33d Week of Ordinary
Time
Nov.
22, 2017Luke 19: 11-28
Day of Recollection, Washington Community[1]
“He
proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that
the kingdom of God would appear there immediately” (Luke 19: 11).
The parable is actually a double parable. Luke places it in Jericho immediately after the
episode with Zacchaeus. On the surface,
then, it might seem to teach about the proper use of wealth, which Zacchaeus
has to some degree just demonstrated.
But, as the Zacchaeus episode isn’t really about
money, but about repentance and divine mercy, neither is the parable about
money.
Luke sets
the double parable in a context that tells us it’s about the kingdom of
God. Indeed, the secondary parable that
frames the primary one deals with a king and his subjects. Luke introduces the parable with an interpretation. Jesus told it because he was on his way to
Jerusalem, and people—not the disciples specifically, but according to Luke
(19:1-11) the larger audience gathered around Jesus and Zacchaeus—“they”
expected that in Jerusalem he would claim the throne of David. The blind beggar had just acclaimed him as
“Jesus, Son of David” as he approached Jericho (18:35,38). It’s many of these same people, presumably,
who will herald his arrival in the holy city by hailing him as “the king who
comes in the name of the Lord” (19:38) in the passage that follows the parable.
We know that
Jesus’ parables are based on the everyday life of farmers, shepherds, merchants,
women, laborers, and travelers. William
Barclay observes that the secondary parable about kingship is the only parable based
on a historical event. In 4 BC Archelaus,
son of Herod the Great, traveled to Rome to petition Augustus to confirm him as
king of Judea. He was trailed by a
deputation of Jewish leaders petitioning the contrary. Augustus did confirm Archelaus, but only as
tetrarch—you remember that St. Matthew tells us that Joseph settled the Holy
Family in Nazareth when he heard that Archelaus was ruling Judea (2:22). Archelaus may not have slain the Jewish
deputation—“hacked them to pieces,” in Barclay’s translation of Luke 19:28—but
he did prove to be a bloody and corrupt ruler, and Augustus removed him after
10 years, installing a Roman procurator instead. We don’t doubt that this back story would’ve
been in the minds of Jesus’ audience.
Luke
presents to us another king departing on a journey in pursuit of a
kingdom. Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem,
where he will undergo his exodus (9:31), as Luke terms his passion, death, and resurrection
in the transfiguration story, is the prelude to another journey that will take
him away from his subjects for a very long time, viz., his ascension, where at
the Father’s right hand he’ll be given kingly power. And, as the angels tell the gawking apostles
when he ascends, he’ll return just as they’ve seen him ascend (Acts 1:11). In the meantime, they are to preach the Good
New everywhere (Acts 1:8), giving to men and women the choice whether to accept
him as their king.
The primary parable promises big rewards to faithful
subjects, while the kingship parable tells the fate of whoever rejects Jesus as
king. Luke may also have in mind the
fate of Jerusalem in 70 AD after the Jewish leaders and most of the people
rejected Jesus; later in this same chapter, he will, uniquely, show us Jesus
weeping over the city for its not “recognizing the day of [their] visitation”
(19:41-44).
But of course Luke is speaking to generations of
Christians. Those who reject the
lordship of Jesus are doomed when he returns.
It’s fitting for us to ponder his message on our DOR. Every day we renew our commitment to our
religious consecration. More fundamentally,
we ought to be renewing our commitment to Jesus
every day: Jesus as Lord, Jesus as Dominus—a title the Caesars claimed as
their own, and so an imperial title as well as divine. We ask ourselves on a DOR, does Jesus rule my
life? my words, my desires, my decisions, my actions? To the extent that he is not our Dominus, to the extent that we have
rebelled in some way, looking to ourselves rather than to the Lord, we renew
our commitment on days like this, and in sacramental Reconciliation and in
daily personal prayer.
The core parable of the servants who are entrusted
with money to trade with closely resembles the parable of the talents in
Matthew. Here the sums of money are much
smaller; the coins are Greek minas, each worth 100 drachmas or 100
denarii. (A talent was worth 6,000
denarii.) But, as I said, it’s not about
the money as such. It’s about the trade
or the investment, as it also is in Matthew’s version.
 |
| Servants rendering their accounts (Rembrandt) |
You may have heard of the Benedict option—the
title of a book and of a contemporary movement in the Church. It takes its name not from Pope Benedict but
from St. Benedict, who withdrew from a decadent Roman society to found a pure
Christian community. One observer
defines today’s movement as “the idea of traditionalist
Christians choosing to step back from the now-futile political projects and
ambitions of the past four decades to cultivate and preserve a robustly
Christian subculture within an increasingly hostile common culture. That inward
turn toward community-building is the element of monasticism in the project.
But its participants won't be monks. They will be families, parishes, and churches
working to protect themselves from the acids of modernity, skepticism, and
freedom (understood as personal autonomy), as well as from the expansive
regulatory power of the secular state.”[2]
I don’t detect much of a missionary thrust there,
much of a sense of spreading the Good News.
It seems to me to be more like hiding the Good News in a napkin so that
it will be purely but privately preserved, not tainted by the business of dealing
with the real world. Not exactly what
Pope Francis has been charging the Church with:
to go out to the peripheries, to live among and smell like the sheep, to
man the field hospitals. And I think
that’s what Jesus is telling us in the parable.
“Me and my Jesus” faith is seriously deficient. Before he ascended, Jesus commissioned the disciples
to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8).
As Salesians we know this, and we take it to
heart. We’re working hard to invest what
the Lord Jesus has entrusted to us, hoping to hand over to him a great revenue
in souls. The DOR is a refreshing
reminder not only of who our King is, but of what he wishes us to do with the
vocation that he’s given us—and of the reward, too, that awaits the “good and
faithful servants.”
[2]
Damon Linker, “The Benedict Option: Why the religious right is considering an
all-out withdrawal from politics,” The Week,
May 19, 2015. Online: http://theweek.com/articles/555734/benedict-option-
why-religious-right-considering-allout-withdrawal-from-politics
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