Kingdom, Grace, Judgment: Paradox, Outrage, and Vindication in the Parables of Jesus

by Robert Farrar Capon

Accordingly, my new version of what the Bible is about reads as follows: it is about the mystery by which the power of God works to form this world into the Holy City, the New Jerusalem that comes down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.

he makes a covenant of nonintervention with the world: he sets his bow in the cloud - the symbolic development of which could be either that he hangs all his effective weapons against wickedness up on the wall or, more bizarrely still, that he points them skyward, at himself instead of us.

The whole operation began as a mystery, continued as a mystery, came to fruition as a mystery, and to this day continues to function as a mystery. Since Noah, God has evidently had almost no interest in using direct power to fix up the world.

But you see the point. At some very early crux in that difficult, personal relationship, the whole thing will be destroyed unless you - who, on any reasonable view, should be allowed to use straight-line power - simply refuse to use it; unless, in other words, you decide that instead of dishing out justifiable pain and punishment, you are willing, quite foolishly, to take a beating yourself.

Left-handed power, in other words, is precisely paradoxical power: power that looks for all the world like weakness, intervention that seems indistinguishable from nonintervention.

The only thing it does insure is that you will not - even after your chin has been bashed in - have made the mistake of closing any interpersonal doors from your side. Which may not, at first glance, seem like much of a thing to insure, let alone like an exercise worthy of the name of power. But when you come to think of it, it is powe...

God in Christ died forgiving. With the dead body of Jesus, he wedged open the door between himself and the world and said, "There! Ju...

But second, if it is examined closely, it turns out to be pivotal not only in people's attitudes toward Jesus but also in his own thinking about himself.

-Jesus is curiously reluctant about doing his "signs." (An important note here: the Greek word usually translated "miracle" does not have miraculous overtones; it is simply the ordinary word for "sign," semeion.) Not only does Jesus play down his signs; it almost seems that he doesn't do them unless they are practically wrung out of him by others. He looks for all the world like a kind of walking cafeteria table of power from which people serve themselves with hardly a by-your-leave.

The whole thing was so underplayed that the bread probably reached the back row of the crowd before the first row figured out what was happening.

It seems to me that from the Feeding of the Five Thousand on, he had a much firmer grip on the truth that the Messiah was not going to save the world by miraculous, Band-Aid interventions: a storm calmed here, a crowd fed there, a mother-in-law cured back down the road. Rather, it was going to be saved by means of a deeper, darker, left-handed mystery, at the center of which lay his own death.

What they need to do, of course, is to make some distinctions. Jesus, as the Word made flesh, is both God and man and he possesses both of those natures "without confusion, without change, without division, and without separation" (to use the words of the Chalcedonian definition). That means, among other things, that while it is perfectly proper to use the attributes of either nature when you are talking about the Person who is both (for instance: the carpenter of Nazareth made the world; God died on the cross), you must be careful not to scramble the two natures when you are speaking of how each one operates in its own proper sphere (thus: God, as God, does not die; Jesus, in his human mind, is not omniscient).

The inevitable condition of a historical incarnation - that he must have a particular human body and mind in an equally particular place and time - precludes his being either Superman or Mr. Know-It-All.

the ministry of Jesus, taken in its entirety, is the manifestation of God's deep preference for a left-handed, mysterious exercise of power as opposed to a right-handed, plausible one.

Consider therefore the two "parabolic events" - as I shall call them here - with which the Gospel writers actually frame the whole of Jesus' active ministry: the Temptation in the Wilderness and the Ascent into Heaven.

If you insist on the Ascension as a mere happening, you miss its meaning; if you harp only on its meaning, you cut it off from history - which is the only arena in which God has revealed to us, parabolically or otherwise, his purpose.

it occurred in his person at the instigation of somebody or something that had a deep interest in turning the mystery of saving, left-handed power into just another right-handed, strong-arm job that would leave the world still on the skids.

He came to save us, in our nature, not to put on some flashy, theandric, superhuman performance that would be fundamentally irrelevant to our condition.

Accordingly, when the deity ofJesus acts or impinges upon his humanity, it does so not in the order of nature - not by souping up his humanity into something more than human - but in the order ofgrace: that is, by divine influences that empower human nature but do not tamper with it.

The influence of the Spirit alone - acting upon his human nature in no fundamentally different way than it does on ours - is quite sufficient:

For what is the dialogue in the wilderness if not the devil's attempt to sell Jesus a set of messianic blue tights?

With my brains and your brawn, we could really get this show on the road."

He says, in effect, "You can't conceive of a messiah unless he's dedicated to a lot of superhuman, right-handed punching and interfering; but as far as I'm concerned, just plain human obedience to God's prescriptions for plain old humanity will do the messianic trick.

Paradoxically, Jesus eventually does all the things the devil suggests. But he does them in his own time and in his own way. He turns five loaves and two fish into an all-time eatout for five thousand. This, while it is essentially the same trick as making himself a miraculous snack, is not only more of a sign but also one that serves to intensify rather than vitiate his commitment to left-handed power. Furthermore, instead of merely circumventing death by having angels catch him (a sign, please note, that would promise nothing to the rest of us who are not messiahs), he dies as dead as anyone and then rises to become the first fruits of them that slept (a phrase that means - since no child of Adam and Eve is exempt from that sleep - absolutely everybody). Finally, he does indeed take up the rulership of this world, but instead of doing so by the devil's device of moving in and applying strong-arm methods, he ascends and sits as King of Kings and Lord of Lords at his Father's right hand. He continues to govern, in other words, as the Wisdom of God he always was, reaching from one end of the universe to the other, and mightily and sweetly - fortiter suaviterque - ordering all things.

The portrait the Gospels paint is that of a lifeguard who leaps into the surf, swims to the drowning girl, and then, instead of doing a cross-chest carry, drowns with her, revives three days later, and walks off the beach with assurances that everything, including the apparently still-dead girl, is hunky-dory. You do not like that? Neither do I. But I submit that it is - unless we are prepared to ignore both the Gospels and the ensuing two thousand years' worth of tombstones with bodies still under them - very much like what the Man actually said and did. And - to come to the main point at last - it is the Ascension of Jesus, and the Ascension alone, that keeps us from missing the reason for his doing it that way.

It is not that someday Jesus will do this, that, and the other thing, and then the Kingdom will come. It is not, for example, that at some future date the dead will rise or that in some distant consummation we will reign with him. Rather, it is that we have already been buried with him in baptism, and that we are already risen with him through faith in the operation of God who raised him from the dead, and that we are now - in this and every moment - enthroned together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.

We are invited not to make it happen, but to believe that it is...

On the last day, Jesus will not do anything new; he will simply make manifest what he has been doing all along - what, in fact, he has long since done by preparing for us a kingdom from the foundation of the world. It will be in seeing him, as he is, that it will finally dawn on us what, in him, we have always been.

And what a comfort that is to us, both theologically and pastorally. Not a single specific prediction over the past two millennia has ever come true, but that makes no difference at all. A promise is a promise: whether its fulfillment takes ten seconds or ten billion years, the simple act of trusting it puts us fully, if mysteriously, in the very center of its power.

But spiritual works no more bring in the kingdom than moral or intellectual ones.

In short, and above everything else, the Word has to mean the eternal Son - God of God, Light of Light, True God of True God - the Second Person of the Holy and Undivided Trinity.

It says, first of all, that the Sower is God the Father, not Jesus. What Jesus turns out to be - since he is the Word - is the seed sown.

Have we not acted instead as if the Word wasn't anywhere until we...

the whole human race's relationship to grace is neatly divided between the prodigal and the elder brother.

"Watch how you hear: the way you measure out judgment will be the way it's measured out to you, and even more severely"

His entire work proceeds as does the work of a seed: it takes place in a mystery, in secret - in a way that, as Luther said, can neither be known nor felt, but only believed, trusted.

Furthermore, just as the effective power of seeds to reproduce themselves is in no way seriously inhibited by the depredations of the birds (in fact, animal ingestion and excretion of seeds is one of nature's ways of insuring their distribution), so too the effective power of the Word is not lessened even though the devil may try to digest it for his own purposes and turn it into offal.

But what needs to be emphasized here is that the differences can never be interpreted as meaning that the operative power of the seed - or the operative power of the Word - is in any way dependent on circumstantial cooperation.