Spirituality Column #454
July 28, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

“You do not realize now what I am doing …” Jesus, quoted in John 13:7

Jesus continually spoke in parables to tell mankind Who God is, what God does, and what the Kingdom of God is like.

If there is a common mistake Christians make interpreting the parables, it’s seeing them as instructions for worship, lessons for human life or teachings in earthly morality.  Those are all important things that cling peripherally to the parables’ divinely identifiable meanings, but what Jesus is relaying in His parables is much bigger than day-to-day human experience and “Christian” behavior.

The parables, if we have ears to hear and eyes to see, teach us about the unprecedented event of God joining the human midst in the person of Jesus Christ.  The parables aren’t God telling us what to do; they are God telling us who He is, God telling us what He is doing, and God revealing His truth as He sees it, not as we want it.

The human snag is that we seek too hard after advice in the Bible.  We crave follow-able instructions.  We want an easily discernable “To Do” list; it would make things so easy, ala, “Do this, do that, be saved.  Rinse and repeat.”  Instead what we encounter in scripture is the seemingly impossible task of coming to divinely-ordained grips with the glory of God through the person of Jesus in the biggest event in the history of humanity.  Often those “grips” are encased in frustrating parables that don’t make a clear point about what, exactly, we are supposed to do.

That’s because, again, the parables are largely about God, and less so about us.

But because we tend to think all things are about us, so we see the parables as an instruction sheet: tell “me” what to do so I can be in compliance with “your” will.  That’s actually not a bad summary of the old covenant of the Old Testament, e.g.: “Here is the Law; obey it, have faith, and be righteous.”  Notice though that there’s nothing, really, about what comes next; nothing about God’s “end game.”

Note also our focus: “my” obedience, “my” faith,” and “my” righteousness.  It’s all about “me.”

By contrast, the event of Jesus on Earth – His life, teaching, death and resurrection – describes God’s direction, purpose, and end game.  In Jesus is the news of how God is going to solve the unholy mess mankind – with Satan’s chortling help – made of God’s perfect Creation.

Jesus Himself is the news of God’s love, glory and permanence.  Sometimes we don’t see that.

Open up the Bible and read all about it.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) cites Matthew 6:33, “Seek first the Kingdom of God.”

Spirituality Column #453
July 21, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville-Geist

By Bob Walters

"This man welcomes sinners …” – Luke 15:1

So said the Jewish leaders about Jesus in the Gospel of Luke, and it was not a compliment.

Tax collectors and “sinners” – “prostitutes” is the text’s meaning in ancient Hebrew – gathered to hear Jesus.  The Pharisees are incredulous that Jesus associates with these awful people.  But these “awful people” are exactly who Jesus came to save.

And what is the point, even 2,000 years later?  Brace yourself.  That we – all of us – are these “awful people.”

But that’s not what Jesus tells them, or tells us.  Not exactly.  What Jesus told these particular sinners were three parables about lost things that their shepherd, owner and father, respectively, desperately wanted to find.  The “Lost” parables are Jesus describing His mission on Earth in search of the “sinners” – the lost lambs, coins and sons, the things of value to His Father, God.

It’s interesting that Jesus never called anyone a “sinner,” not to their face, anyway.  Jesus frequently refers to sinners, says He’s here to save sinners and will be delivered into the hands of sinners.  It’s pretty easy to read the Bible and pick out who the sinners are.  I think that is because most of us, I’m sorry to say, can relate.

Jesus encounters sinners and simply says, “Follow me.” In the case of the Pharisees and others who refused to see His mission as the divinely predicted Messiah Christ, Savior of the world sent by the Creator of the world, Jesus wrapped His message in parables.  Only those with “ears to hear” could understand.

Interestingly, the “Lost” parables appear exclusively in the Gospel of Luke, which deconstructs the Jewish view of whom God is pursuing: “not the righteous, but the sinners” (Luke 5:32).  Luke after all was Greek, the only non-Jew among the Gospel writers or Apostles.  His writings emphasize that Jesus came for the gentiles, too.

Jesus describes the “one Lost Sheep of a hundred” (Luke 15:4-7) that is sought by its shepherd.  The sheep doesn’t understand repentance or salvation; it only knows its own fear and separation.  The woman rejoices over finding the Lost Coin (verses 8-10), but consider: the coin does not know it is lost.  The Prodigal Son (verses 11-31) willfully strays in profound, intentional sin, yet is welcomed back home lovingly,  triumphantly by his father, (“…alive again; he was lost but is found.” Verse 31)

In attempting to share the loving, saving message of Christ, too often Christians focus on the sin of the sinner rather than the love, glory and joy of the Father.

Jesus does it the other way around.  Something to think about.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) never understood he was lost, until he was found.

Spirituality Column #452
July 14, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Saint Peter, the excitable, knife-wielding, in-your-face apostle, was the first disciple to proclaim Jesus as the Messiah Christ, Son of the living God (Matthew 16:18).

Elsewhere Peter often missed not only the point but also the magnitude of what Jesus was teaching, but he wasn’t afraid to quiz the Lord for clarification.

A good example is Matthew 18:21-35, the Parable of the Unmerciful Servant.  After Jesus teaches about “church discipline” in verses 15-19, Peter asks Jesus, “How many times shall I forgive my brother? Up to seven times?”

Jesus tells him “Not seven, but seventy times seven,” and follows with the parable about a servant who, after pleading for mercy, is forgiven a staggeringly large debt by his master.  That servant then turns around and duns a fellow servant – who also begs for mercy but is sent to jail – over a comparatively small debt.

On the one hand, it’s the simple lesson that “God has forgiven us generously so we must forgive each other generously.”  On the other, as with most parables, there is much more going on.

Discussing this parable in a Bible study recently, we looked at the value of a biblical “denarius” (a day’s wage) and a “talent” (6,000 days wages).  After being forgiven a debt of 10,000 talents by the master, the first servant incarcerates the second mercy-pleading servant over a matter of 100 denarii.  In today’s money, that’s a man forgiven $2.5 billion not forgiving a neighbor of $10,000.

The question that popped into my mind was, “How could a mere servant run up a $2.5 billion debt?”  Well, he can’t, and that’s an often-missed point of this lesson.  The parable’s context is sin, grace and forgiveness.  It’s useless to think of our sin in terms of “debt” because it is too big to “pay” back to God.  Nor should we demand it of others.

Jesus’s point very clearly is not money but magnitude.  Our sin “debt” is cosmically big because our sin is cosmically big.  God’s forgiveness is cosmically big because his love, grace, mercy and glory are cosmically big.

Our sins are too big a blot on God’s glory to be simply “paid back.”  Jesus came into humanity with God’s plan of love, servanthood and forgiveness in order that mankind, created in God’s image, could live eternally, joyously, in God’s Kingdom.

“Forgive us our debts”? Sure.  Why? Because that is …




Payback isn’t an option.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) needs more forgiveness that just “seventy times seven.”

Spirituality Column #451
July 7, 2015
Current in Carmel-Westfield-Noblesville-Fishers-Zionsville

By Bob Walters

Americans celebrated our “endowed by our Creator” personal freedom and national independence this weekend with the Fourth of July.

Our American life is so abundant, so filled up, so replete with opportunity, so tolerant, so limitless in its horizon, and so rich in its history and accomplishment.  As nations of the world go – you can gripe about America if you want to, but take a quick, prayerful look at the Middle East, equatorial Africa, and large swaths of Asia – we have been especially, wonderfully, divinely endowed with a way of life where, from the standpoint of human aspiration, there’s not much missing.

America’s founding uniquely expressed the towering yet conflicting images of man as presented not only by the Bible and Jesus Christ, but also by the Enlightenment  and its human-focused, God-as-an-adjunct, unblinking secular vagaries and man-made morality.