Parabolic slider.

 Parabolic slider. 

The problem with writers: This is what they do - they look for connections that aren’t really there, or the words move them to see links that aren’t, so the writers . . . well, they lie.

For example, this last Friday’s post: Kaylee does smell of fennel and ginger, but she doesn’t look that much like Ginger Rogers - really anything like Ginger Rogers. Jesus did walk nearly everywhere; but I’m not thinking that as I leave the house for Corner Coffee; it only occurs to me when Axel begins to wax atrabilious about Jesus’ sayings, particularly the parable that Farah See wrote about in her commentary on The Gospel of Thomas etc.

The parables weren’t writing, but they got written down. Which means they fell into the hands of writers, who began to make connections that weren’t really there, who began to elaborate them, surround them with context, smother them in associations. And the original writers handed them on to more writers, to interpreters - the gospeleers to exegetes, the exegetes to theologians, and the theologians to preachers, all of whom, because they were looking for them, found connections that weren’t there. For parables themselves don’t try to connect anything; they show instead how wondrously disconnected things are.

Ginger (r) and Kaylee

     Axel asked me how I’d preach the elegantly simple, “The kingdom of heaven is like this: When his guest was delayed, the host waited for him.” I said I wouldn’t preach it, because what would I end up doing but what preachers always end up doing, drawing a layered lesson from a beautifully naked puzzle? “Our obsession with time - and timeliness, with punctuality - makes us nothing like the Kingdom of God in the parable. Of course, we live in different times, in far, far different circumstances from those who first heard it, and these we have to take into account. Nevertheless!” And slowly, painfully I’d make my way to “the point,” the purport of which would be to obscure that the point of any parable is that there is none.

“Wait a minute,” Axel is saying. “Doesn’t every parable say something like - at least it implies this: ‘The kingdom of God is like’?”

     Maybe so. But what does it mean to say, for example, “A camel is like a comet out of gas”?

The problem with people: Here’s what we do - we look for connections that aren’t really there; then, we find them. Then, we begin lying about how the connections came about - that they were a product of our looking for them. We pretend instead they were there all along: We didn’t find them, they found us. Next, we begin believing our lies. Soon enough, the lies become true. And the connections that were never there become the way things are.

12.09.18