The Storyteller - Part 3 - As told by Nathanael

He had lots of other stories for us, and some have stayed with me, ever since. Hopeful stories; encouraging stories; stories with unexpected endings. A man gets mugged by bandits while travelling along that rough old road which leads from Jerusalem down the ravine towards Jericho. It's something that happens a lot, I'm afraid, in that wild Judean landscape. He's lying helpless and motionless, by the side of the road. A priest walks down the road and sees him lying there, but he does nothing about it; a Levite passes by, too ‑ neither of them wants to touch what might well be a corpse and by so doing make themselves ritually unclean! Legal correctness comes before compassion!

Then, a Samaritan comes along (and you can hear the crowd gasp when he so much as mentions the name ‑ Samaritans are not exactly welcome, in these parts!) but this Samaritan stops; he takes pity on the poor chap, then he binds up his wounds and looks after him. "And which of them" asks Jesus, in that gentle voice of his, "which of them would you think was a good neighbour to the chap who was mugged?" You could've heard a pin drop ‑ we all knew the answer, of course. Jesus was like that. He just didn't 'toe the party line' at all. Maybe that's why the 'Jerusalem Top Brass' distrusted him so. But it was also why we loved him ‑ and so did the crowds, of course.

Look, I could be here all day, telling you what we did, going around with Jesus. We did make at least one trip through Samaria, in fact, when he wanted to visit the famous site of Jacob's Well, in Sychar; I remember he talked to a Samaritan woman there, and she brought lots of her friends to listen to him. I guess she proved to be a better evangelist than most of us! And at Passover-time, he'd want to go up to Jerusalem, and that always proved an eventful trip. But we don't have all day, so I'm just telling you about some of the stories he used to tell us. I remember them so well.

I can't mention them all, of course, but there was a group of three stories he told us which all seemed to 'fit together'. All these tales seemed to be about being lost and found, and he told them because some of those Jerusalem 'High‑Ups' were criticising him for making friends with people who they thought were 'beyond the pale' ‑ especially the hated tax‑collectors, who they regarded as traitors to the Jewish cause; admittedly, some of them were dishonest, too ‑ but not all.

"A farmer has a hundred sheep," he says, "and one of them gets lost. What'll he do? Won't he leave the ninety‑nine others in the field and go off in search of the one that's lost, until he finds it? When he finds it, he'll joyfully carry it home on his shoulders, and he'll call together his friends and neighbours, saying, 'Let's have a party! ‑ I've found my lost sheep.' In the same way, there's more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety‑nine others who are righteous and haven't strayed away!" ‑ and of course, we all knew who he was talking about ‑ those who were 'righteous' in their own eyes! That's why the Pharisees hated him so!

"Or suppose", he goes on, "a woman has ten silver coins and she loses one." A string of coins like that was really important to a woman ‑ it was like a family dowry, really. So he goes on, "Won't she light a lamp and search carefully until she finds it? And when she finds it, she'll call in her friends and neighbours and say, 'Let's have a party! ‑ I've found my lost coin.' In the same way, there's joy in the presence of God's angels, when even one sinner repents."

And then, Jesus told them another great story, about a man who had two sons. I think it's my favourite! Normally, a man's estate wouldn't be divided between his sons until he died, when each would get his share ‑ the elder receiving the main inheritance, of course. But, on this occasion, the younger son was impatient to get his hands on his share, and the father agreed to let him have it. So off he goes, but ‑ as so often happens with young men, I'm afraid ‑ he got into bad company and bad habits, and soon, he and his newly‑acquired inheritance were parted, and he found himself flat broke and well‑nigh starving! The only job he could get was as a swineherd ‑ and, for a Jew, looking after pigs would be the supreme indignity, of course!

What to do? Eat humble pie! He keeps thinking about home, and how even his father's slaves are far better looked after than he is now. So he decides to head for home, make a clean breast of it, tell his father what an idiot he's been and ask for a job as a humble slave, please, back on the farm. Anything would be better than this!

He's expecting a pretty frosty welcome, but little did he realise that his father had been watching out for him every day since his son had left home. He sees him coming from miles away, runs to meet him, hugs him and kisses him and makes a terrific fuss of him. He tells his servants to fetch the best robe for his son, and to kill the calf that they'd been fattening up for a special occasion like this. "We must celebrate with a feast," he says, "for this son of mine was effectively dead, and has now returned to life. He was lost, but now he's found." And so the party begins!

Now, there was a second part to Jesus' story ‑ about the adverse reaction of the elder son, all pompous and self‑righteous. We all recognised who that chap represented: those Law‑Teachers from Jerusalem! They never liked the way Jesus mixed with people like us, many of whom they considered to be 'sinners', because they happened to break some of their legal, technical embargoes.

But the really important part of all those stories ‑ lost sheep, lost coin, lost son ‑ was that, to use Jesus' words, "there's more joy in heaven over one lost sinner who repents and returns to God than over ninety‑nine others who are righteous (self‑righteous, he meant, of course) and who haven't strayed away!"

Now isn't that just one terrific message! Small wonder we all wanted to go out and tell everyone about it ‑ and, at one stage, Jesus did indeed send us disciples out, two by two, to do just that: to spread the good news. And wonderful things happened ‑ healings, conversions ‑ you name it! So exciting!

But after we'd all been following him around Palestine for three years or so, the atmosphere began to change. We knew that the Jewish 'Big‑Wigs' in Jerusalem were out to 'get' Jesus. Their spies seemed to be everywhere. And we saw a change in Jesus, too. He was spending whole nights in prayer ‑ often, we would wake up in the morning and he wouldn't be there, returning to our camp later, looking drawn. The Storyteller's stories were changing, too. They were getting darker ‑ more mysterious.

One day, there were lots of Pharisees around, mingling with the crowd and asking awkward questions. So Jesus tells another of his little stories:

"A man planted a vineyard. He built a wall around it, dug a pit for pressing out the grape juice, and built a lookout tower. Then he leased the vineyard out to some tenant farmers, and moved to another country. At the time of the grape harvest, he sent one of his servants to collect his share of the crop. But the farmers grabbed the servant, beat him up, and sent him back empty‑handed. The owner then sent another servant, but they insulted him and beat him over the head. The next servant he sent was killed. Others he sent were either beaten or killed, until there was only one left ‑ his son, whom he loved dearly. The owner finally sent him, thinking, 'Surely they will respect my son.' But the tenant farmers said to one another, 'Here comes the heir to this estate. Let's kill him, and get the estate for ourselves!' So they grabbed him and murdered him and threw his body out of the vineyard. "And what do you suppose the owner of the vineyard will do?" Jesus asked. "I'll tell you ‑ he'll come and kill those farmers, and he'll lease out the vineyard to others."

The religious leaders wanted to arrest Jesus, because they realized, of course, that he was telling the story against them ‑ they were undoubtedly the 'wicked farmers', in his story. But they were afraid of the crowd, so they left him alone for a while and went away. But they really hated him ‑ they were jealous of him, I suppose.

We could see what he was saying to the Pharisees, alright ‑ and we loved it, of course! But how slow we were to cotton on to what he was really saying to us! We really believed in Jesus, and we wanted him to throw off the quiet rôle that it sometimes seemed that he'd adopted, as 'The Storyteller', and we all wanted him to reveal himself to everyone as our Messiah and rightful King. So what were we to make of this new story? If the 'owner of the vineyard' was God, as we guessed, and the tenant farmers in the story represented the Jews, then the servants whom God had sent to them must have been the Prophets, who the Jews had often mistreated in the past. But then, in the story, God had sent his own Son to them, and him ‑ they killed! Surely, that bit couldn't be about Jesus ‑ could it?

Now you all know very well how the story of Jesus' life ended, in apparent tragedy, at Passover-time in Jerusalem, and how we all let him down, by running away. I don't want to dwell on that ‑ it's not something I'm at all proud of. But you know, too, that that wasn't the end of the story!

He'd told us countless times what would happen, but either we weren't listening properly, or maybe we just couldn't take it in ‑ perhaps we thought that what he said was just another of his wonderful stories. But it wasn't ‑ it was absolutely true! Jesus did indeed rise from the dead!

He appeared to us all, in the Upper Room ‑ I saw him with my own eyes ‑ touched him, even! He was real ‑ and yet ... and yet ... he was somehow different. He somehow looked different ‑ and yet, somehow, he seemed to look the same, too. I know it seems strange, but I really can't explain it to you any better than that. He could come and go through locked doors, appear and disappear at will. And when he spoke, it was with absolute authority, as though God Himself were speaking to us. I really can't explain it to you any better than that, I'm afraid.

Jesus of Nazareth ‑ how could I ever have said to Philip, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?" I'm ashamed of that, now, for Jesus of Nazareth changed my life, as I'm sure he has changed yours too.

Jesus the great Storyteller? ‑ yes, indeed ‑ but Jesus the Great Saviour of the World, too.

Amen

BK‑