Stories He Told on the Road

By now he had turned toward Jerusalem, and he was going there the long way round, through one town and one village after another, teaching as he went. It took months. Crowds walked with him for a day and dropped away, and new ones came out to meet him at the next village; and wherever he stopped, somebody was waiting to argue with him. Most of what he said on that road was stories — the short kind you can carry home in your head and still be turning over a week later.

One day, in a crowd so thick that people were treading on each other, a man shouted at him about money. “Teacher! Tell my brother to split the family land with me.” Teachers were asked to settle quarrels like that all the time. He would not touch this one. “Man — who made me a judge over the two of you, to divide things up?” And then he said to the whole crowd, “Watch out. Keep clear of wanting more and more of everything. A man’s life does not come out of the things he owns, however many of them there are.” And he told them a story. “There was a rich man, and his land did well. It did so well that he stood there looking at it and said to himself, ‘What am I going to do? I have nowhere to put it all.’ And then he said, ‘I know. I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and I will put all my grain and all my good things in there. And then I will say to myself: you have plenty laid by for years and years. Take it easy. Eat. Drink. Enjoy yourself.’ But God said to him, ‘You fool. Tonight they are asking for your life back. And all the things you got ready — whose will they be?’ That is how it is for the one who piles it up for himself and is not rich toward God.” In a country where a bad year meant going hungry, a harvest like that was the best thing that could happen to a man, and building a bigger barn was the sensible thing to do with it. Jesus did not explain the story any further. It simply stops, with the new barns still only an idea in the man’s head, and the question God asked him left hanging in the air: whose will they be?

On a Sabbath he was teaching in one of the meeting houses, and there was a woman there who had been bent over for eighteen years. A weakness had taken hold of her and folded her forward, and she could not straighten up at all. For eighteen years she had been looking at the ground and at people’s feet. To see the sky, or anybody’s face, she had to twist her whole body sideways. Jesus saw her, and called her out of the crowd, and said, “Woman, you are let go of. You are free of it.” And he put his hands on her, and she came up straight, all at once, and stood there looking round at everybody, and began praising God. It had taken eighteen years to bend her over, and one moment to undo it. And the man in charge of the meeting house was furious — not with the weakness, with Jesus. He was the one responsible for the building and the readings and the order of the day, and he did not dare say it to Jesus, so he said it to the crowd instead, without using his name. “There are six days for working. Come and be healed on one of those. Not on the Sabbath.” And the Lord answered him. “You play-actors. Is there one of you who does not untie his ox or his donkey on the Sabbath and walk it out to water? Every one of you does it. And this woman — a daughter of Abraham — who has been tied up by Satan for eighteen years: should she not be set free on the Sabbath day?” And everybody who had been standing against him was ashamed; and the whole crowd was delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing. And still standing in the same room, he said, “What is the kingdom of God like? What shall I compare it to? It is like a mustard seed, which a man took and threw into his own garden. And it grew, and became a tree, and the birds of the sky nested in its branches.” And again he said, “What shall I compare the kingdom of God to? It is like the yeast a woman took and buried in a great tub of flour, enough for a feast, until the whole of it had risen.” And then he went on again, teaching in the towns and the villages as he passed through them, and making his way toward Jerusalem.

Another Sabbath he went to dinner at the house of one of the leading Pharisees, and every eye in the room was on him. He watched them back. People did not sit up at a table then; they lay on their sides on low couches set around it, and everybody in the room knew which couch was the best one and which was the worst. He watched the guests come in and work their way quietly up toward the places nearest the host. And then he told them a story about it. “When somebody invites you to a wedding, do not go and lie down in the best place. Somebody more important than you may have been invited, and the man who invited you both will come over and say, ‘Give this man your place.’ And then you will have to get up in front of everybody and go all the way down to the last place, with your face burning. So when you are invited, go and take the last place. Then when your host comes he will say, ‘Friend, come up higher.’ And you will be honored in front of everyone at the table. Because everybody who lifts himself up will be brought down, and the one who puts himself low down will be lifted up.” And then he turned to the man who had invited him, and said something that dinner guests do not say. “When you put on a meal, do not go inviting your friends and your brothers and your relatives and your rich neighbors. They will only invite you back, and then you have been paid. When you put on a feast, invite the poor, and the crippled, and the lame, and the blind. They have nothing to pay you back with — and that is exactly why you will be blessed. You will be repaid when the ones who are right with God are raised up.”

One of the men lying at the table did not know what to say to that, so he said something pious. “How happy is the man who gets to eat bread in the kingdom of God!” And Jesus told him a story about exactly that. In that country you were invited twice to a big dinner: once long beforehand, so that you could say yes, and then again on the day itself, when the food was ready. Every man in this story had already said yes. “There was a man giving a great dinner, and he invited a great many people. And when the hour came he sent his servant to tell the ones he had invited, ‘Come — it is ready now.’ And every single one of them started making excuses. The first said, ‘I have bought a field, and I have to go out and look at it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have bought five pairs of oxen, and I am on my way to try them out. Please excuse me.’ And another said, ‘I have just got married, and so I cannot come.’ “And the servant came back and told his master all of it. And the master of the house was angry, and said, ‘Go out, quickly, into the streets and the alleys of the town, and bring in the poor and the crippled and the blind and the lame.’ And the servant went, and came back and said, ‘Master, I have done what you told me, and there is still room.’ And the master said, ‘Then go out on the country roads and along the hedges, and make them come in, until my house is full. Because I tell you: not one of those men I invited is going to taste my dinner.’” He did not say who the man giving the dinner was, and nobody at that table asked him.

On the road again, going toward Jerusalem, he went through the border country between Samaria and Galilee. And as he came into a village, ten men with leprosy came out to meet him. Leprosy did not only make you ill; it put you outside. You could not live in the village, or go into the meeting house, or be touched by your own children, and if anybody came near you had to call out and warn them off. So the ten of them stopped a long way from him, the way they had to, and shouted across the gap. “Jesus! Master! Have mercy on us!” He did not touch them. He did not say one word about healing them. He called back, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” Which is what a man did after leprosy had gone: the priest looked him over and said he was clean and could come home again. So the ten of them had to set off down the road still covered in it, with nothing at all to show the priest. And on the way — walking — they were made clean. Ten men stopped in the middle of a road and looked at their own hands. And one of them, when he saw what had happened to his own skin, turned round in the road and came back, shouting praise to God the whole way, and threw himself face down at Jesus’ feet and thanked him. And he was a Samaritan — a foreigner. Samaritans and Jews did not eat together, or drink from the same cup, or agree about where God should be worshipped; the other nine would have had nothing to do with him, except that leprosy had put all ten of them outside together. And Jesus said, “Were there not ten of them made clean? Where are the other nine? Was there nobody to come back and give God the glory except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Get up and go. Your faith has saved you.”

And he told them a story about praying and never giving up. A widow in that country had no husband to speak for her in court, and usually no money to pay anybody else to do it. If a judge would not listen to her, there was nobody else she could go to. “There was a judge in a certain town who was not afraid of God and did not care what anybody thought of him. And there was a widow in that town, and she kept coming to him and saying, ‘Give me justice against the man who is wronging me.’ And for a long time he would not. But in the end he said to himself, ‘I am not afraid of God and I do not care what anybody thinks of me — but this widow is wearing me out. I will see she gets justice, before she comes back one more time and blacks my eye.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what that crooked judge says. And God — will he not give justice to his own chosen ones, who cry out to him day and night? Is he slow with them? I tell you he will give them justice, and quickly. Only — when the Son of Man comes, will he find that faith on the earth?”

Twice a day the temple filled up for prayer, and anybody at all could walk in and stand and pray. And there were some people listening to him who were quite sure they were good, and who looked down on everybody else. He told this one for them. “Two men went up to the temple to pray. One was a Pharisee. The other was a tax collector. The Pharisee stood up and prayed like this, to himself: ‘God, thank you that I am not like the rest of them — the robbers, the crooked ones, the men who break their marriages — or even like this tax collector over here. I go without food twice a week. I give away a tenth of everything I get.’ And the tax collector stood a long way off, and would not even lift his eyes up to heaven. He beat his hand against his own chest, and said, ‘God. Be merciful to me. I am the sinner.’ I tell you: it was that man who went home put right with God, and not the other one. Because everybody who lifts himself up will be brought down, and the one who puts himself low down will be lifted up.” And then he went on walking, toward Jerusalem.