BibleWorm

This week is Palm Sunday in the Christian tradition, and BibleWorm is reading the story of Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem as told in Matthew 21:1-17. While the text is a familiar one for many, Matthew’s version has some intriguing surprises along the way. Jesus seems to ride on two animals at the same time in this text—both a donkey and a colt, and Jesus seems to take these animals from the owner without permission. What is Matthew up to in telling the story in this dramatic way?

What’s more, Matthew combines the story of Jesus’ entry with the story of Jesus overturning the money changers in the temple and then of Jesus healing the blind and lame in the temple while the children proclaim “Hosanna to the Son of David!” In our reading, this text invites us to examine the ways our own communities are going about business as usual while excluding the most vulnerable members of society. It invites us to acts of disruption that shake us out of comfortable modes of operation to make our communities houses of prayer for all people.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:31-46, which feels like a culminating text for our weeks studying parables. The text seems to locate us in the future, at the time of the final judgment – but it’s not just a different place on the timeline. The nature of the cosmos has shifted, and maybe something in the nature of Jesus, too, after the resurrection. All of the overlapping groups that have been present in the parables – the wheat and the weeds, if you will - will be sorted into two distinct fates. On a quick read, the grounds for this sorting may not seem too high a bar - we must offer generous, loving care for the bodies and spirits and the dignity of our co-travellers on this earth. But how do we keep this care from becoming primarily an act of self-interest, given the presence of those hell fires - would that kind of motivation ruin it? And wait, did this text just say that we need to do this in every single instance, without exception? The words of this text may feel familiar to you, but boy are they a radical reorientation.

BibleWorm recently passed something of a podcasting milestone with our 100,000 download. To celebrate, we are re-releasing our very first podcast episode, from September of 2019—back when we were still NL;DR. First Bobby and Amy reminisce about our experience of creating BibleWorm, and then we share that first episode. It’s not great, y’all—but at least we can celebrate how far we’ve come!

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 25:1–13, the Parable of the Wise and Foolish Bridesmaids who go out to meet the bridegroom but fall asleep when he is delayed. The five wise bridesmaids have enough oil to make it to the wedding, but the five foolish ones neglect to bring extra oil and so are shut outside. Once again, this parable warns us that the kingdom of heaven will be delayed and then come all at once, so we must always be prepared. We wrestle with the individuality of this parable. Why can’t the five prepared bridesmaids just share their lamps with the unprepared ones? But ultimately we conclude that there are just some things we have to do for ourselves—and keeping oil in our metaphorical lamps is one of them. Like it or not, no one can live a righteous life for us. It’s up to us to be prepared.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 22:1-14, a parable of a wedding banquet that a king plans for his son … but it doesn’t go quite as expected.  We love thinking about the combination of obligation and joy and grandeur and intimacy baked into this story. We REALLY loved the idea of a last minute invitation to a mixed multitude of seemingly random people to come witness these nuptials when the first group of invitees didn’t quite work out. And I’ll be honest, we struggled with how to make sense of the fact that one person from the latter group is found unprepared. How could he have been prepared when there was no time between the invitation and the party! Moving from the register of the story into what we think it is trying to teach about the kingdom being described, maybe that’s exactly the question this text wants us to sit with–  if there’s not going to be time later, how can humans best prepare, each of us, right now? 

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 20:1–16, often called the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, in which the kingdom of heaven is said to be like a landowner who pays the laborers a full day’s wage no matter how long they’ve worked. We wrestle with the abject unfairness of this wage system and empathize with the workers who have labored a long day in the hot sun. Yet we also marvel at the generosity of the vineyard owner, who gives everyone what they need for the day no matter how much work they’ve done. Maybe, we think, in the kingdom of heaven people are not rewarded for the labor they provide but rather receive what they need to live a full and abundant life. If we read ourselves as the landowners, this becomes a lesson on how we should conduct our own economic practices, not only paying fair wages but giving generously until everyone has enough. And if we read God as the landowner, then this becomes a parable about God’s radical and endless generosity that welcomes more and more people into the kingdom and treats us all as people of dignity and worth.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 18:15-35 – important and challenging texts about what happens on the ground, in the real and messy world of human community, when something has gone wrong. How can we hold each other accountable with a loving spirit - and when do we need to ask someone to step back from the community because of their behaviors? What is the relationship between compassion, fairness and punishment – between mercy and judgment – here and now, and in the future kingdom? These are hard questions that kinda we wish we didn’t have to think about – but we are messy creatures, us humans, so we do.

On this special Ash Wednesday episode of BibleWorm we’re reading Matthew 18:1-14 in which the disciples ask Jesus who is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Jesus not only refuses to answer the question but insists that one must become like a little child in order to even enter the kingdom of heaven in the first place. It is only the empire that thinks in terms of status and greatness. The kingdom of heaven extends a welcome to all. In fact, Jesus tells us to cut off our hands or pluck out our eyes if they tempt us to think and act according to the imperial logic, which distinguishes the great people from the small people, even in acts of charity. Finally, Jesus tells the parable of the lost sheep, which teaches us not to pursue fairness or equity but rather to make sure that each person has whatever they may need to live a full and abundant life. As Christians enter into the season of Lent, this text calls us to welcome those without status and seek abundant life for all. That sounds like an amazing way to spend 40 days.

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 16:24-17:8, the story of the transfiguration. We think about symbolic moments like this one, the ones that overflow with meaning, that fill your cup to overflowing, and how difficult it is for us humans to just co-exist with them without trying to grasp onto them somehow. We pull apart the different ways that the word life is used in this passage – preserving life as a focus on avoiding pain, vs preserving life as finding the strength to do what is real and godly even when it is hard … which it will be. And we wonder how we can live with a sense of urgency about the coming kingdom of God, even when the fulfillment seems to have been forestalled.  

This week BibleWorm reads Matthew 13:24-43, Jesus’s parables of the kingdom. We talk about how to read parables and why we think Jesus uses parables to declare what has been hidden since the beginning of the world. And we discuss three of Jesus parables, which compare the kingdom of heaven to a field of wheat overplanted with weeds, to yeast leavening bread, and to a mustard seed that grows into a nice shrub where the birds can make a nest. In what way is the kingdom of heaven like these things? We talk about the gleaners in the field who throw the weeds into the furnace and we wrestle with the role of fear in Jesus’s description of the kingdom. But mostly we notice that these parables are about bringing life—to the wheat, to the birds, to the bread—and even to the weeds themselves. Maybe the kingdom of heaven is found in nurturing life in everyone we meet.