I just finished The Witch Box a few days ago, and my editor has told me the double climax I created really works. That’s a relief.
I thought it might be nice to take a break from unrelievedly bad nooze and try to drum up some interest in my books. Hence this column.
Don’t be too quick to brush off fantasy. Do you think the big shots of this world deal in anything but fantasy?
The difference is, mine won’t kill you.
This was sickeningly true in 2014, and even more so now.
Yes–you point to the shambles, the disaster, that you created… and say, “Look what happened.” As if it happened without you!
People, you can’t treat your country like Democrats have been treating America. You’ll kill it. You’ll destroy it.
But I’m afraid that’s exactly what they mean to do.
A long-lived ad campaign debuted back in the 1960s. Most of us remember it as “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.” Even if we never had occasion to try the cereal, it’s easy to remember the commercials with the “cuckoo bird” going positively wild for Cocoa Puffs: like, totally out of control.
I find it difficult to believe that this same spirit has not possessed a great swathe of our fallen world’s movers and shakers, trend-setters and decision-makers. All right, they don’t go caroming off the walls in the Senate Office Building, or swing from the chandeliers in judges’ chambers: but they might as well. It doesn’t get wackier than insisting that men and boys can have periods. You should at least get a bowl of Cocoa Puffs for that.
Were these ads trying to warn us about the people who were ruling us?
I guess we should’ve listened.
In Luke 15:11-32, Our Lord tells us the Parable of the Prodigal Son, a story which most of you have heard.
Consider, though, the prodigal’s elder brother, who is all bent out of shape because his father killed the fatted calf and threw a party for the son who came home. Most of us can easily understand the elder son’s jealousy, because we are sinners like him: we would probably react as he did.
Because I’ve been reading, all along, Notes on the Parables of Our Lord (first published in 1860) by Dean Richard Chenevix Trench–remember his lesson on the Parable of the Wheat and the Tares, which I posted last month–and learning some good lessons from it, I said to myself, “Wait a minute! This is like the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, in which those who worked all day, and were paid handsomely for it, objected because the owner awarded the same payment to those who came late to the job.” And yes, the similarity is there.
To his elder son the father says, “Son, thou art ever with me“–he might have added, “as opposed to the other numbskull, who went out into the fallen world and almost starved to death”–“and all that I have is thine.” The elder son already had “all.” What more could he have asked for?
Dean Trench points out that the elder son, because he was his father’s son, had a perfect right to walk right into the house and join the party, where his portion of the fatted calf was waiting for him. Why didn’t he? One gets the impression that he wanted the whole calf for himself.
He already had all that he could have, and had been spared the experience of leaving his father and winding up in desperate straits. He lost nothing by the father’s forgiveness of the prodigal, and yet he was jealous. In truth, his jealousy and self-righteousness blinded him to the blessings that he had, and to the grace of his father, who was the source of all those blessings. Just as the vineyard owner, out of the goodness of his heart, was generous to the later hires, the father in this parable shed his grace on both his sons. And the one son was jealous and ungrateful.
As Steve Brown would say, “Now you think about that!”
In Luke 16 Our Lord tells an audience of Pharisees a rather difficult parable. I’ve read it many times and am still trying to understand it.
In this parable, a rich man finds out that his steward has been cheating him, so he tells the steward to prepare an accounting and then get lost. Faced with the loss of his position, the steward solves his problem by cheating his master yet again. He tells the master’s debtors to finagle their accounts so that they save a lot of money and the master gets rooked again. That makes these persons beholding to the steward so that, when he gets kicked out of his master’s house, they will take him in.
And yet, when the master finds out about this last bit of skullduggery, he commends the crooked steward for having done wisely…
Okay, I’m lost.
So I’m going to study this parable this morning. I now have books about the parables, by Chenevix Trench (19th century) and John MacArthur (modern), and there’s Matthew Henry (Puritan) on the Internet.
Some of Jesus’ parables were simple. Others were very hard, and He had to explain them to His disciples afterward.
I agree with MacArthur that Jesus often wished His hearers to inquire further into the meaning of a parable–which is just what I’m gonna do today.
I’ll be back later.