Wake up, wake up O Jerusalem
For you shall drink the cup of God’s fury
You shall drain the cask of terror
Tipping out its very last bitter dregs
The king has returned from a distant land
And you have squandered what he entrusted
You have hidden riches in your neighbor’s field
And buried your heads in your own
Your God is a hard master, as you know
He takes up what others lay down
He reaps where he has not sown
Harvesting richly what others dare to grow
So wake up, wake up O Zion
Prepare for plunder, to be stripped bare
What you have long taken for granted
He will bequeath to the oppressed and destitute
Take your place in the dust, City of David
For this is what the Lord has spoken
I send you once again into disgrace and exile
And I have no further plans to redeem you
Wail, for the kingdom is coming upon you
And calamity rides in the prince’s train
Who is left to sympathize with you?
Who now will give comfort or aid?
Yes, Zaccheus is a squat little man
A tax-collecter/cheat is he
We’ll string him up from a sycamore tree
An example for all to see
Or not
What the hell happened there, anyway?
“One of these things is not like the other,” like they used to say on Sesame Street. In Luke 19, Peter gets conflicting messages. On the one hand, the “parable of the ten minas” appeals strongly to his sense of divine justice and the Messiah as Stormcloud King. On the other hand… there’s that deal with Zaccheus. Either the Kingdom of heaven looks awfully forgiving and chummy, or it looks like a blood bath. And Peter can’t decide which Jesus is talking about.
From our perspective, we can see that Jesus doesn’t say, “The kingdom of heaven is like” anything in that parable, and it’s very likely a parable of negative contrast rather than a parable of positive simile. After all, Jesus tells it immediately after his encounter with the blind men and Zaccheus in Jericho (of all places) and immediately before his final “triumphal entry” into Jerusalam. We can note that Zaccheus, in fact, “took up what he did not lay down” and “reaped what he did not sow.” He was a good deal like the hard master in the parable. And yet he was shown mercy by Jesus, even though he was one of those bum Jews that Jesus was about to throw down. Was Jesus rewarding Zaccheus because he was “shrewd as a snake” and still “innocent as a dove”? Is the Kingdom really about performance and ROI? I think not. Jesus did not treat Zaccheus as he deserved… nor did Jerusalem get what it deserved.
Peter riffs on Isaiah 51 in this piece, turning a messianic text about Jerusalem’s salvation into a dirge of retribution. This make sense in the context of the disciples’ general inability to understand what Messiah was actually going to usher in.