Mtr Mary Trainor
They came to a bend in the road...
Dear friend,
Hearing a great story is of value for most of us. It helps us communicate family history, it entertains, and sometimes it facilitates understanding of something otherwise too complicated or too alien to grasp straight-on. It’s valuable and age-old method of teaching, for we know Jesus uses parables as a way to help us learn something we don’t know or can’t comprehend any other way
In today’s Gospel from Matthew, Jesus uses “story” to illustrate the idea of forgiveness, after a disciple asks him to quantify God’s requirements. Do we forgive seven times? While Jesus offers a number that essentially translates to “forgive endlessly,” he continues with a story that perhaps more clearly drives that point home.
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My father told Jim and me great stories. Maybe you had a parent like that, too. Whereas my mother would read stories to my brother and me, Daddy made them up from whole cloth. We especially enjoyed his “bend in the road” accounts. Some he repeated, but often as not we would get a new one just for the asking.
These were formulaic, and that is why we enjoyed them. Someone, perhaps a young family, would be walking a pathway as night approached. They were far from anything familiar, and panic was starting to build Just when full darkness was at hand, and no rescue seemed possible, they came to a bend in the road. What happened around the bend was always a new, sometimes fantastical, reality, but always some form of salvation: a kind family took them in for the night, a talking animal led them to rescue, an old woman served them food and regaled them with stories about people getting lost in the woods.
These stories provided my brother and me with a hope born in mystery. When will our wanderers come to the bend in the road, and by what amazing means will they find safety?
Little kids can get scared in the dark--big kids, too. And bad things happen for real some times, so making light of danger can prove unwise. But to live constantly in fear was not healthy nor necessary for my young self. So I had a father who found a way through story to show us that even when things seem hopeless, to expect a “bend in the road” that can lead to a different and better outcome. Even when that doesn’t seem at all possible.
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Jesus’ stories can alarm us, strike fear in us, call us to look at the world or a situation differently. They can turn “logic” upside down, defy what the world teaches, replacing it with a view of how the kingdom operates.
Just when the pathway to heaven seems overshadowed, Jesus serves up a bend in the road--a bend beyond which life is different, better, sweeter, kinder.
Mtr Mary