Motions of Grace

Intersections of scripture and life

Category: Scripture

Burying the talent (Mt 25:14-30)

February 9, 2020 / / 0 Comments
parable of the talents

Woodcut illustration of the parable of the talents (1712)

I have to confess, Jesus’ parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30; for the extended cut see Lk 19:11-27) was one of my least favorite passages of scripture for a long time. The point seemed straightforward enough: if you waste your God-given potential, then bad things are going to happen to you. 

That certainly didn’t feel like “good news.” The story came across as divine sanction of the ever-present cultural message to do more and be better, like a religious version of a Nike commercial. To continue the financial metaphor that gives the parable its shape, God is expecting a good return on his investment, so you had better produce. But sometimes our lives are a bear market, if not an outright depression – and, in any case, how do we know when we’re producing enough? The two good servants in the parable each posted 100% returns, after all, which is a tall order even in the best of times. 

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House, creation and eternity

February 12, 2019 / / 0 Comments

“One of the things that held me back from Supernaturalism was a deep repugnance to the view of Nature which, as I thought, Supernaturalism entailed. I passionately desired that Nature should exist ‘on her own’… the thought that she had been manufactured or ‘put there’, and put there with a purpose, was suffocating…

To find that all the woods, and small streams in the middle of the woods, and odd corners of mountain valleys, and the wind and the grass were only a sort of scenery, only backcloths for some kind of play, and that play perhaps one with a moral – what flatness, what an anti-climax, what an unendurable bore!”

– C.S. Lewis, Miracles

There’s an early episode of House, MD in which the good doctor describes a personal near-death experience. Although he generally makes something of a hobby out of ridiculing religious belief, in this case House doesn’t immediately dismiss a colleague’s suggestion that he had made contact with eternity. There’s no way to know, he admits. Nonetheless, he chooses (his word) to believe that what he experienced was nothing more than the last chemical reactions of a brain closing shop, because “I find it more comforting to believe that this [life] isn’t simply a test.”

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La Sagrada Familia and loving our neighbors

December 21, 2018 / / 1 Comment

La Sagrada Familia, by Kelly Latimore

This icon appeared on my Facebook feed a few days ago. It’s viscerally powerful and I’ve been thinking about it quite a bit since I first saw it. Ms. Latimore’s implicit message is that how we regard Central American refugees is how we regard Christ, who himself fled to a foreign country to escape violence (Matthew 2:13-15).

I later found this icon illustrating a post written by a Christian blogger who insisted that God wants our country to adopt essentially an open-border policy. But surely it’s not that simple, even if we accept the icon’s underlying message.

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Misusing the Bible

July 4, 2018 / / 1 Comment

It is those who would make a good showing in the flesh who would force you to be circumcised, and only in order that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. – Galatians 6:12

Paul’s opponents in Galatia have since become known as the “judaizers.” They apparently held that since Jesus was the Jewish messiah, gentiles had to convert to Judaism and, more specifically, undergo circumcision in order to receive the salvation offered by Jesus.

Their position doesn’t seem outlandish. At the time it was far from clear what (if any) break the followers of Jesus had made or would make from Judaism. No one in this new movement doubted for a moment that the Hebrew Bible was authoritative.The apostles Peter and John continued to pray in the temple, as faithful Jews, even after Jesus’ resurrection (Acts 3:1). And Jesus himself had declared that he had come “only for the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (Matt 15:24). The judaizers may have been wrong, then, but surely they were honestly wrong?

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Embracing truth

June 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

“I am … the truth” (John 14:6)

Our president, as everyone knows, generously applies the term “FAKE NEWS” to stories and even entire news outlets. In a tweet last month, he helpfully defined “fake news” to mean not “reporting that is factually incorrect,” but rather “reporting that is negative” towards his presidency.

I actually appreciate this. Everyone tends to discount or disregard unfavorable truths, but not very many people have the candor to admit that this is in fact what they’re doing. The president understands that the categories “I don’t like this” and “This is false” are distinct but difficult to keep distinct. Our minds constantly transmute the former into the latter.

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Be not overly righteous

May 17, 2018 / / 0 Comments

There is a rabbinic tradition that Saul protested when God instructed him to exterminate the Amalekites (the biblical account is found in 1 Samuel 15). First, the king pointed out, Torah requires a purification rite in the case of even one murder; one can only imagine what it would say about a genocide. Moreover, the king continued, for what purpose were the women and children, and the animals for that matter, supposed to die? A response came in the form of a voice from heaven: “Be not overly righteous.”

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On Christian moral unimpressiveness

April 11, 2018 / / 0 Comments

George Orwell, 1943

In a fascinating essay published in 1937, George Orwell lamented that the British socialist movement shared a problem with Christianity: its adherents made the doctrine unattractive to the general public. On Orwell’s telling, middle-class British socialists glorified the working class while loathing actual working class people. They pontificated on the necessity of smashing the bourgeoisie while clinging, almost desperately, to bourgeois values over and against the uncouth masses they were theoretically trying to liberate. Worse still, British socialism attracted all kinds of cranks (Orwell mentions pacifists, vegetarians, and men with beards) who made socialism an object of derision to mainstream society.

Orwell thought this supremely tragic, since in his view socialism was the only real option to lift millions of British people out of poverty and despair (in 1937 the end of the Great Depression was nowhere in sight). But he emphasizes, I think rightly, that there is no logical connection between the propositions “Socialists are mostly snobs and weirdos” and “Socialism is a failed economic system.” Socialism is the kind of thing that can be valid even if most of its adherents are not particularly appealing people.

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The Word became flesh

December 9, 2017 / / 0 Comments

“The Annunciation” by Fra Angelico (painted between 1437 – 46).

In 1842, Charles Dickens spent the night at the Mermaid House Hotel in Lebanon, Illinois, on his way back from Saint Louis. According to legend, it was while staying in the Mermaid House that he received inspiration for A Christmas Carol. This is almost certainly untrue, but Dickens did mention the inn favorably in his travel journal, one of the very few positive comments he was to make about anything he found in the United States.

One hundred and seventy five years later, Lebanon celebrates an annual Dickens festival as well as a Victorian-themed Christmas celebration in honor of that greatest of the Victorian writers. You can also buy a t-shirt imprinted with the likeness of the author and the phrase, “What the Dickens?”, a phrase I happen to use quite a bit for some inexplicable reason.*

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