No parable is more widely abused than the Parable of the Talents. On the heels of a series of Matthean stories that warn of destruction and judgment, the Master assigns a duty to each of his slaves in anticipation, yet again, of the coming judgment. He does not want their money. He has no interest…
Category: The Bible as Literature
The Jury is Still Out
People who live comfortably look to religion as a source of comfort and stability. They construct their religious worldview as the Pharaohs of old built pyramids of stone: to maintain a self-serving status quo. Nobody living in comfort wants their situation to change. Nobody wants to answer for their sins. Nobody wants to stand before…
Bread and Oil
For those who impose a triumphalist or sectarian premise on the Bible, it is impossible to hear the Parable of the Ten Virgins. Even if they accept Matthew’s warning that the church will be judged—even if they understand that the virgins represent churches—they immediately assume that their church is numbered among the prudent. But the…
Rightly Dividing the Word of Truth
The Lord’s warning in Matthew 10, “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” (10:34) is often abused as a justification for militarism. In truth, as with so much biblical imagery, this verse exemplifies the Bible’s Ezekielian appropriation of the kingly symbols of power. The sword, the destruction of cities, exile, the decimation…
“But,” Not “So”
The challenge of hearing Scripture has never been more difficult. Each of us is trained to hear what we want to hear. We decide what we think about God before we crack the first page. Then, when God says or does something that does not confirm or conform to the graven image in our mind,…
Grigoreo!
Names have functional meaning. Students of this podcast know that our ability to hear a name spoken in the original language can unlock the meaning of a sentence, within a paragraph, within a story. In some cases, a common word taken from the story, like γρηγορέω, enters spoken language as a proper noun, unlocking the…
But of That Day
In the film Avengers: Infinity War, the story’s arch-villain, Thanos, destroys one-half of humanity with the snap of a finger. In the Book of Genesis, and later, in the Gospel of Matthew, one-half of humanity is threatened, not by an arch-villain, but by God himself. This mechanism, in which God undermines instead of lifting up,…
These Words Are Permanent
It’s been nearly two millennia since Matthew’s Gospel was written—that’s roughly 80 generations. Every 25 years, for the last 2000 years, every generation has been warned about the end, but the end has not yet come. So what does Jesus mean when he says, “Truly I say to you, this generation will not pass away…
The Things Which God Destroys
As Matthew 24 consolidates the fall of Jerusalem (and therefore, the fall of Rome) the centrality of St. Paul’s teaching of the Cross comes clearly into view. The glory of God’s Kingdom can only be present to us through the destruction of human infrastructure and might. Richard and Fr. Marc discuss Matthew 24:29-31. Episode 376…
The Truth is Not Out There
In Matthew’s gospel, it’s the teaching you follow that controls how you understand what you see. So when “false Christs and false prophets arise and show great signs and wonders,” your only hope is to hear what Jesus told you in advance: the truth is not out there. “On the contrary, the word is very…