Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

It’s hard to get out of accustomed, familiar or comfortable modes of thinking—they’re not comfortable for nothing! But often, the accustomed modes of thinking are ill equipped to help us think through or out of the various boxes into which we tend to think ourselves or others.

One of the places where familiar thinking proves difficult, if not downright obstructive, is when Jesus is telling us a parable. And one of the modes of thinking that very frequently gets in the way is our tendency to analogize things. Now, analogizing is an important way of approaching scripture, particularly when we come to the rather more mystical interpretations of scripture in which folks like Meister Eckhart or Origen or Bernard or Catherine of Siena (and many many more!) regularly traffic. But very often our tendency, when we analogize, is to analogize up—we have fathers and father-figures in our lives; we call God “Father”; whatever our fathers and father figures are by virtue of their fatherhood should be able to tell us something about God being the Father. Or: kings are a thing; we call Jesus King; our notions of kingship should be able to tell us something about Jesus’ Kingship.

Here’s the trouble, though: analogizing up can only take us so far, and it may actually wind up taking us deep into the weeds if we don’t balance the up with the down! Take Jesus’ kingship. A Lutheran theologian and pastor, Paul Nuechterlein, writes “The King is not Jesus—Jesus is the King!” The idea here is that Jesus is the origin of the pattern of sovereignty that we call Kingship and in which all other models of earthly sovereignty defectively participate. To analogize up in this instance will likely see us divinizing (and excusing or tolerating) flawed and imperfect human rulers and patterns of rule; to analogize down, though, will help us to more clearly see those flaws—how those rulers and patterns don’t match up with their proper Pattern—and work either to heal them or dismantle flawed human power structures…conscious, all the while, that whatever alternative structures we put in place will still remain deficient because they’ll only ever be human at best. Same with the Fatherhood of God: patriarchy is neither godly nor holy, but analogizing up has allowed some of us (over the millennia!) to fund patriarchy’s power by effectively divinizing it, while analogizing down might provide us with theological tools by which to critique and demolish patriarchy and poisonous notions of masculinity generally, all the while giving us ways to challenge or subvert our desire to definitively gender God in the first place. (And we can do the same with the Motherhood of God as well!)

So when Jesus tell us a parable of a wealthy nobleman seeking ever-greater power and telling his fearful servants to invest his wealth (as he does in today’s Gospel reading), we might imagine (by analogizing up), that the nobleman is Jesus who is telling us something about how we might find reward in his kingdom. And we’d miss some clues in the story (the abject fear that runs through it, for instance) that really do suggest that Jesus isn’t describing himself or the Father—he’s describing a tyrant, which does not, in fact, correspond with any Person of the Godhead whatsoever! Nuechterlein suggests, in fact, that Jesus is telling this story by way of contrast—this is how human rulership works, and as Jesus is approaching Jerusalem to be acclaimed the Anointed One, the Messiah, by many, he’s subtly asking the crowd with which he’s traveling: “Would you like God’s rulership to work the same way, just in a more terrifyingly holy register? Would you have me be that sort of ruler? Is this what you have planned for my kingdom? Why?”

Seen in this way, the parable becomes a challenge to us: what would it be like to seek justice, and not power or reward? What would it be like to commit all we have and are to God’s in-breaking Reign of Love rather than find ourselves drained by the reigns of petty tyrants and terror-mongers to which we may habitually or grudgingly or exhaustedly find ourselves submitting (consciously or not) in so many areas of our lives? What would it be like to let go of accustomed ways of thinking, being, doing, engaging and be given a New Imagination by Love itself?

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+