's pleasurable and powerful and so on and so forth.

So the hiddenness is part of the key. And whether or not you want to call it otherworldly in the sense of it being an afterlife, it's still broadly spiritual as opposed to focused on the material or the worldly. Well, so I think. I think when I say effective, I mean it's the rapid reversal values. And you'll see this throughout the parables. It's the rapid.

37:17 Dylan: It's like a twist ending, I think,

37:18 Wes: till it gets at some of the reason why they're effective. And it goes back to a saying by Nietzsche in our Genealogy of Morals episode, which is that shit.

37:26 Dylan: Whoa.

37:26 Wes: Did you just cuss political superiority? This is an X rated.

37:33 Mark: X rated. What are you going to start doing, Wesley?

37:38 Wes: You know, only after interpretation. Look. So political superiority resolves itself into psychological superiority. I was thinking, of course, about all this stuff before I even got to the Tillich. So part of the point of that saying by Nietzsche is that people think of themselves as less valuable if they are losing on the value scale of might makes right. And they feel actually guilty about it. Yeah, they feel like they need to be forgiven for it. And so the idea of forgiveness in this reversal of values is always there in the background, this idea that you are going to escape the weight of this sort of more primitive conscience, where your powerlessness and your humiliation, the fact that you're on the lower part of the totem pole is constantly nagging at you as a kind of deficiency.

This says, no, it's not a deficiency. And I think that's part of the power. Although maybe I'll find a better way of phrasing that as we look at more of the parables. And of course, Tillich gets it in a great way when you discuss him.

38:32 Mark: I wanted to get in to bring at least one of Tillich's ideas in here. So he's talking about a different context, which we might as well throw in, that a lot of the parables, the reason they're challenged parables, according to Crossan, is because they throw in some detail that's crucial to the plot, that is against what one would expect from custom, that ends up being a very passive aggressive challenge to the status quo. And that's what the Good Samaritan is all about. It's not just. And we don't have to read the whole Good Samaritan. People know what this story is, I think. But the point is that it's the Samaritan who for the audience at the time would have been like, I heard somebody else use the analogy of if you said it in present day Israel and it's a Palestinian terrorist, is the one right? A terrorist, an actual. With bombs strapped on.

39:18 Wes: Or we could just call it the parable of the good Nazi.

39:20 Mark: There you go.

39:21 Wes: That is a tendentious way of you

39:24 Dylan: just cut across the field there on that one.

39:26 Wes: Well, we had already gone to Palestinian terrorists, so I thought I just go all the way.

39:31 Dylan: The parable of the kkk.

39:33 Mark: And when you do that, when you throw in something incongruous like that, it's not a matter of that. You're reversing values and you're saying, oh, well, really, the Nazi's good after all.

39:42 Dylan: No, no, you're challenging the listener. Yeah, right.

39:45 Mark: You could be doing just a Zen thing where you're throwing out this challenge that's really unanswerable because you're never going to say, oh, well, I guess Nazis are good after, you know. But more likely the audience is going to say, that would never happen. The Nazi would never do that. But the fact that you're putting this in there is supp. An unresolvable conflict. So the way Tillich takes that, though, and this is something that Jesus does in a bunch of different parables that you've got the Pharisee and the tax Collector. You've got the one that he starts off his article with is the forgiven sinner versus the prostitute. Something like that. Maybe we should read that. Just because that's short. That's not too distracting.

40:21 Wes: So we're jumping around now between a bunch of different important parables. But, yeah, they're all common.

40:25 Dylan: We should be clear about which parables we're talking about, though.

40:28 Mark: Okay, here's the sentence version from the middle of the creditor. And so Jesus is talking to Simon, who is asking why Jesus is letting the prostitute kiss his feet and anoint him. Like, basically, why are you dealing with that scum at all? Like, that's part of Jewish ritual purity, the thing that Jesus is ultimately arguing against.

40:45 Dylan: And this is the parable of the two debtors.

40:47 Mark: All these rules. Yes. A certain creditor had two debtors. One owed 500 denarii and the other 50. When they could not pay, he forgave them both. Now, which of them will love him more? That's the whole thing. Simon answers the one, I suppose, to whom he forgave more. And Jesus said to him, you have judged rightly. Then we are out of the parable again. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, for she loved much. But he who is forgiven little loves little.

41:11 Wes: I thought this was short enough to read. Is it not?

41:13 Mark: I thought I had read the. I thought the middle.

41:17 Dylan: There's context before and after.

41:19 Wes: So I was just gonna read the. One of the Pharisees invited him to eat with him.

41:22 Dylan: Yeah, go ahead and read that whole text.

41:24 Wes: He entered into the Pharisee's house and sat at the table. Behold a woman in the city who was a sinner. When she knew that he was reclining in the Pharisee's house, she brought an alabaster jar of ointment. Standing behind at his feet, weeping, she began to wet his feet with her tears, and she wiped them with the hair of her head, kissed his feet, and anointed them with the ointment. Now, when the Pharisee who had invited him saw it, he said to himself, this man, if he were a prophet, would have perceived who and what kind of woman this is, who touches him, and that she is a sinner.

And then that's when Jesus responds with the tale of the two debtors. So one owes much more than the other. Who you love the most, the one who forgave the most. So. And then he turns to the woman. Do you see this woman? I entered into your house, and you gave me no water for my feet. But she has wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with the hair of her head. You gave me no kiss, but she, since the time I came in, has not ceased to kiss my feet. I'm gonna skip over that sentence. Therefore I tell you. Her sins, which are many, are forgiven.

For she loved much, but to whom little is forgiven. The same loves little. He said to her, your sins are forgiven. So I just wanted to point out there's a really weird. And this happens in a few of the parables. It happens in the Good Samaritan as well. There's a weird sort of reversal here. Right. Because on the one hand, it seems like he's saying she's to be forgiven because she's.

42:46 Mark: She's already been forgiven. It's not that she should be forgiven because of something. It's just that you forgive and then what happens?

42:52 Wes: Right, exactly. But also, we go from, what's the two debtors thing? Right. You're loved more by the one whose debt is greater that you've forgiven. Yep. The idea directly, if you were to apply, that is, she will love you all the more because her sins are greater. And so the forgiveness that goes towards those sins. But in the end, the idea seems to be reversed in the sense that it's not that she's forgiven that makes her loving, but that she's loving that makes her forgiven. So that's the reversal there. Right.

43:19 Dylan: It reminds me of a great sermon by Tillich where the title of the sermon is you are accepted. Right. It's the idea that the forgiveness has already been extended to you, but it's up to you to accept that forgiveness. And so, as Tillich says in this particular sermon. Well, this particular essay. To whom much is forgiven. Right. The idea is that Jesus literally calls the sinner sinners, and he calls the righteous righteous. And he says, need to wrestle with that. But ultimately, what's surprising is that Jesus takes the side of the sinner against the righteous, which is not a good thing for a rabbi to do, it seems.

Right. That's not what you're supposed to do. That's surprising. That's what's so shocking about this. And Christians have become so desensitized to this that they don't realize that what he's doing is rather shocking, is that he's putting his side. You know, he's throwing his lot in on the center, which is not the way things are supposed to go here.

44:11 Mark: I don't think this squares well with Nietzsche's reevaluation of values. It's not that the Pharisee is the one who has power. In fact, the Pharisee is displaying the kind of virtue that Nietzsche already doesn't like.

44:25 Wes: How does the Pharisee not have power?

44:27 Mark: He's respectable. It's not that he's rich, he's respectable. He obeys the laws of purity.

44:33 Wes: He's like one of the most powerful figures in the community. Right, Isn't he? Or am I?

44:39 Dylan: Well, no, the Pharisee is a powerful

44:41 Mark: figure, but within a community that's oppressed.

44:44 Dylan: Yeah. He's still a marginal figure, though. It's not like the Pharisee is a priest.

44:48 Wes: This to me is parallel to Socrates going to the most powerful figures of Athens and messing with them. It's Jesus walking into the house of a holy man with a prostitute. That's pretty radical.

45:00 Dylan: Oh, it's definitely radical, yeah. It was just a point about the role of the Pharisee in first century Judaism. I mean, the Pharisee weren't exactly inside of the temple. Right. They weren't in cahoots with the Roman Empire like the high priests were. They are marginal figures, but they are the people who are upholding a particular moral perspective. Right. As Jesus says later in Matthew 23, I believe it is where he calls the Pharisees hypocrites. They're the people who are all about the appearance of morality without the core of morality. They're all about looking like they're moral people without actually being moral people.

45:36 Mark: People.

45:36 Dylan: And so that's his main beef with them.

45:38 Wes: Yeah, it doesn't even require hypocrisy. Right. It just requires a kind of sedimentation of. So that's part of the point of the parable is to startle and to surprise because these things become rote. Right. So it's just, okay, I go through the motions and it's no longer something that's deeply felt. So even if, as Tillich says, you know, they are models of discipline and they. And we should respect them as righteous, it's just that that righteousness doesn't contain the same living vital relationship anymore. It becomes papered over by ritual and by familiarity. I think familiarity is the key.

46:15 Mark: That's why I wanted to say that this doesn't reflect the Nietzschean picture. So, for instance, where's the blond beast in any of this? We're sort of already two steps removed. It's as if the revolution of the weak over the powerful has already happened in the Jewish community. And so then we've created a priestly caste, but then that gets Ossified and as you say, does now have way more power than lower people in that cast. And so Jesus is trying to shake that up, but that's a different dynamic that he's finds himself in and is trying to shake up. Then Nietzsche's picture of all these oppressed people are in the presence of the blond beasts that just do what's natural and then they're going against that.

46:55 Wes: Yeah, Nietzsche's thinking more about the response to Romans, right, where they're a bunch of sociopaths. You know, might makes right is definitely more what runs that. Those sort of pre moralistic types of values and beauty and strength and all those sorts of things. But I'm also thinking more broadly about materialism and power. And of course those dynamics are there in the Jewish community at the time. And that's part of what afflicts the Pharisees and it's part of why. So for instance, Jesus can walk into a temple and start throwing stuff on the ground and yelling at people.

So it is still this tension between two very different sets of values which I think coexist in everyone's psyche. So this isn't just an ancient sort of conflict. It's a conflict we all face. And one of them is the idea that might makes right and even guilt, for instance, victims who get overpowered. Why would they feel guilty? Well, that's sort of that Nietzschean psychological principle at work. And then the other set of values is more about conscience. It's more about the community and what the community has supplied to you. And those two, I think, coexist psychologically and are in tension with each other.

So there's a poignancy to any sort of. And it's kind of there in Plato as well.

48:07 Dylan: Right.

48:07 Wes: Because often it's an anti materialistic argument, but there's a poignancy to this sort of quick reversal from materialistic values to kingdom of God type of values that you see with Jesus's parables, that's all. So it doesn't line up exactly with the whole blond beast account. Now.

48:25 Mark: Yeah, I wonder what a variation of this would be because some of this has to do with what the prototypical sin is. To the extent that sin remains a meaningful concept, it has to do with like crime and punishment. Like when you've actually freaking sinned. Not that you're wearing the wrong thing or I forget if it was Crossan or Sheehan that characterized who is the prostitute here. Like a prostitute is not just some wanton sinful woman. No, it's somebody who is so freaking poor that the only way that she could make a living is by selling her body. You know, that's like about out as downtrodden as you could get. Yeah, usually, as you were saying, Wes, the downtrodden become the sinners. The people that are losing out on the power game then feel guilty about it and are labeled sinners in some way. You know, the wretched.

49:07 Wes: Yeah, they feel guilty. It's not just about, oh, I'm a prostitute and society looks down on that. It's, I'm a wretched person. Look at the, look at the beautiful rich people who live great lives. People blame themselves for that. They see themselves as lesser because of it. And that's the whole wretchedness of the sinner. I think, at least in this parable, is not some transgression of particular biblical law. It's bad conscience. It's the guilt of it.

49:32 Dylan: Tillich has wonderful things to say about this. If I can read just a section of what Tillich has to say about this, To Whom Much Is Forgiven, it comes at the very end of. It's on page 13. Speaking about this particular parable. He says, and now let's look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little has forgiven them, they love little. And this is their own righteousness. It does not lie on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job does not lie on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain.

It lies on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality. Now that's of course, Tillich's way of talking about God with the God who vindicates Job unrighteous. Skipping down a little bit. The righteousness of the righteousness ones is hard and self assured. It's a hard righteousness. They too want forgiveness, but they believe they do not need much of it. Their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have helped the woman in our story. They cannot help us, even if we admire them. And then he goes on and asks a series of questions.

Why do children turn from their righteous parents? Why do husbands from the righteous wives and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from the righteous pastor? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Right? And so he's wrestling here with the fact that the righteousness of the person who has always gotten it right, it's a hard righteousness, right? It's not a supple one. It's not a soft one, it's not a loving one. It's not warmed by Love, as he says, but rather those of us, people like me, who have made a few mistakes and done some things they shouldn't have done.

And those people who know they need forgiveness, they're the ones who love more deeply, they're the ones who feel as though they need it. And so we skip forward a little bit and he goes on to say, but more often it is because they see, seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness. And this the righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they cannot turn give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The church would be more the church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in the encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable.

I love how Tillich just kind of cuts to the heart of what Jesus is up to there.

51:38 Wes: Yeah, you have to be a loser in some way to develop a soul,

51:41 Dylan: which is why I have a big one.

51:43 Wes: Nietzsche, you know, and there's parallels, right in Nietzsche's. So the idea of you have to be at the lower end of a hierarchy where your instincts can all simply express themselves willy nilly and they turn inward and that's the. What they do to you. What those aggressive instincts carve out inside of you is what is the soul. So that's Nietzsche from the Genealogy of Morals. And then. And psychoanalysts will talk in similar terms of frustration being mind building, which is to say part of the whole function of language. And the higher level things we do is a way of coping with frustration.

So we don't simply discharge in a way a non linguistic animal would. We don't simply discharge every impulse. The impulses are bound and that is what builds a mind or a soul. So here I just think the idea is that you have to be a sinner. If you're a winner all the time, if you're the righteous one and you don't have the experience of being the loser and the sinner and not needing forgiveness, then there's a real deficiency there. And by the way, I think Nietzsche thought there was a real deficiency there too. So the blond beast is not something we can stick with.

Even though I know again, the righteous ones aren't exactly correlates of the blond beast. Right.

52:53 Mark: So I was wondering about if there is a variation on this parable where instead of a prostitute he's with a. The blonde beast. He's got like a. Basically a murderer there, but the murderer is apologized and he's still doing the thing with his hair and the oil with the feet.

53:12 Wes: Oh, gosh, I don't even know what to do. That completely reverses the whole point of the prostitute is the lose. The blonde beast is the winner, the prostitute is the loser. It's not about having broken certain laws. It's about where you stand on this totem pole.

53:25 Mark: Exactly. That's why I'm saying if the prostitute was about what's the biggest sinner? We need to be merciful to the biggest sinner. Exactly. We'll put the damn biggest sinner there. Put the multiple mass murderer that says, I'm gonna turn over a new leaf. Oh, I forgive you. I'm so big that I forget. You know, that would.

53:42 Dylan: The parable of Charles Manson, that's the reductio.

53:45 Wes: And, you know, as Tillich points out, it's not that Jesus forgives her or there's not even any mention of whether she's turning over a new leaf. She just exhibits a lovingness that is indicative of being forgiven. And so that's.

53:56 Dylan: Right. That's the key.

53:57 Wes: Jesus says she is forgiven.

53:59 Dylan: And I also think it's a little bit more palatable because as Mark talked about earlier, this is probably a woman who is doing what she does because of life circumstances and because of her living on the margins of society. Probably a widow or a woman that was considered to be unmarriable. It makes her someone who feels as though she's utterly unacceptable to everyone. Men, women, everyone. She's used literally on a daily basis, but yet God still accepts her. Right. And that's the difference between her and Hannibal Lecter or Charles Manson that Mark was trying to bring into the discussion.

54:37 Wes: And this is another point that Tillich makes about the requirement of forgiveness from a higher power. Right. I don't remember if that's exactly the way he puts it.

54:46 Mark: Something is bigger than you and your friends.

54:48 Wes: Yes,

54:53 Mark: Well, that's pretty much that language.

54:55 Wes: Yeah, but what's.

54:55 Dylan: This is not the way Tillich talks in his big tone.

54:58 Mark: No one can accept himself who does not feel that he is accepted by the power of acceptance, which is greater than he, greater than his friends and counselors and psychological helpers. Yeah, generally I'm very impatient with anything that sounds like it is the kind of thing Nietzsche would object to that is justifying any kind of slavery. You know the Bob Dylan song, you gotta serve somebody. It may be the devil or maybe the Lord, but you're gonna have to serve. Like, no, I don't accept that.

55:26 Dylan: That was awesome, dude.

55:27 Mark: I know. I was looking for an opportunity to do my late Bob Dylan impersonation.

55:31 Dylan: Holy crap, that was great.

55:34 Wes: Late Bob Dylan? What are you talking about?

55:35 Mark: Well, he sounds even more like that now, is what I'm thinking.

55:38 Wes: That's how.

55:39 Dylan: Yeah, you sound kind of like Carmen right now. Wait a minute. I think you went too far.

55:43 Mark: Oh, maybe.

55:45 Wes: Have you heard Bob Dylan recently?

55:46 Dylan: I haven't. No, I haven't.

55:48 Wes: He doesn't sound forgiven, I'll just say that.

55:55 Mark: But I've in a smaller way, and this is the kind of thing Aristotle would even be okay with. Virtue does not require just listening closely to your self, your body, and responding to it and doing what it wants. That's often the way to pursue bad habits. To smoke one more cigarette, to eat one more extra thing. For instance, I am trying to deal with weight loss issues. Just getting the app on your phone that you have to enter your calories into. So it's basically the boss. It seems it's telling you when you can eat or not. Externalizing authority in some way.

Yes, okay, it's actually me that decided to do this. But still, I didn't create the program. I'm not the one who is saying, given my goals, this is how much I'm allowed to eat. So having an external authority helps to do the right thing. Taking that further. Yaa. Surrendering yourself to a higher power. The app tells me how often I can drink. If you're actually an alcoholic, that you're beyond that point. But it's still. It's an extension of the same procedure. So I think that's what Tillich is playing on here and saying ultimately that we have to get out to something that's like a religion, if not an actual religion.

57:02 Wes: Part of it is the problem. You need unconditional forgiveness. Right. The order of things is not that there's repentance and then Jesus can forgive her. It's that forgiveness creates repentance. And forgiveness has to be unconditional. And so it can't come from anything human, because human beings provide that unconditional forgiveness. Human beings are not going to escape judgmentality to that extent. You can't look to the community for that.

57:26 Mark: So take this back to existentialism. This seems the kind of thing that you can maybe not just decide, like Sartre might think. You can just decide. I'm just going to have the sort of attitude as if I were forgiven by a higher power. This is the motivation for religious existentialism. That it is in some way is our choice whether we're going to have this attitude or not. But he thinks just the way that psychology works, that simply deciding that you're a good person according to Tillich here, is not going to be enough. You cannot accept yourself unless you feel that you're accepted by the power of acceptance which is greater than yourself.

No matter how much you self justify, there's always this nagging feeling that morality is somehow objective. These are the rules. I'm obeying the rules, so I'm okay. That's even not enough. Even if you believe in objective morality that you are doing okay by that something else psychologically is required. So this is the truth of the you gotta serve somebody. That there is something that you are putting above yourself. I'm not gonna go take the extra step and say, well it either has to be God or it's gonna be mammon or cigarettes or something that you let slip in there and become your God.

I think this is more of realizing that this is a flaw in the mechanism of human self esteem and then working to overcome that is more the solution I would go for.

58:44 Wes: Well, I think there's a truth to this. There no way out through self improvement or becoming less of a sinner. Right. The unconditional part really does hold in a sense. If you're wracked with guilt and self hate, there's always something you can fixate on. The nature of human frailty is such that you can't. And this is sort of what narcissists try to do. They try and perfect themselves out of that dilemma. They try and become worthy, say sort of ruinous path. You sort of have to start with this unconditional thing which I think can be hard for many of us now.

I think if you put yourself in the shoes of the prostitute and think about that experience that she's having where suddenly it's no longer about her wretchedness and what she needs. She is in the role of giver. So there's a. She's doing the loving thing. Right. And there's a kind of power to that. And that's really what's required. There has to be some kind of experience of power.

59:37 Mark: We had Ricoeur talking about Nietzsche and Freud last time. So I think it's entirely appropriate to try to bring those ways to of looking at these in here. And I think they should remain hermeneutic guides. That if you read a parable and it sounds like it's those guys are oppressing us and they're going to go to hell. That like. No, that's the kind that your reading of the Hermeneutics of suspicion should make you not read the text that way.

1:00:02 Dylan: I completely agree. And I think that also here, in light of the fact that we're kind of wrestling with what Tillich has to say about it. Tillich is an existence existential thinker. One of the main thing he talks about is this whole notion of estrangement. Right. And so we're caught in between finitude and who we are essentially, that is to say, who we're supposed to be. And so this angst of finitude, as Kierkegaard says, drives us both to action while it simultaneously alienates us and causes despair. And so that's essentially what this woman is wrestling with.

Right. So I can see why Tillich latched on to this particular parable. Because this woman is exactly there. She's right there. She's dealing with that. And this parable is rich for what he wants to say, which is that you can't will your way into it. You can't buy your way into it, but you are accepted, you are forgiven. Love is there, and it's up to you to just accept what is already there. Whether you accept it or not. You are forgiven, you are there, you are loved, and it's up to you to accept that. And the declaration degree to which you accept it is the degree to which you move into your essential nature according to Tillich.

So I think to talk about this within the context of existentialism is right on.

1:01:10 Wes: I was thinking of something Tillich says about forgiveness, which is nothing greater can happen to a human being than that he is forgiven. For forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement. It means reunion in spite of hostility. It means acceptance of those who are unacceptable. And it means reception of those who are rejected.

1:01:30 Dylan: Man, we've got to read Tillich. Yeah, go ahead.

1:01:32 Wes: Yeah, we got to do an episode. He's great. This idea of estrangement, it's evocative of an idea of a split within yourself and the overcoming of that split. Because that's part of what this guilty conscience does. That's why I was talking about state of mind with the kingdom of heaven and trying to get at the experience of the prostitute and being in that mode of being forgiven and being loving. There's a tremendous power to that. There's a tremendous reward to that. And you can even say there's a kind of ecstatic experience that goes along with these reconciliations of very disparate things.

Which I think is part of what the parables do. It's kind of a good segue back to the Good Samaritan, because there is another transition there from the concept of being loved to loving. It's another weird reversal because the question that's asked of him is, who is my neighbor? Which is really a question about who should I love, who should I forgive?

1:02:20 Dylan: That's an important question you gotta wrestle with. Why is this person asking that question? It sounds like this person's looking for a way out. Right. It sounds like they're looking for someone who they can say, okay, good, I don't have to be nice to them. Right. They're not my neighbor.

1:02:34 Mark: Because he's trying to actually be able to apply. Yeah. These impossible love your enemies and these kind of things that you almost have to interpret them as a Zen koan, as an absurdity, because you can't physically do what it's asking you to do. And so he.

1:02:49 Wes: He's asking a question about who should I love? Who counts as my neighbor? Ostensibly, the story about the Good Samaritan is saying, well, this is the kind of you should love. But of course, it's not saying that. He's not actually answering the question of who your neighbor is. Maybe he's. The answer to the question is, you are the neighbor. You have to be the neighbor to everyone. The Samaritan is not the model of the type of person he's supposed to love. It's a model for him. He's answering the question, not who is my neighbor, who should be loved? It's who should you be? And that ends up, of course, being universally loving. Everyone is your neighbor. In a sense, that's the answer. But it's another switch here where he doesn't actually answer the question the person is asking. He twists one of the things I

1:03:29 Mark: read said that one of the things that comes out of this is that. And maybe this is even a linguistic point, it's not just how should you treat other people or how should they treat you? It's that if you engage in a neighborly relation, then it is by definition bi. Directional. They are your neighbor and you are their neighbor. And that was supposed to be significant. It's a different way of thinking about something than just, how should I treat people.

1:03:52 Wes: Yeah, I mean, another way of saying the answer to this question is, who's my neighbor? Well, your neighbor is everyone to whom you are a neighbor.

1:03:59 Mark: Yes.

1:03:59 Wes: You make them your neighbor through that behavior, and that behavior is not contingent on anything from them. It has to be a part of you, part of your nature, let's say, or something like that. The Neighborly comportment to the world it's not dependent on doesn't vary from one person to another.

1:04:14 Mark: It doesn't seem that revolutionary to us that you should treat people the same. That was so revolutionary at the time.

1:04:22 Dylan: It was, yeah.

1:04:23 Mark: That, of course, you treat the enemies of your people with. Differently than your own people. And the fact that the guy on the road, the victim, has no clothes, has his clothes ripped away, like that's what would tell you who this person is, what tribe they belong to. That doesn't matter. That in itself was challenging the status quo at the time. And this is one that we've so internalized that if you take it as an example parable, as opposed to a challenge parable. A challenge parable being, it's the good Nazi, if you take it as an example of what to do, be nice to people.

1:04:54 Wes: Yeah. It's not just that it's the Samaritan, but it's also the fact that the priest and Levite pass by. The representatives of what's authoritative and good, I guess, are of no help.

1:05:03 Mark: And probably just because of the purity laws, if it wasn't clear whether the guy on the road was dead or not. Well, the priests and the Levites, who are just another kind of priest, aren't allowed to touch the dead. So that maybe could explain why they.

1:05:17 Dylan: That would have made them ritually unclean.

1:05:19 Mark: But still, you would at least kind of poke him with a stick.

1:05:22 Wes: He looks dead and he's naked, which in paintings of this, you know, that's one of the things that comes out, is it's one thing to help a guy who's hurt, some other thing to haul a naked guy back to town.

1:05:35 Mark: Well, and yeah, this was another thing. Just to return briefly to this stuff about the crucifixion before. The fact that crucifixion was supposed to be was purposefully a way that Romans would insult Jewish purity laws, that you become unclean. There's no way that somebody was going to be taken down from the cross and put in an awesome tomb or something like those bodies. The priest couldn't even touch them. They were thrown to the dogs. That in itself was a great deal of cognitive dissonance, the fact that he would die that way. And if you want to make sense of that in your faith community, then you have to really reinterpret that in some radical way. All right, before we talk more about crazy interpretations of the Good Samaritan, here's Seth reading the commercial.

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1:08:00 Mark: Okay, so we're still in the Good Samaritan.

1:08:02 Wes: You had me skim that Crossan chapter where he goes on at length about this. You know the way. So Augustine starts out interpreting this as a riddle. The man is Adam and the thieves are devils and being half dead.

1:08:15 Mark: So in this chapter, Crossan points out that Augustine actually in two different books, interprets it both ways.

1:08:20 Dylan: Right.

1:08:21 Mark: And even though Augustine is always slammed for this very metaphorical allegorical interpretation, at least Crossan thinks that Augustine was doing this very self consciously that he saw that these are open ended and I should be able to do this wacky stuff. And I'm not necessarily just giving you a dogmatic.

1:08:36 Wes: I don't see the allegorical version as implausible at all. The priest and the Levite as representative of the ministry of the Old Testament. I mean, what is Jesus there to do he's there to have a revolution. So that's one way to put it into a parable. So I don't see it as so implausible. But then Crossan goes on, okay, so St. Augustine also interprets it as an example parable. Okay, be like the Good Samaritan. Great, right. And then the final is a challenge parable. And that's where he uses Fielding's novel from the 1700s. It kind of expands on this whole dilemma of, oh, he's dirty, oh, he's going to get blood on me. All those sorts of. Of responses to helping him. Because it's about a. Basically he translates the tale into a group of people passing by in a carriage.

1:09:20 Dylan: Right.

1:09:21 Mark: Just that again, it's sort of the lowest person in the pecking order, does the right thing, and it's more clear that it's putting the emphasis where it should be. So, for instance, I remember one of the interpretive essays that we looked at guidelines for interpreting Jesus's Parables, Mark L. Bailey, and he has like a list of ways to figure out the point of the parable. What comes at the end of the parable. This has been called the rule of end stress. What does come at the very end of the Good Samaritan as written?

1:09:47 Wes: He says, go and do likewise.

1:09:49 Mark: It sounds like an example parable if you read it with the rule of the end stress. But if you think that the whole challenge part of it is just in setting it up, you know, as soon as the third guy comes along and it's the Samaritan that does something that. That's the thing that's. That's we're not to the end yet. So it seems to go against the form to interpret it as a challenge parable in the way Crossan wants to.

1:10:09 Dylan: It's such a rich parable, though. I know that there have been many Christian thinkers, people like William J. Where they would use the parable to kind of address the way that Christian people or just you can expand it into broadly, just religious people have been woefully silent on certain ethical issues, which kind of bringing back the ethics into this particular narrative, into this particular parable. Because, you know, here you have two religious people who see a person who is clearly in distress, who needs help, who needs assistance, and yet they go about their merrily way, you know, and so it reminds me of the way that Christianity is complicit in slavery, Christianity is complicit in white supremacy, Christianity is complicit in patriarchy and all kinds of things.

The way that the Vatican was silent about the Holocaust. You can use this in all of these different kinds of ways to illustrate whatever point that you want to. That's what's so beautiful about this particular narrative. Those were so brilliant about it that it's such a rich, dense, polyvalent text that depending upon what you want to emphasize, you can do just that. But that's also the danger of the text that you can emphasize what you want and therefore get it completely wrong, as I would argue Augustine does.

1:11:23 Mark: Let me read the Augustine, since I found the page just before we go on.

1:11:26 Dylan: Go for it.

1:11:27 Mark: A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho. Adam himself is man. Jerusalem is the heavy city of peace from whose blessedness Adam fell. Jericho means the moon and signifies our mortality because it is born, waxes, wanes, and dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels who stripped him, namely, of his immortality and beat him by persuading him to sin and left him half dead. Because insofar as man can understand and know God, he lives. But insofar as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead. Therefore he's called half dead. So we're still like, in the first sentence of the parable he's given, the priest and the Levi who saw him and passed by signify the priesthood and the ministry of the Testament, which could profit nothing from salvation.

Okay, you add that little extra there. Samaritan means guardian, and therefore the Lord himself is signified by this name. It seems like Augustine doesn't even know that Samaritans were the historical enemies of the audience here. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope, wine, the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which he deigned to come to us. The being set. Anyway, he goes on, the innkeeper is the apostle Paul.

1:12:31 Dylan: Paul, what the hell?

1:12:33 Wes: Like, dude, come on, Augustine, Jesus is

1:12:37 Mark: telling us a story, and he means by the innkeeper, a guy that hasn't been born around yet.

1:12:44 Dylan: Hasn't been born yet.

1:12:44 Wes: Well, Jesus presumably would know Paul is coming.

1:12:48 Mark: Exactly. That's the one.

1:12:49 Dylan: Okay, as a Christian, I have to say that in theory, Jesus can know all things. I mean, okay, because he's the Son of God. So, okay, that's out there. My Christian thing has been said. Now, Lawrence here is going to say, what the hell, right? Because Augustine's brilliant. I got problems with Augustine and sex. And I got problems with Augustine and originally sin, I got major problems with Augustine. But Augustine is a brilliant thinker I would never say that he's not a brilliant thinker, but this is an example of someone being eisegetical with the text, someone reading the text, bringing all of this stuff, all of this Christian historical knowledge to the text and trying to explain, I mean, really, just the moment he said that the innkeeper is, look, I can go with you, with Adam maybe, but the moment he brings in a person who hasn't been born yet as the innkeeper.

Yeah, I'm done with you, Augustine.

1:13:34 Wes: This all depends on what we think, what our criteria for good interpretation.

1:13:38 Mark: Right, exactly.

1:13:39 Wes: And my criteria are actually a lot looser than lost.

1:13:41 Dylan: What's your criteria then?

1:13:43 Wes: It's like the criteria for good metaphor. Enough things have to line up. It's not about Jesus's intention. You know, when people produce things creatively, what's most interesting is what is a product of unconscious intention anyway? So you can't ever restrict yourself to, to conscious intention. And your best bet for reading unconscious intention is simply to stick to the rule of finding structural isomorphisms. In other words, if there's some kind of structure to this parable which is repeated elsewhere, then this parable as sort of standing for that, as being a symbol for that, I think it's legitimate.

We're dealing with a larger body of doctrines and beliefs though. So I think, yes, you have to be able to, to test the results against that larger context. So for instance, if it just doesn't make theological sense, once you say, okay, yeah, this is cool, Adam is man, thieves is devils, we could line those up and there are these sort of structural isomorphisms and the way they're related, the analogy works. One thing is to the other thing is the other is to the other. But if then you produce some monstrosity that doesn't make any theological sense, then yeah, you have to reject that.

The fact that it's speculative is not enough for me to out hand. And, and also it's not like I think there's one interpretation. So I think like you said, it's polyvalent in that sense because you're going to find lots of these different isomorphism. So it's, it really is a matter of how it adheres logically fits into. There is the interesting question in the context of the. Yeah, I think I've addressed that. You do have to think about, well, how is it functioning in this text and in this religious tradition and so on and so forth. You can't simply ignore all that.

1:15:19 Dylan: Right. Because for me, this parable, I don't think Jesus is doing any theology at all. I mean, this is a parable, is just quite simply moral thinking. It's moral teachings here. And so all this theological weight that Augustine's bringing to it, that other people have brought to it, that honestly I've heard many Christian preachers bring to it, I just can't get on to that because this is something that is that when you understand the historical context and you understand what the Samaritan represents, you understand that this is a Jericho road wherein people are traveling down it for the purpose of getting employment and then they end up usually being attacked by robbers.

Once you understand all of that, and of course, Martin Luther King preached the great sermon, why is there a Jericho road? Right. Questioning the economic structures of societies. The idea is that once you get there, it's just a moral teaching. It has very little to do with these theological language. And that's the danger of these parables is that when you read into them, all of this stuff that you want to see there, that's how you get into trouble.

1:16:18 Wes: At bottom, it's a tale about someone who is suffering and needs help and then the people you think should help him don't, and the person you think wouldn't help him does. And by the way, the people who should help him are the representatives of law and order and culture and that society. So there's a definite. And religion and all the things that we're supposed to hold dear. So there's that subversive element to it, generalizing that to humanity and thinking of, okay, it doesn't have to be Adam except insofar as he's the representative of human beings in general, but the idea of, of the wretchedness of that person on the road as corresponding to a spiritual wretchedness I don't think is so far fetched.

And the idea of the Samaritans providing salvation to that person as being parallel to spiritual salvation, I don't see that as far fetched either. Because just in the context of what Jesus is doing, especially with all the other parables, it seems to fit. I understand what you're saying because you're reacting to the element of speculativeness and the reading in part, I'm comfortable with that reading in if it works by

1:17:24 Mark: certain criteria, given the rest of the beliefs, Augustine and folks like this have a reason to bring in the rest of Christianity wherever they can here. So whatever they understand the kingdom of heaven to mean based on subsequent traditions or Jesus talking about himself as Messiah or something that maybe is not in here, but you could Pour it in. I'm coming at it from the opposite point of view, that we just had this whole discussion about forgiveness and Tillich saying that you need the forgiveness of something greater than yourself. And I'm thinking, can I interpret this in a non theological way?

And it looked like this parable of the good Samaritan provides a start at that. Whereas far from seeing the Samaritan as an image for God, translate all that into the way we deal with each other and the way we deal with ourselves. So as a moral story, can you love your enemies? Can you do the right thing, whatever the circumstance, blah blah, blah is more inspiring. And can that be generalized to give a comparable non theological explanation for what was going on in the previous discussion?

1:18:29 Wes: Well, law was getting at the way. This is evocative, for instance, of Christianity being complicit in racism, things like that.

1:18:37 Dylan: Right, right.

1:18:38 Wes: And you can generalize that and you can think about how any moral order, any established moral author that's become a sort of set of habits and mores and rules for society in a way is of no help. That's the sedimented part of things. And it's become too rote to us. And I'm reminded here, for instance, of Gadamer talking about how interpretation can't be operationalized. Right. And the meta parable we talked about where Jesus is explaining what he's doing. Where my take on these things is he's advocating a. A hermeneutic relationship to the world.

A relationship in which we can still be puzzled about things, still be curious. And then you could say all the other things about being forgiven and loving and all those sorts of things in general as well, without ever talking about religion or God. You see what I'm saying? You could translate all these things into a certain type of comportment to the world. And what's most interesting to me is this idea of a hermeneutical comportment to the world where you read things in

1:19:39 Dylan: I see Jesus, I see Jesus.

1:19:41 Wes: Yes, that's right. Everywhere, everywhere. But when I say hermeneutical, I just mean the quest for understanding in its more general sense. And to see subtext instead of just text.

1:19:54 Dylan: True.

1:19:55 Wes: To be able to read between the lines, let's say. And there's a greater aliveness to that comportment to the world as well. And I think there's greater moral possibility because you're not simply doing what you're told. You're not simply following the law. You know, what Jesus is overturning is this operationalized legal Approach. Yeah, legalism to morality, as opposed to maybe a more existential mark, maybe that's the.

1:20:19 Mark: What turns me off of a lot of ethics is something like the univocity of virtue. I don't know if I've used that word. But like the idea in Plato that the good will be rewarded, that's just part of the definition. And Kant even takes this as a regulatory principle that there must be an afterlife because it's inconceivable that bad things could actually happen to good people. There must be some. At least we have to think that there is some.

1:20:44 Wes: Yeah, that's some reward. Right. That's what he's really saying. We have to think that way. He's not saying.

1:20:49 Mark: Yeah. So with that goes the thing that Nietzsche is so successful at arguing against of the idea that you could have somebody that's really impressive in some way, but just horrible in other ways. And it's not just a matter of that they're out of balance. It's that virtue is not a single amount of sin that you have on you. It's not a single one dimensional thing of good to evil. That's the really simple, completely stultifying way. And think about morality and the way we react to that is often, oh, well, there's just shades of gray, but that's still affirming that there's a single.

1:21:22 Dylan: A single morality.

1:21:23 Mark: Yeah, there's still a single. Yes. And that you could just. Oh, and we're all imperfect and we're all sinners. And so the moral views that excite me are the ones that complicate that in interesting ways. So Nietzsche's already mentioned Macintyre, we brought up before that Macintyre talks about a Sophoclean view of virtue, that in a tragedy like Antigone, there are things that are morally incumbent upon you, but they will damn you anyway. Like they're just our moral commands that are unrealizable. That kind of view is the polar opposite of a view that just says, well, well, morality is not really real anyway.

And so everything is just kind of fuzzy or something. Like you could still have very strong moral views, but think that they're in some way paradoxical. So now we look at Jesus and we get the idea that the sinners really are sinners. We're not just reversing the values or something. But yet this throwing in the idea of grace, of forgiveness, complicates things in an interesting way that I still need to think more, more about in terms of what the psychological implications of it are. And what it does to moral theorizing, because the Zen Koan, the self contradicting aspect of these parables that are supposed to make it at least very difficult to apply them, if not downright impossible.

And I think that the difficulty in application is not just that we're just not as good as Jesus. We're just sinners and we can't always love our enemies.

1:22:48 Dylan: We can't reach those high.

1:22:50 Mark: Yeah, there's something that's actually logically contradictory about loving one's enemies. But yet in the same way that I was characterizing the Sophoclean view, it's incumbent upon us anyway, even though we can't do it, it gives it a totally different view.

1:23:04 Wes: I think it's a little too strong to say we can't do it because I've seen too many documentaries where the mother of the victim goes and forgives the murderer in his jail cell and things like that.

1:23:13 Mark: I mean, in individual circumstances, yes, you could do it. Can you live that way?

1:23:18 Wes: But it's also about how many enemies do you have? Right. Is it the guy who cut you off in traffic?

1:23:23 Dylan: I have two right now on the

1:23:25 Wes: phone that I'm talking to both of you. Yeah, exactly.

1:23:28 Mark: Another way to put it is it's usually a conflict between the kinds of morality that says you have to respect everybody equally. That, you know, like utilitarianism, everyone has equal weight. We don't give special. It sounds like the Jesus is urging us. The Jesus, the Jesus doctrine is urging us towards something like one of the these. But then notoriously.

1:23:49 Wes: Well, it's not respect everyone. So that's the equivocation of respect.

1:23:52 Mark: It needs to actually be love and it can't just be respect.

1:23:55 Wes: But what do you mean by love and respect? Right. It's not that you can't think people are assholes, it's just that you can't treat them as if they're not human. And I guess it is, you know. Yeah, it's not just treatment, but it's a way of viewing them. Look, some people are prone to. They get into conflicts and part of the suffering of conflicts with other human beings is not just the pain they might cause you. Right. We think back to the Rousseau episodes. It's a kind of expectation we have towards their comportment towards us. Or think about the Strawson episode.

I forget what he calls it. Exactly. We make certain demands on other people's treatment of us and we feel offended. This is the flip side of empathy, according to Rousseau. And we feel offended when they don't and this is part of the reason why. Not just offended, but even humiliated, endangered in some deep way. And I think this is part of the explanation of why. Why human beings do terrible things to each other in a way that animals don't. So the idea of overcoming. I don't think it's implausible to think of overcoming that as a goal. It's almost like demilitarizing or de escalating, but really demoralizing one's conflicts.

Right. To think about Nietzsche again, to go from, okay, this person, the premoral version of this, they caused me suffering, I want compensation. That's the pre moral thing. The moralized version is they're fucking evil and they need to be destroyed. Right. And to get away from that mode of thinking I think is plausible. I think we can think, yes, the person who murdered the innocent. We're not going to put them in the electric chair. We are going to treat them with dignity as a human being, even if we think there's something terrible about them.

And societies can do that, at least at the societal level.

1:25:34 Mark: That sounds like a transition to the talent. Talents to the gnashing of teeth. One of the parables that involves weeping and gnashing of teeth.

1:25:43 Dylan: Oh my gosh, the talents drive me crazy.

1:25:46 Wes: Yeah, I did not enjoy the. The harsh ones. I was trying to get in touch with the loving Jesus.

1:25:51 Dylan: Yeah, man, I was hoping we could talk about the prodigal son or something because these talents drive me crazy. We can do the talents.

1:25:56 Mark: Okay, so Parable of the Talents, Matthew 25, 14:30.

1:26:02 Dylan: I'm reading from the NIV the Parable of the talents Again, again. He's big about this. Again again. It will be like a man going on a journey who called his servants and entrusted his property to them. To one, he gave five talents of money, to another two talents and to another one talent, each according to his ability.

1:26:20 Mark: And a talent is a lot of freaking money.

1:26:22 Dylan: It is like, is it one? Is it one month's pay?

1:26:25 Wes: It's like £60 of silver or something. Some ridiculous you can't even carry.

1:26:30 Mark: Yeah, that's supposed to be the thing to knock you on your ass right at the beginning. Meaning of this, as an audience member that he's talking about these ridiculously large amounts. Okay, go ahead.

1:26:38 Dylan: So in other words, this owner is a baller.

1:26:40 Wes: All right.

1:26:40 Dylan: He makes it rain in the club. All right, let's keep going.

1:26:43 Mark: So don't assume Jesus is the master who's passing.

1:26:47 Dylan: Jesus is not the one that's very heavy.

1:26:49 Wes: Rain.

1:26:51 Dylan: Yes, yes. You throw this up in the club, someone will die. Keep going. All right. So then he went on his journey. The man who had received the five talents went at once, once. And put his money to work and gained five more. So also, the one with two talents gained two more. But the man who received one talent went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid his master's money. After a long time, the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five talents brought the master five. Master, he said, you entrusted me with five talents.

See, I have gained five more. His master replied, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things. I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master's happiness. The man with two talents also came. Master, he said, you entrusted me with two talents. See, I have gained two more. The master replied, well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful with a few things.

1:27:46 Mark: I could see you don't preach on this one because you're not giving it the gusto.

1:27:52 Dylan: Okay, fine. I will read it as a preacher. You ready? I will read it as a good, pretty preacher. Here we go.

1:27:56 Mark: Read the last, last line. It's a preacher.

1:27:58 Dylan: All right. Here we go. You have been faithful with a few things, and I will put you in charge of many things. Come on and share your master's happiness. Okay, I'm done with that stuff anyway. So then the master who received. Then the men who received one talent came. Master, he said, I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown, gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your talent in the ground. So see, here is what belongs to you. The master replied, you wicked, lazy servant. So you knew that our harvest were not sown and gathered.

Were I not scattered seed? Well, then you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so when I returned, I would have received it back with interest. Noticed. Interest. That's important. Take the talent from him. Give it to the one who has the 10 talents. For everyone who has will be given more, more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have even what he has will be taken from him and throw that worthless servant outside into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

1:29:04 Mark: So I'm looking on Wikipedia, there's a different translation of almost everything else. But weeping and gnashing of teeth is still in there. There's no alternative.

1:29:14 Dylan: Teeth. That's going to happen.

1:29:15 Wes: It makes me Think that they live right next to hell or something. Right. You can just. All right, throw them in the pit. The outer darkness is just right. It's next door. Throw him into the outer darkness.

1:29:27 Mark: So he's ironic. Isn't that awesome? Actually, the funniest thing is if you look this up on YouTube, there's a whole bunch of these videos that are acted out like, actually pretty good cinematography really, where a guy is dressed as Jesus and is a. Among a bunch of people and he's sitting and they're all the people are sitting around him, just wrapped, listening to this and have two talents and you have one talent and he just delivers this and then it just ends. And like, as if. As if we would all just say, yeah, that's right. No, as opposed to what the. Did you just praise people who take interest, do all these things that are against Jewish law?

1:30:07 Dylan: Right, right.

1:30:08 Mark: And the word talent, even though it in English as a cognate for having a skill. There's no comparable thing in Greek, right?

1:30:17 Dylan: No, not really.

1:30:17 Mark: Yeah. So the interpretation that people give is, well, God has given us all different talents, different skills. We have to make. We have to make the most of them. If we don't make the most of ourselves and do what we can to serve God, then God is going to come back and kick our asses. Like, that's the sort of wrote version that I've read. Multiple interpretations along those lines.

1:30:39 Dylan: I have as well.

1:30:40 Wes: Yeah. The Greek word is actually just for a scale or a balance.

1:30:44 Dylan: Yeah. It's denarii.

1:30:45 Wes: Yeah.

1:30:45 Dylan: It's money or a measure. Yeah.

1:30:47 Mark: 6,000 denarii in the comments of that particular YouTube video referred to the actor as surfer Jesus. So let's refer to that as the surfer Jesus interpretation.

1:30:57 Dylan: Here's the thing about this particular one that drives me a little crazy is the whole idea of interest. Right. That's not something you're supposed to be participating in. You're not supposed to be using interest. And like a good storyteller, he saves interest for the end. You always throw in the shocking part. Now, this is not shocking to us. I've heard people who have used this as an illustration of why Jesus is a free market capitalist. And so they completely misunderstand what's going on here. But the issue is that the guy who, in a first century context, a Jewish context, you're not supposed to be doing anything that has to do with interest.

Right. That's not what you're supposed to do. The Hebrew Bible explicitly talks about that. And John Dominic Crossan, I believe, brings this out a little bit in his text as well. And so the idea then is that for someone to not participate in that banking, right. Not participating in that interest, and then to be punished for. For it. That's the shocking part for them, which completely upends how we read it, because for us, we're like, yeah, go put it in the bank and collect interest on it. But for them, that would be shocking that Jesus would say that's what he should have done.

1:32:08 Wes: Yeah. I mean, I don't think it's implausible to interpret it more generally as saying, you have to develop what you have. Right. You don't let it sit. And there's some sort of mandate to fulfill one's potential, let's say, or to actualize or any number of things. Things. This one leaves a lot of room for pernicious interpretation. Thou shalt invest or be cast to the out of darkness or you going to die.

1:32:34 Dylan: Yeah, you better make that money. Or it sound like, oh, gosh, is this hor. I'm going to say it anyway. It sound like, dude's a pimp. Right. It's like, you better make me my money. And if you don't, it's going to be consequences of repercussions. That's what it sounds like. You know, it's hard out here for a pimp. You better make my money.

1:32:52 Wes: Parable of the Pimp.

1:32:53 Dylan: The parable of Bishop Don Magic Juan. That's what you call it.

1:32:56 Wes: Exactly.

1:32:57 Dylan: Right.

1:32:57 Mark: So Crossan has a long treatment of this in his book. The ultimate purpose of this is to make people question authority, that I'm presenting such an unjust situation. And the form of the parable is such that it's pretty much always the third one, like in the Good Samaritan, who gets it right.

1:33:16 Dylan: Right.

1:33:16 Mark: And so actually it's the third servant in this who gets it right. And the Master. The Master is even saying, you knew that I was wicked, and I reap where I didn't sow and gather where I didn't scatter.

1:33:28 Wes: That's an interpretation. I think that's going too far.

1:33:30 Mark: Well, yeah, so that's. Anyway, Crossan is reversing it, whereas normally you say somehow the Master is God, and because God's the boss and we got to do what God says, and we have to somehow, you know, we have to deliver up to him or we'll be thrown out. That Crossan is turning the Master, saying that there are all these signals throughout the presence of interest, but also him admitting his own own vileness. And just the whole setup here, the huge amounts of money involved, the peasants hearing this, they're going to most sympathize with the person who, like, you know, if somebody gives me that much money, it's like if mafia bosses came and dropped money off at your house, like, just bury it in the yard and then give it back to them when they come back.

Like, that's the best you could possibly do in that situation. You go out and start trying to earn on your own with it. You're playing with fire.

1:34:15 Dylan: Right? That's too far, it seems, Wes, like you're resistant to that reading. But why do you feel that's an improper reading of this? Because. Because in theory, maybe Jesus is telling us. Because again, if we're going to take this as participatory pedagogy and Jesus is telling a story and he's provoking people to ask him questions, I could see Jesus maybe telling the story and illustrating how, in fact, the owner is not God, but in fact a bad guy. So why are you so resistant to that reading?

1:34:45 Wes: One of the reasons is just it's so convenient. It's a convenient way to get around sound. Something that doesn't sound nice. Although I think there's a benign interpretation having to do with the mandate to develop oneself rather than stagnate. But anyway, right, because you weep, you

1:35:02 Mark: know, as part of contrition and the gnashing that's kind of just like you're getting the tartar off.

1:35:07 Wes: Well, that's about being lost if you don't. That's about being damned if you. And we could talk about all the different interpretations of damnation, but I'll, you know, obviously there's a psychological one, but I think the other part of it is it's just not the style of any other parable. So this would be unique in the sense of being this subversive. So there's three reasons. One is that there's a more plausible, benign interpretation, even though it doesn't look great, you know, the parable itself, the content seems harsh. And the second reason is the convenience of the alternative interpretation. The third reason is just that it doesn't fit with any of the other.

1:35:43 Mark: Does it not fit with some of the others? Because you could read this right alongside the vineyard one, which we. I, I don't want to read the whole vineyard one. But the idea is to just give the idea. Yeah, the master has left tenants in charge of a vineyard, and the tenants decide just pretty much to take it over and they crash the place. And then he sends servants and they just kill the servants and he sends his own son. Like they'll listen to my son. So dumb. Yeah, so they kill the son and then he just comes back and he kicks their asses and he murders him, them all. In that case, it's not the master that's being a bastard. But still the story sounds like it's the same. God has left you the earth and you are pissing it away, and he's going to come kick your ass. So should we just accept that that's just part of Jesus's take on things?

1:36:29 Wes: He's just a. Yeah, that's consistent in the eschatological. Doesn't that seem the consistent kind of Helen fire and brimstone thing going on here?

1:36:37 Dylan: I don't.

1:36:38 Wes: I don't think we can get around that of kind.

1:36:39 Mark: Can we Crossan certainly thinks we can, but I think we can.

1:36:42 Dylan: I think we actually can. All right, so one interpretation of what is meant by the weeping and gnashing of teeth, right? Now, one way you can go straight to hell, right? I mean, you can go straight to. What it means is hell and Gehenna, Right?

1:36:57 Wes: Right.

1:36:58 Dylan: Another way that you can look at that is just outside of Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, there was a place called the Ravine of Hinnom, I believe it's called. Just southwest of Jerusalem was a big, kind of like. Like trash heap, a big fire heap. And so many of the people who were poor, who were marginalized, who were ostracized, they would go there, right? Because there's a lot of food there that the people throw away. Maybe they kind of go through the pickings and this where the poor people would go to cry. To weep and, you know, just kind of gnash their teeth, if you will.

And so one interpretation that people like Borg, I believe, Crossan, does this as well, argues that the weeping and gnashing of teeth is in fact, not about hell, but it's about actual historical place that people would go. And so the people who's listening to the story when they hear weeping and gnashing of teeth, they're not thinking hell, they're not thinking Gehenna, they're thinking of the ravine, right? They're thinking about the Ravine of Hinnom down the street southwest of Jerusalem, where the people who lose their jobs go, right? Or the people who mess up go.

And so it has more to do with shaming and being marginalized than it does with actual hell. Now, that is an interpretive question.

1:38:05 Wes: Well, to someone like Me, they seem like clever ways of avoiding a hard truth. They sound very implausible. And all the more implausible for being historical, by the way, the history actually doesn't help because it's taking something that's meant to be symbolic and then it's a deflationary. Anything you do historically is going to be deflationary. And the point of the parable is not to be deflatable in that sense, but anyway.

1:38:27 Mark: And there are just too many parables that seem easily interpreted along these lines that have some sort of harshness in them of the master who. His servant owes him a lot of money and so he lets him off, but that servant in turn is owed a lot of money by somebody else and doesn't let him off and is a dick about it. So the original master finds out and kicks the middle guy's ass. I let you off the hook and you were not similarly merciful. So it seems like there is this directive to love your enemies, love others as yourself, but if you don't do that, then there's going to be woman.

1:39:02 Wes: Yeah, I mean, it sounds like there's a tradition that sort of explains away any fire and brimstone aspect to this stuff. The.

1:39:10 Dylan: Absolutely. I mean, because. Because you have to keep in mind that there's Christian universalism, the idea that hell is not a place that everyone ultimately goes to heaven. Right. And so hell then is other people. No, hell then is. Is living a life in alienation and estrangement from God with no reconciliation.

1:39:31 Wes: That's what I was calling the psychological interpretation.

1:39:34 Dylan: Interpretation.

1:39:34 Seth: Right.

1:39:35 Dylan: And that's one way of it. But yeah. So there is certainly the tradition of Christian universalism that completely explains away any notions or any references to Gehenna to hell. And of course, Eric Reitan wrote a really good book about that not too long ago.

1:39:49 Wes: The whole idea of Christian universalism, it's appealing, obviously.

1:39:52 Mark: Yeah.

1:39:52 Wes: To me. Me and probably a lot of listeners. You know, the. The hell thing.

1:39:56 Dylan: Heck, it's appealing to me. I mean, it's appealing to Rob. Yeah, Rob Bell talks about it.

1:40:00 Wes: Hell is a sticking point.

1:40:01 Dylan: Yeah, Hell is definitely a sticking point.

1:40:07 Wes: One of Nietzsche's great takedowns in the genealogy of morality is just his ridicule of the concept of hell represents psychologically concept of heaven and hell.

1:40:17 Mark: And.

1:40:17 Dylan: And any thinking Christian has to wrestle with what he says about hell, particularly if you want to hold on to the concept. Concept of hell. You know, any thinking Christian has to wrestle with that. In fact, there's a pretty decent documentary on Netflix if it's still on there called Hellbound question mark that wrestles with that. So when you read these parables and you hear certain characters in these parables sending people to the place where there's weeping and gnashing of teeth, I'm not so quick to say that's a representation of hell. That's theological language that you're bringing into this. I'm not so sure that's what that is. But many people do make that claim.

1:40:52 Wes: Well, just the outer darkness part too.

1:40:54 Dylan: That could just as easily be this ravine of Hinnom that has become a representation for hell. I'm just not comfortable with making that leap on that one.

1:41:04 Wes: Yeah, psychological interpretations, you know, I find more plausible. It's not a problem for me that I don't like certain parables because I don't know which ones Jesus actually said.

1:41:13 Mark: I had sent you guys a link before to one of the books put out through the Jesus seminar, which is a thing that Crossan is a member of that. It's a lot of historians that vote on what they think, which works, which sayings, whatever actually came from Jesus as opposed to were added by Mark, Luke, John, etc, somebody else. And they have for every single parable they have like the rankings of voted 90%, you know, 90% of the people that were there voted. The Levin is the number one that, that Jesus definitely said that in terms of multiple attestation, blah blah blah. And so for instance, instance, the tenants, the versions in Matthew, Mark and Luke are both voted 91%. Almost certainly not something Jesus actually said. But then there's some other version of the tenants. I think that's the tenants or the talents that's higher on the list.

1:42:04 Dylan: Tenants are talents.

1:42:05 Mark: The tenants.

1:42:05 Dylan: Tenants.

1:42:06 Mark: Okay, the vineyard tenants.

1:42:07 Dylan: Right.

1:42:07 Mark: But the one in Thomas is voted 77% authentic. So there is a version. I don't know how the one in Thomas goes, but whether it's any let's objectionable than. Than the others. But the other ones that we were talking about are not all at the bottom of the list. I don't think we can use this. Well, there's those, those bad ones just aren't historically authentic. It's just, you know, Luke making stuff up or whatever, you know, I don't think that works so well.

1:42:30 Dylan: That's the thing about Jesus that we have to wrestle with us as thinkers, but really Christians more so that the message of Jesus is not this great cohesive thing that we would like for it to be. Right. It's not this philosophical systematic theology or Philosophical system that he sat down, thought about, worked it out, and presented to us holistically. But rather, it's a collection of sayings, a collection of parabolic actions as well. You know, we have to kind of deal with that a little bit. The fact that some of the things that he does are teaching.

Right. So riding in on a donkey, for example, being one of them, or touching a leper being another one of them. Right. These are parabola actions that he's doing here. These are things that are not systematic, but rather that they are hit or miss, that they may say one thing, they may say something else, depending upon the interpretation, depending upon the context. And so it's a problem to try to act as though these things are a holistic thing, all pointing towards the same thing, but rather, they are complex. They are a prism of different actions.

And sometimes there's even examples of. Of Jesus apologizing for some of the things that he says. You know, so he'll call someone, you know, something, and then he'll say, oh, I can't believe it. Look at this woman. You know, so, you know, we have to kind of wrestle with the fact that these things are not necessarily always consistent, that they are sometimes inconsistent.

1:43:53 Mark: So if we were pulling out a quote for every episode to advertise it with, then Pastor Lawrence says, jesus actions are hit or miss.

1:44:03 Dylan: Hey, hey, I didn't say that. I did not say that. That is not what I said. That's how you get someone in trouble.

1:44:11 Mark: That's my interpretation.

1:44:14 Dylan: That would be eisegetical of you. Ricoeur would not be pleased.

1:44:18 Mark: So, yeah, Ricoeur takes. You know, we've been getting into these, like, oh, you got to worry about the historical details. You got to worry about. And Ricoeur seems in the actual examples, he gives almost the opposite of that.

1:44:29 Dylan: He doesn't care about it.

1:44:30 Wes: Yeah.

1:44:31 Mark: So going back to the original lost and found, you know, the lost treasure, the stuff. But he interprets it. He says, oh, this is what Heidegger teaches us about. He looks at it as a schema.

1:44:43 Wes: Yeah.

1:44:44 Mark: So it's this threefold event, reversal and decision. So you find the treasure. That's the event. And he says, isn't that like time itself? Like our fundamental relation to time and being in time, the event par excellence.

1:45:01 Dylan: Mm. Something happens.

1:45:03 Mark: It's. Yes, let us be prepared for the newness of the new. That's being open to an event.

1:45:09 Wes: Right.

1:45:09 Dylan: But the art of the parable. The art of the parable.

1:45:12 Mark: Yeah, the art of the parable is to link dialectically finding to two other critical turning points. The reversal. It's selling your other stuff to get the pearl or selling all you have to be able to afford. The land that has the treasure in it is a conversion. It's a reversing your gaze, reversing your value. And only then after that is the actual action that you take is the decision to actually buy the thing, to buy the pearl. And yeah, he makes a big deal out of that.

1:45:40 Dylan: Yeah, this actually reminds me of the Prestige, that film directed by Christopher Nolan. But I think he's on to something in how he presents this. That indeed there is this event that happens, right? This thing that happens. There is the reversal that always happens in the parable, right. That there is a reversal of meaning. Something happens that supports surprising, the twist ending, if you will. It was the butler. And then ultimately there's a decision that must be made, right? And it is on the basis of the decision that we begin to have investment in this word conversion, as he said, which means here, to quote him, know how much has been invested in this word conversion, which means much more than making a new choice, but when.

Which applies a shift in the direction of the look, a reversal in the vision, in the imagination, in the heart before all kinds of good intentions. Intentions and all kinds of good decisions and good actions.

1:46:30 Wes: Yeah, so I like actually to back up a little bit. I like what he says about finding as well. So, yeah, so we're trying to get at. So there's the finding the treasure, the selling and then the buying. So what he calls the threefold division. So the finding something, this simple expression encompasses all the kinds of encounters which make our life the contrary of an acquisition by skill or by violence, by work or by cunning. And I take it that's what he's calling the event, right? So it's a sense in which.

1:46:55 Dylan: Which.

1:46:56 Wes: So I was talking about the scale of values, which is might makes right or which accentuates power. So I think that's the scale here, the normal scale. Acquisition by skill or violence by worker, cunning. So it's that very finding which is. There's a reversal of values there. This idea of. So he goes on to say, encounter of people, encounter of death, encounter of tragic situations, encounter of joyful events, finding the other, finding ourselves, so on and so forth, these things beyond our control and which are matters of serendipity or good luck or bad luck or things that happen to us, let's say. And then there's a way in which that, I take it, can transform us if we take it to heart. If we take that powerlessness to heart.

1:47:39 Mark: Right. In the same way, just bringing back the Tillich's point about grace, that this is the God, the having to serve somebody is another way of putting that. The something outside yourself is that authentic encounter is outside of your control. You can't just summon this up yourself.

1:47:56 Wes: Yeah. And also there's a question of whether we can be in the mode of finding. So he talks about surprise and if everything is familiar and operationalized. As a kind of thing I was talking about before with the Samaritan, I'm thinking of the hermeneutics again. So I'm not sure you can actually be in that mode of finding. Perhaps you're always in the other mode, which is working or trying to get ahead or something like that. There has to be a certain kind of passivity and openness to the world, let's say a receptivity which doesn't square with just being busy and running around and blah, blah, blah.

1:48:31 Dylan: Almost a mindfulness, if I can use a. Yeah, you know, a Buddhist kind of framework. You know, that in the same way that many Buddhists talk about things like mindful breathing, mindful walking, mindful living, that you have to have a kind of mindfulness. In fact, Greg Boyd talks about this in his Present Perfect, actually, where he talks about a certain kind of mindfulness when it comes to your approach to life, that this kind of transformative opportunity only presents itself if you are mindful of it, if you're aware of it. So you have to be aware of this event, that it happens to you. Right. You don't create it, it happens to you. And you have to be ready for that when it comes.

1:49:09 Wes: Yeah. And then this reversal of vision you were talking about about.

1:49:13 Dylan: Right. And that's the next step. Right. Because before you can make a decision, there has to be that reversal of vision that we kind of talked about already, that the next step. Then right after you have found it, then next comes that reversal which leads to the conversion. Many of these parables follow that kind of thing. That something happens. Right. Joyous, happy, bad, whatever. Something happens. Jesus then inverts the meaning to this parable is what Ricoeur is going to say upon the reversal of meaning. The listener, not the person inside of the story. But it is then the listener who has a decision to make based off of what's been told. And depending upon the decision that the listener makes is the potentiality for a conversion and that for Ricoeur's kind of the way that this unfolds itself.

1:49:59 Wes: Yeah. And so then at the end of that account, there he. I forgot if he read this part law, but he. The succession in the full sense. So the kingdom of God is compared to the chain of these three acts, letting the event blossom, looking in another direction, and doing with all one's strength in accordance with the new vision. So what's interesting here is the way in which it's not even the content of the parable exactly. It's the structure he's trying to get at, the way in which the very structure of the parable has something to do with the kingdom of heaven and this, let's say, awakening or reversal in

1:50:33 Dylan: the imagination and which leads to us to Mark's favorite parable, Parables of Growth, to talk about the mustard seed one. Right. So we should probably read it first before we say what Ricoeur has to say about it.

1:50:47 Wes: I'll give you Matthew's version from the World English Bible. All right. He said another parable before them, saying, the kingdom of heaven is like a grain of mustard seed which a man took and sowed in his field, which indeed is smaller than all seeds, but when it is grown, it is greater than the herbs and becomes a tree tree, so that the birds of the air come and lodge in its branches.

1:51:09 Dylan: And so he says, look. So this unexpected growth of the mustard seed, this growth beyond all proportion, draws our attention in the same direction as finding the natural growth of the seed and the unnatural size of the growth speaks of something which happens to us. It invades us. Listen to the words that he uses. It happens to us. It invades us. It overwhelms us beyond our control and our grasp, beyond our willing and our planning. Right. It just takes over us once more. The event comes as a gift. Right. And so he's pointing out, using that particular parable, again, the way that this huge thing, it overwhelms. It takes us over and becomes something that we can't contain, something that we cannot explain. But it comes nevertheless as a gift, pointing out the growth there and the kingdom of God being. Or the kingdom of God Heaven being there.

1:52:00 Wes: Yeah, I thought this was interesting because it sort of goes towards the question of how parables could be effective, how preaching could be effective, essentially, how words could be effective in changing people substantially. And this idea, there's a parable of the growing seed as well, where you cast a seed on the earth and should sleep and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up. He doesn't know how, for the earth bears fruit. So this idea of. Of Something germinating and you being asleep while it happens and not knowing the mechanism via which it happens.

And here with the mustard seed, it's sort of the unexpected nature of it, right? The smallness of the seed compared to the greatness of the fruit. But I think there's also something there about this idea going back to what we were talking about at the beginning, which is that you have to plant seeds as opposed to simply give things to people, whole cloth, right? Present them with, I don't know, a bouquet or something. You can't present them with the finished product. The whole point of the parable is to implant seeds and let them germinate in this way in people, right?

1:53:05 Dylan: And what's interesting is that oftentimes you plant seeds and you don't see the result of it for months later, right? That's what's beautiful, because I remember Paul talks about the gospel, you know, the kerygma being this way in First Corinthians, chapter three, verse six, I believe. Believe, where there's a controversy about who's greater. Is it Paul, is it Apollos? You know, two preachers, they like a lot. And Paul says, you know, I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but it's God who gives the increase, right? And so he's playing with this particular kind of metaphor, the idea that seeds are planted and it's not one person who gets all the credit, but ultimately it's God who gets the credit for it.

So all these things are kind of talking in circles and in dialogue with one another. The idea. Idea of seeds and growth and the impotence of man, enough humanity to make these things happen, that they are outside of our growth. Sure, we can put some dung on it, if you will. You put some poop on it to help it grow, some fertilizer. But ultimately it's not us that makes it grow. It happens in a natural course of things. And so these are, you know, agricultural references that the people who are listening would have picked up on, right? You know, their agricultural society.

And so that's part of the brilliance of all of this, is the fact that he's speaking to them in ways that is complex and has depth of meaning, but at the same time is accessible to people who are not terribly educated in the way that the people to whom Plato's writing probably would not have picked up on. Those are educated individuals, right?

1:54:35 Mark: They're accessible through the parabolic form. But Ricoeur is telling us that it's going to be unsatisfying to some of Our tendencies.

1:54:44 Dylan: Right.

1:54:45 Mark: So we don't know how to apply these things immediately. Also, it's symbolic language. It only tells what the kingdom is like, not what it is. We think through the metaphor and never beyond parables allow no translation into conceptual language. Right. So that's the. You know, I'm hearing you talk about this schema that he sets up, event reversal, decision. I find it very difficult to get excited about that because it's just too abstract that it's like you could apply that to just about anything. Just like when we're reading about Ricoeur, Ricoeur, Ricoeur.

When reading about Ricoeur last time giving his phenomenological take on the Book of Genesis or something. Like, it's sort of like reading that Augustine take on the Good Samaritan that it sort of makes me roll your eyes. Like, if we can have such an abstract schema based on this that almost anything could fit in and it's too vague to argue against. Like, if you think I'm coming to a real phenomenological realization that there's a lot of things in life that are like an event and then a reversal and we make a decision based on it. Like, well, who could argue against that?

Like it's not specific enough a claim to provide sufficient fodder to argue about it all. And I think Ricoeur is trying to tell me that I've got these pre. Understandings. I'm approaching the text in the wrong way to have these expectations that I can argue with it, that I can apply it. When I was referring to Zen coins before, I. I think that. I forget if Ricoeur actually uses that phrase, but that's definitely what he seems to be pushing at with a lot of these. That maybe the issue with the talents is not supposed to be that we come away with either a clear story that Crossan wants to think that we should be questioning the whole system of private property and kings that can give out such sums of money.

Nor should we be reading it as people that don't do what God says are going to be cast into outer darkness. We should be reading it as simply something to make us think a Zen koan. And that's, you know, goes along with what you were saying, law, that you don't get a systematic set of doctrines out of Jesus at all. If he just was looking to mess with us and make us think and improve us in that way. Yeah, that of course we wouldn't get a clear set of principles out of it.

1:56:56 Dylan: Well, I mean. But I think that's the point, because parables are supposed to be parables, they're not supposed to be sermons. And I think that's a key difference. Whereas when I preach a sermon, if I use an illustration, I'm using an illustration to make a point. And I will always, at the end, explain, okay, so I'll say, here's my theological point that I want to make, here's an illustration to make that point. And then I end by saying, this is what I want you to get from this illustration. Ultimately, if these are indeed parables, and sure there is meaning there, parables are supposed to be open ended, they're supposed to be in interpretive.

And so parables, just by the nature of them being parables, you tell the story, you have an idea of what you want to get across. But if you tell the people what it is you want them to get from the parable, it becomes a sermon and not a parable. Right. And so that's why I think it's interesting where, for example, when you look in Mark, which is our earliest gospel, going back to what we saw at the very beginning of our discussion, Jesus talks to the crowd, but then he says to the disciples off to the side, he explains to them, them the meaning of it, which is, you know, maybe he didn't do that, maybe he did.

Scholars say different things. But the point is, to the people who are listening to the hoi polloi, to the crowd, he doesn't explain it. He tells a story, he leaves a discussion to the individuals who are private, that he gives the revelation, that he gives the truth to the, you know, the explanation. I think that's key to understanding what parables are really all about.

1:58:20 Wes: Yeah. And I think to come back to Recur's point, Ricoeur doesn't say this exactly, but I think it's relevant that part of the function of the parable simply is structural. It simply is the fact that they are symbolic and that they elicit the symbol unraveling function in people or the hermeneutic comportment to the world. And that that comportment is related to the kind of change he's trying to instill in them. Whether you call it faith or coming to the kingdom of heaven or whatever you call it, those two things are related. And if you think about what a metaphor is.

Right, so think about, compare Tillich, what Tillich calls forgiveness, reconciliation in spite of estrangement. Well, metaphor just is a reconciliation of estranged things. And that's part of its power and I think part of the poignancy that comes across. So if you're Shakespeare, you have Romeo, call Juliet something like an earring on the cheek of night. The reason why it works is because there are certain key isomorphisms, or you could call it similarities, but I think it goes beyond that because it's not like there are simply isolated similarities.

They're more dynamic. They work structurally. There's internal relationships between the different elements of the one thing that you're comparing to the other thing. And so there's a deeper structural similarity that you get at. And part of the thrill of that is just the idea that things that seem to be divided and forever in a kind of schism, turn out to seemingly be related in some deep way.

1:59:46 Mark: Way.

1:59:46 Wes: And I think that's what symbolism and metaphor do. And they're fundamentally related. This idea of overcoming those divisions is fundamentally related to Jesus's larger project.

1:59:59 Mark: One of the other. He says these event parables, like the finding treasure are. He compares them to the phenomenological, just how we deal with time itself. And related to that are some other parables of you have to be ready now or it will be too late. That there's something that is supposed to be resonant in our experience in a fundamental way that would give poignancy to these stories. So, for instance, the parable of the ten virgins, or the wise and foolish virgins.

2:00:32 Dylan: Interesting parable.

2:00:32 Wes: Yeah.

2:00:33 Mark: Then the kingdom of heaven will be like 10 virgins who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom. Bridegroom, five of them were foolish and five of them were wise. Those who were foolish, when they took their lamps, took no oil with them. But the wise took oil in their vessels with their lamps. Now, while the bridegroom delayed, they all slumbered and slept. But at midnight there was a cry, Behold, the bridegroom is coming. Come out to meet him. Then all those virgins arose and trimmed their lamps. The foolish said to the wise, give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.

But the wise answered, saying, what if there isn't enough for us? And you, you go rather to those who sell and buy for yourselves. While they went away to buy, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went in with him to the marriage feast. And the door was shut. Afterward, the other virgins also came, saying, lord, Lord, open to us. But he answered, most certainly. I tell you, I don't know you. Watch, therefore, for you don't know the day nor the hour in which the Son of Man is coming. So, yeah, I mean, Is this just another. In this case, it's, you better be ready for the second coming.

This is one of the interpretations that's normally given, right? It could happen at any time. And if you're not ready, then too bad for you. And so the bridegroom is like God in this one.

2:01:43 Dylan: I think that the Jesus seminar, the group of scholars, you know, so you're so Crossan and Borg, even N.T. Wright. I believe they designated that as either gray or black. Black, meaning that it. Why gotta be black, though? You know, Come on, man. Anyway, but, but, but gray or black, black mean it probably, almost certainly did not come from Jesus. And if gray, because there's a little bit of white in there, if gray, then maybe it came from Jesus, but probably not. So that already raises the issue of is this actually something that Jesus literally said, or is this something that people who, in light of trying to make Jesus, you know, the king of the world, eventually, to quote Leonardo DiCaprio, that Jesus, you ought to get that joke anyway, so that Jesus ultimately didn't say this, but this community is saying this about Jesus.

All right, that's one way to go about it. The second one, if you want to go the route of west, right, The Alwanian interpretation, if you want to go down that road, then you can say that maybe what's talking about here is maybe death, right? Maybe not the kingdom of heaven, but rather death. So having your affairs in order, always being aware that death is around the corner, that that is the common denominator of us all.

2:02:59 Wes: All.

2:02:59 Dylan: And that it is incumbent upon us to always be ready for when death comes, to knock.

2:03:05 Wes: Right?

2:03:05 Dylan: To make sure that you say, you know, I love you to your loved ones. Make sure you give people their roses while they can still smell them, things like that. So I think if you want to go the eschatological route, you can. But I think there are other ways to interpret this particular parable that maybe goes away from hell in the second coming of Jesus.

2:03:22 Wes: Does Ricoeur talk about this one briefly? Yes, because it seems like we could talk about it in terms of the event, of being open to the event, right?

2:03:31 Mark: Yeah, right. It's a variation off that theme that sometimes the event comes and then you have to make the decision or it's too late. So it's another facet of the same

2:03:41 Wes: experience, you know, I mean, you could see it more broadly as being closed to the world versus open to the, you know, being curious about the world and capable of being surprised by it and capable of. Of thinking and feeling in the most robust way, as opposed to simply plodding along in autopilot.

2:03:58 Dylan: You have Eminem, who has a song called Lose Yourself. And the whole song is only about when the moment comes, will you be ready? And so there's that old quote that is like preparation meets opportunity. Right. Or something like that. That's what success is. Right. And so you can talk about it in those kinds of terms where Eminem, when the time came, he was ready with that freestyle. Even though he threw up spaghetti, ready on his jacket, he was ready to go with their freestyle. And because of that, he is the rapper that we know today. Whatever. It's more of a commentary on time. When the time comes, are you ready? Whether there is. Ready for heaven, ready for death, ready for your moment, whatever.

2:04:33 Wes: The girl you met in the bar. Yeah.

2:04:35 Dylan: You know, when she comes to holla at you, are you nervous and stumbling over yourself? Or you like, hey, shorty, you know, can I get that phone number? Whatever, Right?

2:04:43 Wes: Definitely the former. No amount of religious awakening is going to help that.

2:04:51 Dylan: A certain amount of beer may help.

2:04:53 Mark: Just seems that most of the other parables that we've looked at, and again, maybe this could be because this is not authentic or something, but reading it as if trying to make sense of the text as it is Ricoeur says we have to look at all the parables as they relate to each other and interpret them as a single text. I'm not clear on that, but let's give it a try. It seems strange that there's so many details in this parable. Parable that aren't necessary for that particular message. Right? Why are there 10? Why isn't it just like one in one? Why is it a bridegroom and virgins at all as opposed to something else? And this particular imagery with the oil and the lamps, like it sort of calls out for an Augustine to come along and say, you know, give some sort of point by point.

2:05:34 Dylan: I think that has to do with historical circumstance. I think that has to do with just the marriage culture customs at the time. I think that this is just the custom of what happened when her people getting married. You had 10 virgins who would do what they were supposed to do.

2:05:45 Mark: So it's not a harem. The bridegroom is not going to marry all of them. I was.

2:05:49 Wes: No, that's just mean. They just mean non slutty bridesmaids, basically.

2:05:53 Mark: I just think that the 10 virgins are like the 10 bowling pins. And then it's like if you get a spare, then you get Half of them.

2:06:02 Dylan: And what's the point of the oil then?

2:06:04 Wes: To rub on your bowling ball? I don't know.

2:06:06 Mark: Oh.

2:06:08 Wes: Oh, I wasn't even thinking about that.

2:06:10 Dylan: Yeah, sure you weren't.

2:06:11 Wes: I wasn't.

2:06:12 Dylan: Okay, well, then my bad. Still. Oh, no.

2:06:16 Wes: But, yeah, it's a legitimate o.

2:06:19 Mark: Perhaps we should have a audience contest for who can get the most convincing and awesome and outrageous interpretation of this particular parable.

2:06:28 Dylan: I would love to read that. Please let me be in on the judging.

2:06:32 Mark: I will put up a blog post about that. I will make my stab at it, and I will invite readers to give their own.

2:06:37 Dylan: But I will let you know that you're going to get some evangelical Christians who are very mad that you're making fun of a biblical church.

2:06:42 Mark: They don't. They're not even aware that we exist.

2:06:45 Wes: And we're not making fun of.

2:06:47 Dylan: No, we're actually asking for bad interpretations.

2:06:49 Mark: We're making fun of hermanutics.

2:06:50 Dylan: Yeah. We're making fun of hermeneutics, not the actual text.

2:06:52 Mark: That's a good point of Augustine, that rapscallion Augustine.

2:06:55 Wes: That's right. We're making fun of any but the most literal possible interpretation.

2:07:01 Mark: Are we out of.

2:07:02 Wes: I'm out of steam, unfortunately.

2:07:04 Mark: All right. No lost sheep for you. You or lost son. No prodigal son for you.

2:07:09 Dylan: There's some rich stuff in there. Like, we could easily talk about that prodigal son one for a long time.

2:07:14 Mark: One could, but luckily that's one of the most treated it is ones in the literature already, so.

2:07:20 Dylan: But that lost sheep one is really interesting because it makes no damn sense. Why would a dude leave all of his sheep to go get one? Yes, I know. Love, whatever. It still makes no damn sense. Sense, Right. The whole idea that he would leave the 99 to go get the 1. And so people who are listening to that parable are thinking what I'm thinking. No way am I leaving my 99 to go get that one. But of course, one way you can interpret that is that it's all about love, which, you know, all you need is love.

2:07:51 Mark: Is this another case where the interpretation is attached when it shouldn't be or something? Here's the whole thing. He told them this parable. Which of you men, if. If you had 100 sheep and lost one of them, wouldn't leave 99 in the wilderness and go after one that was lost until he found it? So maybe he's asking this in a snarky way that, of course he wouldn't actually do that. So he must mean something symbolic. When he has found it, he carries it on his shoulders, rejoicing. When he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, rejoice with me, for I found my sheep, which was lost. Okay, so none of this would actually happen. But then he follows up and he says, I tell you that even so, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over 99 righteous people who need no, no repentance.

2:08:31 Wes: He could have just said that.

2:08:34 Mark: So it sounds like, again, he's trying to give you like this is a riddle parable in terms, but he's telling you that at least in this version, it gives you the answer right after it. And so the riddleness of it is just supposed to sort of call your attention to the point. If he just said that last sentence by itself, then it wouldn't have the impact that it would. So it's a purely rhetorical device. And so how does Ricoeur take these lost ones? He makes a deal of these.

2:09:02 Dylan: Page 242. He says, if you isolate the parable of the lost coin, if you interrupt the dynamism of the story and extract from it a frozen concept, then you get the kind of doctrine of predestination which pure Calvinism advocated. But if you pick the parable of the prodigal son and extract from it the frozen concept of personal conversion, then you get a theology based on absolutely free will of man. I don't know if that's what we want, though, as in the doctrine of the Jesuits opposed to the Calvinism or the Protestant liberals or the orthodox. So really, he's just talking about the fluid nature of how you interpret these things. He doesn't directly speak about the lost sheep, though. He talks about the lost coin, and he talks about the prodigal son.

2:09:45 Mark: All right. I thought there was a thing in here. Certainly I could see the dealing with the lost thing things as yet another version of dealing with time in the same way that we just said that the.

2:09:57 Wes: So he's leading up. He's leading up with all this to talking about how the parables teach, but not in an ordinary way. And then he gets into this use of hyperbole, which is how he explains, for instance, sending your son to be killed. I forget which one.

2:10:12 Mark: That's called Wicked Tenants.

2:10:13 Wes: Yeah. So the point of hyperbole is. So we jolt the imagination from its vision of a continuous sequence between one situation and another, another. Our project of making a totality continuous with our own existence is Defeated. For who can plan his future according to the project of losing in order to win? So hyperbolic orders like love your enemies. And then he says, so this is a great way to put it. So, like paradox, hyperbole is intended to jolt the hearer from the project of making his life something continuous. But whereas humor or detachment would remove us from reality entirely, hyperbole leads us back to the heart of existence. The challenge to the conventional wisdom is at the same time a way of life. We are disoriented before we become reoriented.

2:10:57 Mark: So next time I say to one of the members of my family, like, gosh, you're spending an hour in the bathroom. Why are you spending an hour? And they're like, why are you being such an asshole?

2:11:06 Seth: I'm just.

2:11:07 Mark: Hyperbole leads to the heart of existence.

2:11:17 Dylan: That's not gonna work. I wouldn't do.

2:11:19 Wes: You're gonna use hyperbole wisely.

2:11:21 Dylan: You gotta be divine in order to pull that off.

2:11:23 Mark: Dude, I tried bringing my lamp oil to the bathroom door, but it ran out. Still, they said, I don't know you. I mean, it was a stranger's bathroom door, certainly, but still, I thought since I had the lamp oil, it would be okay.

2:11:38 Dylan: You're doing that whole recurring where you're reading all of the parables. It's one. That's clearly what you're up to here.

2:11:43 Wes: You're basically a bad Christian.

2:11:45 Mark: Probably there'll be some gnashing of teeth tonight.

2:11:48 Wes: The outer darkness, which just means outside the bathroom. So the other thing he sort of closes with is to listen to the parables of Jesus, it seems to me, is to let one's imagination be open to the new possibilities disclosed by the extravagance of these short dramas. If we look at the parables as at a word addressed first to our imagination rather than to our will, will, we shall not be tempted to reduce them to mere didactic devices, to moralizing allegories. We shall let their poetic power display itself within us.

2:12:20 Mark: You know, that's a great way to wrap up this discussion, is to bring it back to our Ricoeur discussion that he's. This is presented in the same collection as the two Ricoeur essays that we covered last time. If you got through the language of faith, the second essay that we had for last time and thought you actually, actually were clear about how you're supposed to read the Bible, then you're an amazing person. Because I needed this additional. Even this short article to give me even the faintest clue of how really we should Be reading the Bible.

So what do you think? Have your questions been answered about recurs hermeneutical method by looking at this exemplar of how at least he put it in the other section, that texts like this symbolic language in general are important for our humanity because they enlarge the sense of human possibility. I could picture a more straightforwardly religious person than Ricoeur probably was saying, well, science tells us so much, but it doesn't tell us, for instance, what really happens to us after death. And can't we just have hope that we do live on and we will see grandma and everybody up in heaven and that kind of stuff?

2:13:31 Dylan: Stuff.

2:13:32 Mark: So in that sense, yes, our imagination flows around the tree.

2:13:37 Wes: Grandma made it to heaven, sorry, racist that she was. Yes, that's the flip side of that. But anyway, go ahead.

2:13:46 Mark: So, so Ricoeur, his statement to that effect about human possibility brings to mind a lot of very familiar things from religion like that that I think a good case could actually be made for those points like you don't know that there's no God, you don't know that there's no heaven, you don't know any of this stuff. So Ricoeur was very straightforwardly pointing out that we are a mystery. Science treats us as if we know what we are. Oh, we're just chemicals and blah blah, blah. But the fact is we don't know any of that. So this unleashing of the imagination could just mean that a God of the gaps can enter into. Do you think that's what Ricoeur includes, those kind of possibilities in his account here? Or is he saying something straight up more symbolic and mean something completely different than those things by the possibility of man, of humanity?

2:14:32 Wes: I don't know. I don't know if we have enough

2:14:37 Mark: data.

2:14:38 Dylan: I'm gonna say probably more along the lines of symbolism. Probably.

2:14:43 Mark: So how does symbolism make us reflect on human potential in possibility in some other way?

2:14:49 Dylan: Because symbolic stories, parables, things like this, they illuminate something to us about human nature, even though they are not factual events. Right. I don't think anyone will say that these parables are factual events. Very few people will say that. But they do illuminate something about human nature. I've seen people get teary eyed when they hear the parable of the prodigal son. I've seen people get emotional when they hear the parable about the lost sheep or about any number of these things. And I've seen people get deeply angered and full of righteous indignation when they listen to a preacher illuminate a social justice reading of the story of the Good Samaritan.

And so these symbolic gestures, these symbolic stories, they say something to us that communicate truths that are existentially deep within us and require of us to wrestle with our own human, wrestle with injustice, wrestle with our finitude and our lack of coming to the fullness of our essential natures, to use Tillichian language, actualizing our fullest potentialities. And so I think that symbols do that and that these parables do that for us as well. And so I think that he would argue along those lines more so than he would in any other direction.

2:16:14 Mark: I do cry when I hear about the fatted cat calf. It sounds so delicious.

2:16:18 Dylan: I cry because I might be that fatted calf. Because in my reading of it, the white people are the father and the master with all the money, and the poor people are the fatted calves that are served up on a capitalistic plate. Damn you, capitalism.

2:16:37 Mark: That's good. All right, next time we're going to read some of Arthur Schopenhauer's the World as a Will and Representation,

2:16:46 Dylan: part of

2:16:47 Mark: book two on the world as will. Check out partiallyexaminedlife.com for the exact page numbers and such. Everybody should go and discuss this with us on our blog, partiallyexaminedlife.com or our Facebook group, facebookgroupie.com no, I don't. Whatever it's called, just look it up and follow us on Twitter. And we have a LinkedIn group I'm sure that's very active. I've never looked at that, but I'm sure it's on. Awesome. The after show for this episode with Stephen west is going to be on Sunday, April 19th at 5:30pm Eastern Time. Go sign up for Not School and join the group corresponding to that meeting to signal that you'll be there.

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2:19:02 Dylan: and gnashing of teeth.

2:19:03 Mark: Gnashing of something I don't. You can gnash whatever you like. Thank you again, Law.

2:19:10 Wes: Thanks, Law.

2:19:11 Mark: This is great.

2:19:12 Wes: It was fun.

2:19:12 Dylan: I enjoyed it.

2:19:13 Mark: By the way.

2:19:14 Wes: Yeah, you got a lot of positive comments. The post with the last podcast on it. People were singing your praises.

2:19:20 Dylan: Oh, were they really? I didn't get a chance to look at it.

2:19:22 Mark: Give that man a fatted calf. I think one of them said, get

2:19:24 Wes: the hell out of here.

2:19:29 Mark: Okay, good night.

2:19:30 Wes: Good night, Pete.

2:19:31 Dylan: Peace out.

2:19:51 Mark: Jesus needs a dressing down Sacrificing stuff around but he cannot make a single sound for you. Jesus made a big mistake Promises too huge to fake he couldn't get the earth to shake for you. Everybody's getting down all over this holy

2:20:31 Wes: town

2:20:33 Mark: I get weary of the sound I do. Glory in the highest way let's how they pray I got good at blocking it out in my younger days. Jesus left a mustard seed Grew into an ugly tree Multiplying forth to feed on you. Final days that came and went

2:21:37 Dylan: Barely

2:21:37 Mark: even made a day Only what you might invent is true. Glory in a high pitched way that wafts away I got good at blocking it out in my stronger days

2:22:04 Seth: it.

2:23:32 Mark: Glory in the highest Fail to come our way I got good at blocking it out in my clearer days. Hark the herald angels singing as they fall and what the hey. May we all grow out of this now here in better days, wiser days.

2:24:12 Wes: Sam.