Surprised by Nothing

John Shuck

January 29^th, 2006

First Presbyterian Church

Elizabethton, Tennessee

Jesus said:

“The Father’s imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a jar full of meal. While she was walking along a distant road, the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled behind her along the road. She didn’t know it; she hadn’t noticed a problem. When she reached her house, she put the jar down and discovered that it was empty.”

The Gospel of Thomas 97

The image that comes to mind when I hear is this parable is the advertising image for Morton Salt. It is a drawing of a girl carrying an umbrella in one hand and a container of Morton Salt in the other. The salt is spilling behind her on the road. She doesn’t know it. The caption reads: “When it rains, it pours.” The advertisers wanted to make the point that the salt pours even in damp weather.

I don’t think the advertisers had this parable in mind when they created the Morton Salt girl in 1914. The reason is that this parable of Jesus has not been part of the canon of parables. Only the renewed interest in the Gospel of Thomas has brought this parable to our attention. The Jesus Seminar felt that this parable was in the repertoire of Jesus’ authentic sayings.

What makes this parable fun, in my opinion, whether it goes back to the historical Jesus or not, is that it has no history of interpretation. We have not inherited baggage regarding what it “means”. There is in a sense more freedom for us to interpret this.

Of course we always have this freedom even with familiar parables. It is hard for me to get beyond wanting to find out what a parable means—as if it contains some objective essence of meaning that I need to uncover. Most of what I think we call “meaning” is our own interpretation. We project on to the parable or text or story or God or another person or the world itself ourselves. We think we may be observing or discovering something objectively real, but in actuality we are creating meaning through our own experience and point of view. So when someone tells me about the meaning of a parable or of an event or of God or of life, I am finding out a lot about that person. This is of course the same for all of us. The process of interpreting, if we are aware of this, can help us to learn about ourselves. Through language, human beings are meaning makers.

I have been thinking about all of these things as I have been thinking about the parable of the empty jar and what “it means.” I have found out a bit about myself this week as I have been thinking on this parable and connecting it to other things I have been reading, thinking, and doing. One of the things that I am learning is that I am far less objective than I think I am. When I think I have discovered something, it is likely that I have taken my own language, desires, feelings, and experience and through them projected a meaning onto the object or event or person I think I am discovering. It appears that we all do this. This does not mean that we cannot know anything. We can by degree be more objective or less objective. Listening to other points of view can help in this process. But this is to say at least that by and large human beings are far more subjective about things than we care to admit or are even aware. Well-crafted parables can help us become aware of ourselves. They can help us tell our stories.

Let us look at the parable itself.

I see two ways of looking at this parable. A positive way and a negative way. It comes down to how we answer this question: is the woman in our story to be praised or is she to be pitied? Is she a good example to follow or a bad example to avoid?

The natural reading is pity. One would assume that she would want to make it home with her jar full of meal intact. The little Morton Salt girl will likely be scolded when she finally gets home. She has been on the way home for a long time, (since 1914!), she has been spilling salt on the road. When she finally gets home her mother will say: “Why didn’t you pay attention? What were you thinking?”

If we apply the parable of the woman with a jar full of meal to life, it is a warning not to let life slip by. Be mindful. Savor what is available. Don’t lose your focus and let the important things slip away. In this sense it is like the parable Jesus tells of the man who had a bumper crop so he tore down his old barns and built bigger barns. Before he could enjoy it, the Lord visited him and said: “You fool! Today you are going to meet your maker. What good will your barns do you now?”

The parables of the woman with the jar and the man with the barns are parables of warning. Don’t do as they did. Pay attention. Focus on what is important.

But, there is a problem with that reading. The form of the parable is set up so that we should read it positively. Jesus says, “The Kingdom of God is like a woman carrying a jar full of meal….”

We assume that the kingdom of God is a good thing. In other parables when Jesus introduces them that way, good things seem to happen. The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that becomes a shrub. The kingdom of God is like a woman who lost a coin and found it and invited the neighbors over for a party. The kingdom of God is like a man who found a pearl and sold everything to buy the pearl.

So we have a positive form and a negative story. What do we do with that? It would appear that we ought to read this negative story in a positive way. Somehow a woman losing the meal on the distant road without being aware that there is a problem opens us to the realm of God.

How?

How is the woman with the empty jar like the realm of God?

Or how is the realm of God like the woman with the empty jar?

I think it has to do with emptiness and emptying.

The realm of God comes to us in our experience of loss.

We discover the realm of God as we are emptied.

Listen to this poem by D. H. Lawrence:

Are you willing to be sponged out, erased, cancelled, made nothing?

Are you willing to be made nothing? Dipped into oblivion?

If not, you will never really change.

As a minister I have discovered from people who come to me with anxieties about faith, that in virtually every situation, the problem is not that they need to believe in something. The problem is that they need to cease their belief. They believe in things that are not helpful. They believe in things that are false, at times even harmful.

These are beliefs that have been given to them by religion. Not necessarily bad religion, sometimes toxic religion, but usually not. Usually, just religion in general. This is what the Bible is. This is who God is. This is who Jesus is. Many of us come to a point in our lives when these beliefs that we have been given do not seem to be working, but they seem to be so absolute. Rather than do the obvious and change our beliefs, we think we must keep believing these things even though they seem to make less and less sense and take more and more effort to explain. We think we should believe more or pray more or sin less. We think there is something wrong with us when we struggle with our inherited beliefs.

My role as a minister, oddly enough, has been one in which I find myself helping people let go of their beliefs rather than encouraging them to believe harder or to add more beliefs to their collection. This way of letting go—this way of emptying—is a spiritual path. There comes a time when we need to give up those things that we once thought were absolute.

By way of illustration, let’s talk about the Bible. There are other things that we can talk about, but the Bible is good for now. Through this we will get to the parable and ultimately to the purpose of religion and how one might look at life itself.

It has taken me a long time to get to this position. It is not a position I wanted to get to at first. Now I embrace it. The change that I have now embraced is not about the contents of the Bible although it is because of the contents that I have come to my conclusions. The change is in regards to the way I view the Bible.

When I was in seminary, I, like all entering students, took the Old Testament survey course. I remember this one lecture in particular. The professor was dealing with those passages in Joshua and Judges in which the Hebrew people did their battles with the surrounding tribes.

In many of these passages, YHWH or God, commands that the Hebrews kill all of the people, including women and children and animals. “Destroy them completely” is the command. Today we would call it ethnic cleansing. They are to do this in order to obey God. They do it because their god commands them to do it. It isn’t just their god, some bad god, it is our God with a capital G or as the New Revised Standard Version translates it, “the Lord” with a capital L. It is the god whom Christians turned into the Father of the Holy Trinity.

The professor offered a list of explanations for this hard text. I don’t remember any of the explanations, but none of them was adequate it seemed for me. The only explanation that was adequate for me was the obvious one—one that was not offered by the professor. That explanation is this: the writers of Joshua and Judges were justifying their violence against their neighbors by writing stories in which God supposedly told them to do these things. They made it up. These stories are fiction. They are not only fiction, but bad fiction. They are no better than their counterpart stories in Greek mythology about Zeus or in Ugartic mythology about Baal and Asherah.

It took me a long time to get to that point—to say it to myself, let alone to others from the pulpit. I began to realize that the Bible was very uneven. I began to realize that the Bible was from front to back, cover to cover, a totally human work. I began to realize that “The Lord” is a creation of the human imagination. It has taken me a long time but I finally have let go of the notion that the Bible or any other piece of literature is “divinely inspired” whatever that means.

This has been for me a long struggle and “struggle” is the word. It goes against the entire institutional apparatus that bases its own authority on the belief that the Bible is the Word of God. It has created within me great anxiety. To say it to myself and to say it publicly has been frightening to say the least. It has been an emptying.

I recognize that we are all on a different place in our journey. Some of you are light years ahead of me on this one and may be amused that I seem to be making such a big deal about this. Because we start at different places we have to empty ourselves of different things. Some of you are troubled by what I have said. If that is you, I hope you will accept the spirit in which I offer these things. I intend to be honest with my experience. For me this pulpit stands for honesty, nothing more nothing less. It doesn’t mean I am right. Honesty means that we can honestly come to different conclusions.

   

The emptying and the anxiety caused by it were not the last words. I began to realize that if it is true that the Bible, Christianity, and religion in general are totally human products, then I can appreciate the Bible, Christianity, and religion for what they are and not have to believe in a fantasy about them. I no longer have to hold them up with supernatural authority. The Bible is a human product. As such it is uneven. Some of it is very good. Some of it is not. Some of the stories I will keep, remember, and treasure. Some I will not.

Because the authority of the Bible has been emptied of its divine status, because it is a human work, I now can appreciate it. Now I have some sympathy for the writers of the Bible who told stories to justify their actions. I do the same thing. I don’t believe them. I don’t justify their actions. But I sympathize with them. They were being human.

We think that religion is supposed to give people things to believe in or to strengthen their belief in something. I have found that not to be the case. I have found that religion that actually is helpful does not give people answers. Instead it helps them wrestle with important questions. Philosopher and theologian, Don Cupitt, lists a few of these questions:

“What is the self?

What is the world?

 In what ways are we interwoven with each other and with our world?

What is wrong with us?

How can we set about changing ourselves and our world in order to attain the highest happiness or blessedness that is accessible to us?”

Those are basic human questions. They are religious questions. They are the questions that are underneath all the answers our various religions attempt provide for us. In order to get to those questions, we have to let go of our answers—especially those answers that we think we cannot let go. These are the answers, the beliefs, the doctrines that have been given to us, in good faith, by our religious heritage. But many of these answers are no longer adequate to our questions. For example, for me seeing the Bible as supernatural revelation is no longer helpful. I needed the divinity of the Bible to be emptied so its humanity could speak to me. Every now and then, it does. It finds me.

When we let go, or when we are emptied, as frightening as it might seem, we finally allow ourselves to accept life as it is with all its transience and uncertainty. Being emptied allows us to accept the world as it is without needing to seek after some other world or some divine plan or some absolute authority or even some meaning.

Being emptied is like the woman with her jar full of meal.

I will close with my reading of this parable.

The woman with her jar full of meal is like a person who is filled with beliefs and answers. These are beliefs that she has learned at a young age from people whom she loves and respects. For a long time these beliefs have served her well. But as she travels life’s path, without her knowing, her beliefs and the answers upon which she relied slip away until she discovers one day that she is left with nothing. Her jar is empty. It is devastating. She panics. She doesn’t know what to do. She wants to fill up the jar quickly with more beliefs. But she can’t. Finally she stops. She breathes. She realizes that it is not devastating. She is O.K. She breathes again. She feels better. In fact, she feels good. Really good. It is liberating. She is free! She discovers that she doesn’t need those beliefs. She doesn’t need to carry them anymore. She discovers the joy of being emptied—what Jesus called the realm of God. She looks around her with new eyes, eyes cleared, eyes wide open, and she says,

“This is life! It is what it is for as long as it is. I am going to live it.”

Amen.

ⁱ Don Cupitt. Emptiness and Brightness (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 2001), p. 4.