A Modern Punch and Judy Story

                                                                Craig Anderson

                                              Brookside Community Church, UCC

Matthew 13:1-9                                                                                                  February 10, 2002

On that day when Jesus put out in a boat with crowds gathered on the shore to listen, suppose on that day, someone went home and said, “I just heard the most interesting lecture about how to sow seeds!  Some guy, I don’t know maybe he was from the agricultural extension office over in Capernaum, has this theory that the best way to do spring planting and increase production, is to plant the seeds in rich deep soil, and not on shallow, rocky ground.   You know, he sounded sincere and maybe he’s on to something.   I think I’ll try it.”

So there you are, standing before your friend, what are you going to say?!  Yeah, but Olie, I don’t think he was talking about sowing seed.  He had something else in mind.  Don’t you get it Olie?!  He wasn’t talking about agriculture, it was only an illustration.  The story he was trying to tell had another point entirely.  Really Olie, wake up and smell the dandelion wine.  “It was a parable, friend.  Now what's the hidden punch line?"  (Dominic Crossan)

We smile, but this story in itself is a parable of our time, and how we so often miss the meaning of scripture, because of what Harvey Cox says is “a disability that plagues and cripples the modern rational mind -- literalism.”

To hear Cox tell it:  

      The problem with what is sometimes called "the modern mind" is not that it is too critical but that it is tiresomely pedestrian. Literalism is a scourge, a disabling disease of the spirit. And, ironically, it afflicts religious fundamentalists and secular atheists in equal measure.

      It is a kind of color blindness, a blight that incapacitates its victims' ability to notice the truth that glimmers below the surface of song and metaphor, of poetry and legend.  The fundamentalist insists it is all literal, and demands we believe it all.  The atheist also insists it is literal, and rejects it all.  Together they play out the unending Punch and Judy show of modernity, shrieking and whacking each other with big sticks.  But this puppet show is too sad to be funny.

This is a helpful perspective, isn’t it?  It is just as frustrating to talk with an ardent doubter as it is a fervid believer.  Sometimes a helpful rejoinder is to ask an atheist, “which god don’t you believe in?”  Chances are neither will you.  But to throw the baby out with the bath water, to reject all religious insights because some seem incredulous, is just as foolhardy as keeping the baby, every drop of the bath water, and the soap ring around the tub as well. 

Now lest you go home and say the preacher warned us about the dangers of soaped-up babies slipping down the drain, let’s take stock of what we’re actually talking about this morning.  In some ways this is an old story, a Punch and Judy episode we in the west especially have been repeating since the enlightenment began 400 years ago.  The story we’ve been telling and sticking to, is that humankind finally emerged from the dark ages when we woke up to the powers of reason, the rigors and results of scientific observation, the carefully constructed proofs of mathematics and logic.  There can be no doubt that the marvels and wonders produced by science and engineering, by rational and intellectual endeavor, are amazing indeed.  But enlightenment came at a cost.   To cite Harvey Cox again, remember that the results of such one dimensional rationalism, is  “a blight that incapacitates our ability to notice the truth that glimmers below the surface of song and metaphor, of poetry and legend.”  In Cox’s view, “the main obstacle to mature spirituality in the modern era is this crippling literalism,” which prevents us from “soaring with the poetry, the music, and the old, old stories.”

Indeed we all too readily imagine that the creators of the old, old stories must have been sadly ignorant and profoundly stupid to accept those stories as literally true.  But suppose they never did?  Suppose that Jesus never intended for the parable of the sower to be understood as a lesson about the latest agricultural technique.  Suppose that besides Olie in his audience, there were also people who got it in one, and understood that there were truths in that parable glimmering beneath the surface.

As Dominic Crossan tells it,

       With the enlightenment, we began to think that ancient peoples told dumb, literal stories that we were now smart enough to recognize as such.  Not quite.  Those ancient people told smart, metaphorical stories that we were now dumb enough to take literally.  Enlightenment, yes, but Endarkenment also.

To illustrate how silly our modern Punch and Judy stories can be, Crossan would have us imagine what it might be like, if one day a cult arose which treats Aesop’s Fables the way some approach the Bible.  Remember talking animals and then imagine that: 

The Aesopians are an ancient and venerable religious community going back in time over two and a half millennia. Their religion was founded by a Greek slave named Aesop, and his book The Fables, is accepted by all Aesopians as their inspired text of sacred scripture. They have recently been embroiled in a nasty public dispute, which ended up in a very high‑profile legal battle.

It began when a group called Scientists Against Mythology described the Aesopians as a bunch of half‑witted weirdos.  The Aesopians immediately sued them for defamation and hired a Boston lawyer, named Pog Mahoney.  He was brilliant, he was ruthless, he was devastating.

The first expert for the defense was a Pulitzer Prize winning historian from Harvard.  She was shredded on the stand as Mahoney insisted and the judge agreed that she must answer a simple yes or no to the questions put to her.

“Were you alive in ancient Greece at the time of Aesop?"

“No.”

“Have you read all the extant documents from ancient Greece?"

“Yes.”

“Do you think that those represent all there ever were from that time?"

“No.”

“Then, Madam, since you do not know everything that happened in ancient Greece, is not your assertion that animal linguisticality did not occur there simply a personal historical bias?"

The second expert was a Nobel Prize‑winning biologist from Stanford, but he too went down in flames.

“Are there changes in animal evolution so that earlier capabilities are later lost?"

“Yes."

(A whole series of examples followed, with much debate about nonflying chickens.)

“Do you know, or does science know; every single species of presently living animal?"

“No."

“Could there be some animal even now, in the canopies of the rain forest or the depths of the sea, about which we know nothing, not even of their existence?"

“Yes.”

“Then, Sir, since you do not know all past or even all contemporary animals, is it not fair to say that your assertion of their non-linguisticality is simply an individual prejudice?"

The jury took only half an hour to find for the Aesopians and to assess both compensatory and punitive damages amounting to $14 million.

To wrap up his parable, and further drive home his point, Crossan concludes:

“If Aesopic literalists existed, none of us could disprove them any more, of course, than they could prove their belief.  But, reduced to anger in face of their intransigence, we would end up shouting: ‘It's a genre of speech, a special type of story, Olie!  It was never intended as history.  It's a fiction with a message.  It's a parable.’”

If we look at the Gospels, it appears that whenever Jesus had something important to say about God that he told parables.  That is, he told “a fictional story with a theological punch.”  “The kingdom of God is like a sower who went out to sow...”  The audience was then inspired to wonder, “how is the kingdom like that?”  To tell a parable was the beginning of a process, not to speak an eternal truth meant to end debate.

In the same vein, as the Gospels were being composed, it appears that when early Christian communities had something important to say about Jesus, they also told parables.  The one who spoke in parables became as parable himself.

When humanity’s capacity to notice deeper truths in poetry and song is incapacitated, then we end up with fanatic Christians and Jews lurking in the streets of Jerusalem believing quite literally that they must rebuild the temple on one of Islam’s most holy sites before the messiah can come.  They pose a constant threat and create still greater instability.  But our own pedestrian literalism blinds us too.  Let us drink from the well of parable and song, metaphor and legend – and let our lives, like the lives of the ancients be enriched by the deeper truths which lie glimmering beneath the surface of our holy texts.