The Parables of Grace

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Summary: The Modus Operandi of Grace
Review: So you thought you knew and understood the parables of Jesus? Take a look at Robert Farrar Capon's superb trilogy on the parables of the Kingdom, Grace and Judgment and see if they don't rattle your theological bird cage just a little. This volume is on the parables of Grace. The author again deals with lastness, leastness, lostness, littleness, left-handed images, death and resurrection, this time in such parables as the Lost Sheep, the Prodigal Son, and the Good Samaritan, among others. And he includes the hardest parable of all - the Unjust Steward of Luke 16.

I've always checked every book of Bible commentary to see what the author has to say about this parable, and so far, only Father Capon has come up with anything that makes sense to me. He says the unjust steward was wasting (diaskorpizon) his Lord's money. "Diaskorpizon" is the same word used for the Prodigal Son's wasting of his "substance." That's a clue, according to Capon, that this is a grace and not a morality parable. This is also like the parable of the Unforgiving Servant except that it's reversed. Forgiveness starts from the botom up instead of from the top down. It's the steward who forgives the debt (not the rich man or the Lord), and so he is a "dead ringer for Jesus Himself." He dies (to his bookkeeping) rises others (forgives their debts), but most important of all, "...the unjust steward is the Christ-figure because he is a crook, like Jesus."

"The unique contribution of this parable to our understanding of Jesus," says Capon, "is its insistence that grace cannot come to the world through respectability. Respectability regards only life, success, winning; it will have no truck with the grace that works by death and losing - which is the only kind of grace there is." Jesus was "...not respectable. He broke the sabbath. He consorted with crooks. And he dies as a criminal." And he did all this to "...catch a world that respectability could only terrify and condemn. He became sin for us sinners, weak for us weaklings, lost for us losers, and dead for us dead."

For my money, Father Capon is the only writer since C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton who has even a clue about the true dynamics of the Christian Faith.

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