Why Did He Say That?

Why Did He Say That?

Reflections on Some Wrong Statements by Jesus

Jesus taught primarily through parables. Most of us familiar with the Gospels of the New Testament, or at least with the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) know that. Some of the most famous and best loved passages from those Gospels are parables—the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, and others. Sometimes Jesus’ parables can drive us a bit nuts. Sometimes we want to shout “Just give it to us straight, will you?” Well, no, for the most part he won’t. Even upon a superficial reading the parables can be strange. What do you mean the workers who only worked an hour or two get paid as much as those who toiled in the field all day? Isn’t the older brother right that the returning prodigal son doesn’t deserve his father’s lavish generosity as much as he does? Isn’t the righteous Pharisee more deserving of God’s grace than the sinful tax collector? Jesus’ parables often just don’t make sense on first reading.

Yet as maddeningly obscure as many of the parables can be on their surface there is something about several of them that, when we understand it, makes them even stranger. In several of the parables Jesus says things that are just wrong. He says things that he and his audience would surely have known right from the start were wrong. Yet he says them anyway. Here are a few examples. In the Parable of the Mustard Seed, Matthew 13:31-32, Jesus says that the mustard seed is the smallest of all seeds but that it grows into the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree so that birds makes nests in it. Wrong. The mustard seed is not the smallest of all seeds, and it doesn’t become a great shrub much less a tree. Surely Jesus knew that. Surely his rural audience knew it, yet he said it anyway. In the Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat, Matthew 13:24-30, Jesus has the landowner say no, don’t pull up the weeds before the harvest time because if you did you would pull up the wheat as well. Wrong. Any farmer knows that you have to pull up the weeds in the field so that they don’t choke out the crop and use up all the water. Surely Jesus knew that. Surely his rural audience knew it, yet he said it anyway. In the Parable of the Lost Sheep, Luke 15:3-7, he affirms a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep in the wilderness, not in a secure, safe enclosure, and goes wandering off to save one that has strayed from the flock. Wrong. That’s really bad animal husbandry. The shepherd is likely to lose far more than the one lost sheep when he abandons the others in a place of danger. Surely Jesus knew that. Surely his rural audience knew it as well, yet he said it anyway. Jesus pretty clearly used a teaching technique of saying things in his parables that his audience knew were wrong. Why? Why did he say those obviously wrong things? Wasn’t he afraid that his listeners would simply take him for a fool and pay no attention to him?

Well, no, I don’t think he was afraid of that. We have to assume that Jesus knew what he was doing in these parables. We have to assume, or at least I do assume, that he knew he was saying things that his audience knew were wrong and that he was doing it for a reason. What might that reason be? Understanding that reason, I think, tells us a lot about what Jesus was trying to do in these parables.

The parables that contain these patently false statements would, we can assume, have shocked the people who heard them. The falsehoods in them would bring the listeners up short. When they heard them they’d say Whoa! Wait a minute! That’s wrong! Why did he say that? Those jarringly wrong statements would get the listeners thinking: He must have some reason for saying something he knew was wrong. What can that reason be? To get any understanding of what Jesus was saying his audience would have to start thinking about something differently than they ever had thought about it before. They’d have to turn their conventional thinking upside down and look for a truth in what they knew to be false. Unless they just dismissed Jesus out of hand—which is precisely what I imagine many of them did—they would have to start thinking in new ways. They would have to get behind the factual error in Jesus’ little story to seek a truth to which the wrong fact, so far from simply being wrong, actually pointed. Jesus’ factual inaccuracies did, or at least could, crack open people’s conventional ways of thinking and get them looking for something true hiding behind something false. If those obviously false statements could get people thinking in new ways even a little bit, Jesus had an opening with them. He could use that opening to get them to think in new ways about far more important things than the facts about mustard seeds, weeds, and lost sheep. He could get them thinking about the kingdom of God, which so far from reflecting and affirming what everyone was sure was true turned what everyone knew was true completely upside down and replaced it with what everyone was pretty sure was false.

Turning the world upside down was what Jesus was all about. If you want to know what the kingdom of God that he proclaimed is, take just about any worldly value and look at its opposite. That opposite is probably a value of the kingdom of God. Yes, of course many people in the world carry some kingdom values. Or at least many people in the world say that they do. We all say we value love, and love is the foundational kingdom value. We all say we value peace, and peace is a fundamental kingdom value. Yet we have to ask: Does the world really value love? No, not really. If we really value love, why is there so much hatred in the world? Hatred is more of a worldly value than love is, or at least than the absolutely unconditional love of God is. Does the world really value peace? No, not really. If we really value peace, why is there so much war and other violence in the world? Power expressed through violence is more of a worldly value than is the absolute nonviolence of God.

So what does the world really value? Power. Wealth. Domination of some over others. Exclusion of some from the benefits of society. Condemnation of anyone we can see as “other.” Claims to having a monopoly on God’s truth that turn everyone not of our group into sinners damned for eternity. Success measured in terms of money, prestige, and power. Honor gained through acts of violence that we call acts of valor and heroism.

Kingdom values are the opposite of all of these. The kingdom includes everyone. In the kingdom love is unconditional for everyone. In the kingdom success comes not from dominating but from serving. In the kingdom wealth is measured not by money but by spiritual depth and peace. In the kingdom there is no violence. All issues that must be decided are decided peacefully, and they are decided in the best interest of the ones Jesus called the least of these (Matthew 25:40) not in the interest of the wealthy and powerful. Jesus came to proclaim the kingdom and to call us to live the kingdom life here and now.

I don’t envy him. His message was at least as tough a sell in his day as it is in ours. Selling it did, after all, get him killed. Yet even when selling it won’t get us killed, the kingdom of God is not exactly a hot item being whisked off the shelves faster than we can keep them stocked. The kingdom is a hard sell precisely because it turns the world on its head. You can’t get there thinking the way the world thinks. You can’t get there through conventional wisdom, and conventional wisdom is all the wisdom most people have. As Albert Einstein is supposed to have said, conventional wisdom is merely a collection of prejudices acquired before the age of eighteen. It is the wisdom of the world, not the wisdom of God. To get people to grasp the kingdom of God Jesus had to get them thinking in new ways. He had to break through their conventional wisdom. He had to crack the hard shell around what they were sure was true. So he said things in some of this parables that made a point about the kingdom but that were simply factually false. He gave people what he and they all knew was bad advice. He did it precisely to bring them up short. He did it precisely to shock them out of their conventional ways of thinking. I suppose it worked with some of them. I’m willing to bet that with most of them it didn’t.

Jesus healed and consoled. He loved and forgave. What we so often forget about him is that he also jolted and jarred. He challenged people’s assumptions. He denied their conventional wisdom. He knew he couldn’t break through all the barriers they threw up to his message only by gentle cajoling and teaching. So he said leave the weeds in the field. The tiny mustard seed becomes a tree. Leave the ninety-nine sheep and go looking for the one. He knew that what he was saying made no conventional sense, but that was just the point. He wasn’t trying to make conventional sense. He was trying to make divine sense, and that is a very different thing.

Christianity has been trying for most of the last two thousand years to make Jesus gentle, approachable, nonthreatening, and confirming of our conventional beliefs. Doing that to him certainly makes him an easier sell, but it gives people at best only one side of who he was. It gives them look for your lost coin, but it doesn’t give them look for your lost sheep. It gives them my yoke is easy and my burden is light, but it doesn’t give them take up your cross and follow me. It gives them render unto Caesar, but it doesn’t give them sell all you have, give the proceeds to the poor, then (and only then) follow me. It gives them blessed are the poor in spirit but it doesn’t give them woe to you who are rich now.

Following Jesus and living the life of the kingdom of God requires that we attain totally transformed minds. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 2:5 You don’t get a transformed mind by staying in the same old mental ruts. You don’t get a transformed mind by following only the safe, consoling, forgiving, compassionate Jesus. Yes, he was all of those things too (except maybe for the safe part); but he was so much more than that. A safe, consoling Jesus wouldn’t lace his parables with things everyone knew weren’t true or were bad advice. That is however precisely what Jesus did. Why did he do it? Why did he say those things? Precisely to get us to think!  Precisely to get us to think in new, transformed ways! He did it precisely because he knew we’d trip over those things. So go ahead and trip over them. Then open your mind to Jesus’ new way of thinking. If we can do that, his little rhetorical device will have done its job. Amen.