The Logos plays
A trooper pulls over a priest and immediately smells alcohol on his breath. The next thing he notices is an empty wine bottle lying on the passenger seat.
“Have you been drinking?” the officer asks.
“Just water,” says the priest.
“Then why do I smell wine?”
The priest looks at the bottle and shouts, “Good Lord! He’s done it again!”
We all love a good joke. Humor is the spice of life and adds years to our life spans. Did Jesus have a sense of humor? How could he not? He was Jewish, for goodness sake! And humor is one of the many things that Jews are good at. How can you read the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus and not smile or laugh? Short Zacchaeus wants to see Jesus and he climbs up a tree to get a good look as Jesus passes by. And Jesus calls him to come down because he just invited himself to dinner at Zacch’s home! Or when Jesus changed 150 gallons of water into wine so the party could go on longer and people could get really drunk! (And that miracle is of course the inspiration for the priest’s answer to the trooper.) I wonder what Baptists and grape-juice drinking evangelicals say about that. Some of the parables of Jesus are LOL funny. I mean really, did you think he meant the parable of the shrewd manager seriously? Do you know that one? It’s in Luke 16:
Jesus told his disciples: “There was a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, ‘What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.’
“The manager said to himself, ‘What shall I do now? My master is taking away my job. I’m not strong enough to dig, and I’m ashamed to beg—I know what I’ll do so that, when I lose my job here, people will welcome me into their houses.’
“So he called in each one of his master’s debtors. He asked the first, ‘How much do you owe my master?’
“‘Nine hundred gallons of olive oil,’ he replied.
“The manager told him, ‘Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it four hundred and fifty.’
“Then he asked the second, ‘And how much do you owe?’
“‘A thousand bushels of wheat,’ he replied.
“He told him, ‘Take your bill and make it eight hundred.’
“The master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly.
And there’s the persistent widow in Luke 18:
Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up. He said: “In a certain town there was a judge who neither feared God nor cared what people thought. And there was a widow in that town who kept coming to him with the plea, ‘Grant me justice against my adversary.’
“For some time he refused. But finally he said to himself, ‘Even though I don’t fear God or care what people think, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will see that she gets justice, so that she won’t eventually come and attack me!’”
No wonder those serious monks who chose our Sunday readings left readings like these out. After all, they’re not serious or threatening enough. So what do we do with today’s Parable of the Rich Fool from Luke 12? I never thought of it as comical until I came upon this quote from St. Gregory the Theologian:
Παίζει γαρ λόγος αιπύς εν είδεσι παντοδαποίσι,
Gregory of Nazianzus, Dogmatic Poem 1.2.2, translated by Paul Blowers in the book Re-Reading Gregory of Nazianzus, published by Catholic University Press of America, 2012
Κίρνας, ως εθέλει, κόσμον εόν ένθα και ένθα
For the Logos on high plays in all sorts of forms,
mingling with his world here and there as he so desires.
Jesus Christ, the Logos, Παίζει! He plays, mixing it up – mingling – with our world and our ways. I’m sure Jesus met many dishonest people like the dishonest manager when he lived among regular human beings 2,000 years ago. And he met many persistent people like the widow who badgered and bothered until they got what they wanted or needed. And he encountered or heard of many rich farmers and businessmen who kept the rewards of their labor for themselves, like the farmer today or the rich man two weeks ago. Did he always judge these people? Even that parable of the rich man and Lazarus two weeks ago has humorous elements to it. Is it as threatening as it appears?
I just love forming images in my mind of what Saint Gregory wrote. The Logos – the Word of God who became incarnate as Jesus Christ – that Logos, the eternal Word of God, true God of true God, plays! Do you remember the movie Big where Tom Hanks plays with his feet on a large size keyboard in a toy store? That’s how I like to imagine the Logos playing in the world that he created, and telling stories to show how ridiculous we human beings can be. There are evil people in the world – but they’re not many. I think most of us are just ridiculous, foolish. And so when I read these parables I say to myself, here the Logos is having a good laugh with us. And I can’t imagine God sending to hell a man who decided he made enough money and just wanted to take it easy. And of course the parable says nothing about hell or judgment – only that he was foolish, piling up wealth that would not go with him when his soul would be required of him; in other words, when he would die.
So, dear friends, laugh with Jesus once in a while; but trust him to show you the way to meaningful life. Let me conclude with another poetic excerpt by St. Gregory the Theologian:
But as for me, I know this much: God governs all these things,
Gregory of Nazianzus, Poem 1.1.5, On Providence, translated by Peter Gilbert, Saint Vladimir’s Seminary Press
the Word of God directing, this way and that, everything, above or
below, that he’s set up by his thoughts: above, he gave
harmony and motion and ever-enduring constancy;
here, life, changeable and bearing many forms;
some of which things he’s shown to us, others, again,
he stores in the layaways of his wisdom,
in his will to thwart man’s hollow boast.
And some things he’s placed right here, others in the final days
shall meet us. A farmer clips off all his fruits in season:
in the same way, Christ is my life’s most expert judge.