Wheat and Chaff

Sometime after the arrest of John the Baptist and the scattering of his followers, Jesus of Nazareth began his own public ministry, preaching, as John did, that God was going to reenter human history and turn the world upside-down, and he was going to do it soon.

What would you do if you knew that God was coming to mete out cosmic justice, to separate the wheat from the chaff, and that he'd been watching and taking notes the whole time? Naturally, you'd want to put your house in order. You'd want your moral and spiritual life to be in tip-top shape when the Big Guy came to look things over.

This is what Jesus and John were urging of everyone: repent. Renounce your wicked ways and start treating each other right, because if you don't, you'll be sorry when the Bossman arrives. This was Bentham's Panopticon 2000 years earlier, except that for the devout Jews John and Jesus, someone really was watching.

It's common knowledge that Jesus' audience generally wasn't the rich or the pious. He spoke to the poor, the criminals, the vagrants, the tax collectors, the lepers- in other words, people who had likely done some things (by choice or by necessity) that they weren't proud of, and knew that God certainly wouldn't like. When they heard Jesus' message, they probably assumed that God, who knows all, had already seen their misdeeds and written their names on his cosmic list. If He was coming soon, they were screwed, so why change?

To me, many of Jesus' parables address this issue by highlighting a reversal of expectations. The wayward son is welcomed home with joy and feasting; the gutter trash of the town get invited to a wedding feast, the shepherd is concerned about one sheep that strayed; the workers who started later get paid the same as those who started earlier. The message of these parables seems to be "It's not too late."

This is a radical notion of forgiveness that is difficult to swallow. It doesn't seem in line with our traditional notions of justice and fairness. The worker who works less should get paid less; the son who disobeys should not be treated better than the one who obeyed. A whole flock of sheep should not be put in danger in order to save one.

And yet, if everyone who has done wrong in their lives feels as though they cannot turn back, the world of the righteous would shrink to almost nothing. Jesus understood that forgiveness and hope are essential to justice and repentance here on earth.

But do we now offer forgiveness (or simply forget transgressions) so easily that some people will say sorry until they're blue in the face without really changing? Nowadays, it seems lucky to even get an apology, sincere or not. After 2000 years, the notion that God is coming soon with his axe and his winnowing rod seems to have lost some of its punch. Jesus and John were not content to wait for God and let him sort things out. They wanted people to enact their own transformations. In the absence of the threat of sulfur and brimstone, how do you make people want to do the right thing?