Once upon a time...

An audio recording of today's gospel and blog can be accessed here.

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Today's gospel (Luke 12: 54-59) is a reminder that even if Jesus is a mystery to us, we are no mystery to Him. When He asks why the people cannot read the signs of the times, it is not because He does not know the answer. And when He draws this scenario about having to go to court and being in danger of ending up in a debtors’ prison, He was not telling the people anything they did not know; rather He was telling them things they knew very well but did not like to think about. In this regard, these hypocrites in the gospel are once again ourselves.

How was it that people knew what the weather was going to be: whether it would be hot or whether it would rain? There was no weather service in the Roman Empire. They probably knew the future weather in the format of stories. Red sky at night, shepherd’s delight; red sky in the morning, shepherd's warning. In its aim, this saying is a weather forecast, but if we look at its structure or genre, it is a story. There are highs and there are lows. There is a hero. There is emotion; deep emotion. Above all, this story helps people make sense of their immediate surroundings, and it tells people what to do in the short term, assuming of course that they already have a long term plan. With this story of the coming weather, they travel into the future, and they can take action now to shape that future. Alongside all the models of humanity that anthropology has proposed, such as homo sapiens and homo faber (man the maker), we also find homo narrans - man the storyteller.

So, what then is Jesus getting at in the first part of this gospel if not simply that we are rather good at telling ourselves one kind of story (the one that plays to our self interest) but not so good at telling ourselves other kinds of story that are, shall we say, not so self-serving? We are good at telling ourselves the stories that tickle our ambitions and needs, or perhaps indulge our self hatreds; those stories that lie in embryonic form in our imaginations and grow and shrink like a wicked genie. We are not as good, perhaps, at telling ourselves the stories that we need to hear. 

In truth, audiences choose their stories. We characterise the cultures that we come across by the stories that they tell themselves. The people Jesus preached to liked stories about the weather, for many of them were farmers and this was an agricultural society. Today, the kind of stories that many of us read are plastered across the pages of the media in our letterboxes or more usually on our screens, and they are rarely of the edifying kind. In that sense, we might read The Times but do we have any more sense of the signs of the times that the original peasantry of ancient Israel?

The people in this gospel extract do not know the signs of the times because they decline to listen to the stories that could unfold for them the signs of the times. Like us, they tell themselves stories of anguish about the things that they desire or the things that they fear to lose, and all the while they ignore the stories that would interpret for them their true reality and the dangers in which they really stand.

For this is the essence of Jesus' complaint. The people are not anxious about eternity; they are more stirred by a story about a potential law case than they are by a story about the courtroom of the last judgement. But, as we noted above, people choose their stories. They would in fact listen to these stories about the last judgement if their hearts were in the right place; if in fact their hearts were seeking God. Of course they liked stories about their own piety; the stories that gave them reassurance about what fine fellows they were. Yet these stories did not cut very deep…

Unlike the story of Scripture which St Paul describes in the following way:

For the word of God is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword, penetrating even between soul and spirit, joints and marrow, and able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.

This is a story of high emotion too; of a hero, Jesus, who comes to our rescue, and of the drama that plays out for our salvation. This is the story that gives us the signs of the times, the story that tells of our peril, and of the destiny which cuts through every living and waking moment. This is the story in which, like Mary, we have the choice of saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to the Lord. 

The only story left to tell, therefore, is what we are going to do about it right now.