unfair, but common sense tells us otherwise. How could they have worked earlier if no one hired them? And how could they and their families eat that evening unless they received a day’s wages? Admittedly, even in the God Household there is a realm where merit has its proper place. It does matter what we do, or fail to do, with our talents.Yet, isn’t our very existence pure gift to begin with? Ultimately, all is grace.
5. A new order: Not drudgery,but celebration. What makes a parable tick is the ticking of a time bomb that goes off the moment we get the point. Common sense blows conventional notions to bits.
Even the notion of “serving God” is exploded. No matter how much we are accustomed to thinking of our relationship to God as that of servants to a lord and king, Jesus uses the leverage of common sense to lift us out of that rut. Isn’t the King of Heaven your Father? “‘What do you think, Simon? From whom do the kings of the world take tribute or taxes? From their children or from strangers?’ and when he said, ‘From strangers,’ Jesus replied, ‘Then the children are exempt’”(Matthew
Need breaks laws.
— DUTCH
Law makes law-breakers.
— BANTU
The law is a spider’s web: Big flies break through, but the little ones get caught.
— HUNGARIAN
17:25–26).You are princes and princesses: You are tax exempt!
Once we realize this, we no longer drudge along in servitude but freely and joyfully offer our gifts to God. “The spirit you received is not the spirit of slaves, bringing fear into your lives, but the spirit of sonship in which we call out, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Such common-sense teaching is heady wine. Will anyone put new wine like this into old wine skins? “If one does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins”(Mark 2:22).
From early on, however, the followers of Jesus have tried to do just this: tried to contain the new spirit within the old forms.The result is compromise — patchwork. “No one sews a piece of un-shrunk cloth on an old garment; if he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made (Mark 2:21).That’s common sense.Yet, for almost two millennia now, church institutions have suffered rift after rift because of precisely such patchwork.
One handy example is fasting as a prescribed religious observance. Voluntary fasting can be a healthy practice. There are many good reasons for fasting, but earning God’s favor thereby is not one of them. God’s love — like a mother’s — need not be earned, only celebrated, Jesus held. He did not fast; in fact, they called him “a glutton and a drunkard” (Matthew 11:19). His favorite image for life in fullness was a great feast, a royal wedding feast, to which everyone — high and low, rich and poor— was invited. “Can you make wedding guests fast?” (Luke 5:34), he asked. He did not want his followers bound by religious observances but freed for a great celebration. Soon, however, they reinstituted fasting on the grounds that Jesus, the bridegroom, was “taken away from them” (Matthew 9:15), in spite of the fact that, in the same gospel, he was quoted as saying, “I am with you all the days until the end of time”(Matthew 28:20). In this, as in many other points, conventional religious practice won out over the spirit of Jesus. And yet, the same religious institutions that are to blame for this shift of focus deserve our thanks for having preserved for us the common-sense sayings of Jesus. Now, as then, these sayings challenge prevailing practices.
One of Jesus’ most amusing parables addresses the tension between ascetic religious observance and celebration in the Spirit. We might call it the Parable of the House Left Standing
Empty (Matthew 12:43–45). Here the classical pattern of Jesus’ parable telling has not been preserved, but we can easily restore it.
Step one, the opening question: Don’t you know what happens to a house when you sweep it and decorate it and then let it stand empty? Think of a holiday cabin on the shore or in the woods. Say it came to you as an inheritance. You are thrilled; you dream already of parties you will have there and you spend every spare hour fixing it up. Soon it looks spicand- span. But just when all is ready, your children lose inter- est;other plans interfere,weekend after weekend.What do you expect that place to look like when you finally return? Moldy, mildewed, full of mice and squirrels, bugs and spiders.
This is already step two, the common-sense answer to the opening question.We have merely updated the gospel imagery and replaced evil spirits with rodents and insects. A place left standing empty — and empty is the operative word here — will be worse in the end than before you put so much effort into fixing it up. Common sense tells us this.
Hence, step three, the implied question: Why then do you put so much effort into inner “housecleaning,” without ever
Tis a good word that can better a good silence.
— DUTCH
Words are silver, silence is gold.
— GERMAN
The stars make no noise.
— IRISH
getting around to having that party for which you have uncluttered and cleaned and adorned your heart? Once again, the joke is on us, because we are reminded of a truth we know deep down, but fail to act upon: the goal of asceticism is celebration— and not later, either, but here and now. The very housecleaning ought to be done in the spirit of a party.
Throughout the ages and in our own time, countless followers of Jesus have done this and are still doing it.They make ascetical practice come aglow from within. In the midst of misery and in spite of all adversity they suffer for their convictions, they celebrate the great wedding feast. Didn’t we come across this image before in our exploration of common sense? Yes, we did — when we found common sense alive in the hum and buzz of a meadow. Here, at the level of human society, we must lose nothing of what we witnessed there among plants and animals, but we must add the specifically human elements of freedom and responsibility. To build a common-sense society that is in tune with the great cosmic wedding feast — that’s what “this whole show is all about,” and this fact is good news indeed.
Telling the truth is not a sin, but it causes inconvenience.
— MEXICAN
A child, a drunkard, and a fool tell the truth.
— HUNGARIAN
Seeing is believing, but feeling is God’s own truth.
— IRISH
Truth has all the benefits of sham without the disadvantages.
— DUTCH
Obstacles to Common Sense
Jesus, if he came today, might look bewildered at what has become of the movement he started. Would he recognize it at all? Would he think it has much to do with the message he preached? I think he would feel more at home in a twelve-step meeting than in most Christian churches, let alone in the Vatican. But this should not surprise us. Other spiritual masters of the past would be no better off. Lao Tsu would be at a loss searching for vital signs of the Tao in a Taoist temple and any philosophy department would make Heraclitus feel like the proverbial fish out of water.Yet, all three of these great teachers still have fervent followers today.As for Jesus,there are still — within the churches and without — countless men and women who are aglow with his spirit because they have understood his message. They live by common sense — in
Children talk with God.
— CHUANA
A child who asks questions isn’t stupid.
— EWE
A lovely child has many names.
— HUNGARIAN
Honor a child and it will honor you.
— ILA
Children are the wisdom of the nation.
— JABO
more traditional terms, they are “led by the Spirit of God” (Romans 8:14).
Twelve-step programs rely on no other authority than common sense. Jesus would recognize his spirit alive and active today as soon as he walked into a twelve-step meeting. This should not surprise us, since the founders of Alcoholics Anonymous were fervent Christians. And there is an even deeper connection between sobriety and common sense. Don’t we call people who use common sense “sober minded”? What then is the addiction that makes most of us, again and again, fall off the wagon of common sense? It must be an enormously strong addiction to draw so many into its spell.