Jesus' Parables Speak to Power and Greed: Confronting Climate Change Denial

By Richard Q. Ford

The psychological process of denial involves refusing to see what is in front of us, and for some time we have been struggling to shape master narratives to encompass climate breakdown. Jesus' longer parables offer insight into the possibilities that are hidden within the hierarchies of power. Through the work of understanding the experiences of all the parable actors, we are invited to practice the empathy required to face the global challenges of the twenty-first century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Sep 19, 2022
• ISBN: 9781666794526

Richard Q. Ford

Richard Q. Ford, MDiv, PhD, a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist, is coauthor with Sidney J. Blatt of Therapeutic Change: An Object Relations Perspective, and author of The Parables of Jesus: Recovering the Art of Listening. He resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts.

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Introduction

Climate breakdown is real. It is irreversible. It is the most pressing, all-encompassing issue of the twenty-first century. ¹ As the evidence mounts, fewer and fewer people the world over remain unaware of the scientific hypothesis that humans are responsible. ² Yet many are in denial. They refuse to see what is in front of them. What informs the current refusal, by large segments of the population, to recognize the realities of climate breakdown?

The answer may be found in a narrative that is as old as human civilization, a story that goes back to the earliest human hierarchies. It tells of efforts to cling to power. When the few learned to control the fates of the many, they also mastered ways to justify that control. In service to the desire to possess more, they created stories of such conviction that they transformed what was once mere possibility into an inescapable imperative. These narratives enable and insist on the ongoing success of endless expansion.

In his day, Jesus confronted a narrative not unlike our own. He lived in an era when monetization of the economy rendered even more efficient the most efficient empire the world had yet seen. The worldview that subjugates the resources of the many to the control of the few was firmly entrenched in the Roman Empire of 2,000 years ago, as it is today in the American empire. Under the rubric Pax Romana, Roman armies stripped everyone else of resources, sweeping a huge, one-way flow of land, goods, and slaves into the control of the elites.

These elites created narratives—beginning with an account of the virgin birth of Caesar Augustus—that justified their right to exploitation. The central purpose of Roman imperial theology was to lock in the privilege of a few over the welfare of the many. The gods have chosen Rome. The gods have determined that the Romans should be victorious with their military might. The gods have ordained Roman domination. This is not only the way things are; this is the way things are supposed to be. Thus, Caesar and the Roman aristocracy bestowed upon themselves the divine right to appropriate our shared resources.³

Jesus adopted a particular strategy in addressing the economic and social injustices that resulted. He told stories. Not treatises on societal dysfunction, but rather simple tales, called parables, that tell of two persons forced to rely on one another across widely differing economic and social positions. Of the longer parables that have survived, nine are thought by scholars to be authentic parables of the historical Jesus. In each, Jesus consistently employed the following plot devices: two characters, one possessing power and the other not, are placed in a situation of having to collaborate. Because of the differences in power, each perceives the other in a distorted way. As a result, collaboration disintegrates.

Jesus not only puts the economically dominant character in charge, he lets him pass judgment on his own behavior. In one way or another, these characters rationalize both their endless quests for the elusive gratifications of wealth and their distortions of protests by the powerless. Both themes call upon listeners to see what is not described: Nowhere is the deprivation for which the overlord is responsible addressed.

Jesus leaves entirely to his listeners the job of inferring what it is like to be exploited. He leaves to his listeners the work of seeing through the deceptions engineered by the dominant character. Listeners must wrestle with the ways in which each character’s attitude towards the other makes sense. They must penetrate long histories of dominance and submission that precede the failed interactions in the story. These histories lead to misunderstandings that result in tragedy.

That task, the one Jesus assigned his listeners, resembles the challenge faced by those engulfed in the still widespread denial of climate change. Like the underlings in Jesus’ stories, they must struggle on their own to perceive how they have been taken in and themselves become victims. Though the scientific facts of such imminent peril are increasingly acknowledged, even among deniers, the task of breaking through resistance to significant action remains formidable. To shift the paradigms of change, one must challenge economic certainties thousands of years in the making.

Jesus’ parables are located precisely at the intersection of domination and submission. They interrogate listener propensity to hand authority over to an overlord—to allow that authority not only to define what is going on but simultaneously to dismiss the point of view of the underling. Jesus has us straddle a fissure characteristic of all societies, but one that has become particularly dangerous for our own.

When these stories are seen as complex commentaries on cultures of dominance and submission, they spring to life in our contemporary world. Clearly, Jesus was not confronting the unprecedented realities of global warming. Nonetheless, his parables consistently engage what is perhaps the central issue in climate denial, namely the way humans, in order to dominate others, deceive themselves. His exceedingly brief narratives offer exceptional insights into the range of human motivations to not see. Even the gospel editors minimized his invitation to wrestle with the misperceptions occurring between superiors and inferiors. Instead of understanding each character as equally involved in a conflict with the other, they transformed the powerful character into an allegorical figure for God. The resulting prospect of a rescuing God obscured the realities of human conflict.

If we accept that we are not going to be released from the consequences of climate change through some kind of adaptive intervention from above, then we must work to find terms to express the seeming contradiction, How can a God who does not intervene be with us? These enduring parables provide a forum for such work.

All of Jesus’ longer narratives leave a great deal unsaid. They are replete with carefully crafted gaps, which the listener must fill to make sense of the whole. They become what we make of them. For this reason, his parables have no right or wrong interpretations. How we fill in the gaps tells us less about the stories than about ourselves. What these stories do, brilliantly, is allow us more readily to understand what we have chosen to see and what not to see.

By converting the parables’ ambiguous invitation into an expectation that God will intervene, we overlook the myriad ways these narratives respect the role humans have to play. Do we choose to emphasize how God will intervene to bring about growth and harmony? Or, when confronted with the corruption inherent in human hierarchy, do we recognize how we ourselves are called upon to intervene? The essence of this second response is captured in an aphorism attributed to St. Augustine: Without God, we cannot; without us, God will not.

1

. The proposal to use the phrase climate breakdown to replace climate change was made by the British author and journalist George Monbiot in The Guardian Weekly.

2

. An accessible presentation of the basic science is found in the Netflix TV series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, season

1

, episode

12

, narrated by Neil deGrasse Tyson,

2014

.

3

. When I pointed out to a Sunday school class that the Roman emperor, together with the Roman aristocracy, controlled probably

50

percent of the Roman Empire’s wealth, a fourth-grader raised her hand and observed, "Oh! That’s the way it is today. The

1

percent has all the money!"

1

A Woman with Leaven, a Woman with a Jar, and a Man with a Sword

We start this book with three very brief parables, almost certainly authentic to the historical Jesus, ¹ and placed side by side in the Gospel of Thomas.

A Woman with Leaven

Jesus [said],

(a) The Father’s imperial rule is like [a] woman

(b) who took a little leaven, [hid] it in dough,

(c) and made it into large loaves of bread.

A Woman with a Jar

Jesus said,

(a) The Father’s imperial rule is like a woman

who was carrying a [jar] full of meal.

(b) 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.

(c) When she reached her house, she put the jar down

and discovered it was empty.

A Man with a Sword

Jesus said,

(a) The Father’s imperial rule is like a person

who wanted to kill someone powerful.

(b) While still at home he drew his sword and thrust it

into the wall to find out whether his hand would go in.

(c) Then he killed the powerful one.

(Thomas 96–98 Scholars Version)

•

The parable of the leaven underscores the efficacy of collaborating within the limits of nature. Its image of yeast immersed in flour evokes the ever-widening patterns of interaction characteristic of natural growth—of seed enclosed in soil and semen fertilizing an egg. Both in its evolutionary history and in the mother’s womb, the beginning swelling into life is imperceptible. (The seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how [Mark 4:27].) From ancient times to the present day, this process yields enormous satisfaction and endless mystery.

The parable of the jar, with its suggestion of miscarriage, delivers the shock of unexpected moments of disaster—of malfunction in the natural order, but not of malfeasance. In the leaven, the plot line is utterly predictable. In the jar what should have been commonplace gets traumatically disrupted. Neither of these two stories gives human initiative pride of place. Both privilege natural forces.

When considering the three stories as a whole, what stands out is how radically the parable of the man with a sword differs from the first two. It breaks with their depiction of the natural order. The stories progress from collaboration with the natural order (leaven), to anonymous disaster within the natural order (jar), to humans operating outside the natural order (sword). Instead of describing what the natural order does for or to humans, the third parable focuses on what humans do to each other. It replaces the dominance of the natural order with the dominance of human decision-making. Put in terms of climate breakdown, the first parable may be said to describe the benefit of operating within the known boundaries of climate, and the second to depict the disruptive power of climate. Against that backdrop of the natural order acting predictably or erratically, the third stands out by referencing humans acting to transform climate. It thus embodies the endless human conceit that coercion can escape retaliation.

Unlike the leaven, the outcome in the sword is unpredictable. Because the man gains his authority through violence, justified or not, that authority is perennially vulnerable to overthrow by greater violence. And just as the one man shoves his sword into the body of another, so humans inject deadly amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Because we gain our position by violence, not collaboration, we too will be subject to retaliation by greater violence.

If the yeast can be seen to represent natural fruition, and the jar to represent natural disaster, the sword can represent deliberate human attacks on human bodies. Here is one human body, integrating untold layers of complexity, now suddenly disemboweling, deadening, and draining another of all possibility. This instant of violence stands in utter contrast to the eons of evolution required for the first mitosis of the first cell—an event surely equal in magnitude to that first moment in which the universe itself was born. Moving from the expansion of the big bang to the mitosis of a cell to the birth of a self-awareness capable of imagining the murder of a rival, we arrive at a central question: How can the self-determining human live in concert with the eons of developing life contained within the natural order? The answer can be found in Jesus’ manner of living. The only way to be kingly is to be subject to. In being subject to, Jesus exemplified what the natural order requires of humans if they are to thrive.

Though a man’s sword can be readily interpreted as sexual, the challenges of today’s world require us to look beyond the image of a male thrusting a sword into a female body. The image of the sword must be expanded to represent an exponentially larger means of destruction. Here bodies must be understood to include political bodies, national bodies, and world bodies. The critical involvement of individuals controls the fate of millions. We have reached a moment in evolutionary time when a few persons are capable not only of destroying each other but of endangering all humanity. We face the reality of destruction that is not only caused, but planned, by humans. The newly powerful man wants to penetrate, exploit, and destroy the natural order, and the body of Mother Earth herself. Here we see the face of willful human destruction of the very source of life.

This present reflection is from a contemporary perspective. It leaves open the question of how an ancient might have imagined the contest between emerging life and sudden death. Nonetheless, the sequential placement of these three parables enables both ancients and moderns to perceive the contrast among the natural emergence in the leaven, the perturbations of nature in the jar, and the unnatural ambition in the sword. The murderer intends, in an instant, to disrupt and then transform the progression of eons. He will upset the rhythms of the natural order, whether beneficent or tragic, with his willingness to use violence to effect change. He will disrupt the natural order and bend it to his will. He neither consults others nor doubts his design—only his courage. He knows the right way to go. He will not see that his intervention will provoke counter-interventions. He believes he can escape retaliation. He is the epitome of the interventionist. He is the embodiment of the self-deceived. As he strides forward, believing he can survive and succeed, he becomes a masterful representation of the strong man denying the coming retaliation of climate breakdown.

1

. One possible criterion indicating which of the longer parables may be attributed to the historical Jesus is the presence of sustained tension between its two major participants.

2

A Widow and a Judge and the Wish for a Rescuing God

Among Jesus’ longer narrative parables, the most condensed and most complex is that of a widow and a judge. It reads as follows:

The Situation

In a certain city there was a judge

who neither feared God

nor had respect for people.

Scene 1

In that city there was a widow

who kept coming to him and saying,

Grant me justice against my opponent.

Scene 2

For a while he refused,

Scene 3

but later he said to himself,

"Though I have no fear of God

and no respect for anyone,

yet because this widow keeps bothering me,

I will grant her justice,

so that she may not wear me out

by continually coming."

Luke 18:2b–5 (NRSV)

Introduction

The concept of Christian religious literacy encompasses two very different but interactive domains, one of historical reconstruction and the other of modern response. For the response to be appropriate, the reconstruction must first be adequate. Likewise, unless it is refreshed by modern response, historical reconstruction will atrophy and be relegated to the ivory towers of academia. In that case many of us reading this book would simply close its pages.

This chapter focuses on the three sentences that comprise the outline of an enigmatic and complex parable of Jesus, that of the unjust judge. To our advantage the narrative calls less for an understanding of time-bound social and economic conventions than for an appreciation of the illusions required for the exercise of power. Illusions, unlike conventions, are timeless. Across centuries, continents, and civilizations, they regularly infect humans who reach for the pinnacles of power. They are as disconcerting today as they were when the character of the judge was first conceived.

Many listeners are deeply troubled by the ways in which this parable seemingly champions a combination of absolute power and absolute self-delusion. The parable firmly discounts the age-old hope that our God will save us. Whatever vindication the widow receives comes about for all the wrong reasons. Any hope that justice will prevail is eradicated. Instead, the narrative focuses on the judge’s mocking question. He asks, in effect, Where is your God?

This seeming breakdown of law is so appalling that listeners, beginning with Luke, find it impossible to tolerate. Luke wrote:

And the Lord said, Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you he will quickly grant justice to them. (Luke

18

:

6

–

8

)

The parable virtually compels listeners to introduce a deity who intervenes. However, to do so, listeners must fly in the face of Jesus’ insistent exclusion of that solution. They must confront the fact that nowhere in the story does Jesus provide any hint of God’s intervention. Even Luke, when attempting to rectify this omission, dares not tamper with the parable’s construction. Left standing on its own, that structure seems to exclude all possibility for justice.

Nonetheless, listeners must respect the boundaries of the story. They must not fall prey to Luke’s urgent editorial intervention, one that releases the narrative’s tension and altogether vitiates Jesus’ challenging invitation.

For those who remain within the boundaries of verses 2b–5, the task of creating coherence throws up questions such as: What forces drive this intimate, utterly impersonal conflict so squarely situated within a massive imbalance of power? What motivates the widow’s extraordinarily dangerous behavior? What provokes the judge’s implacable resistance? Why doesn’t she just give up? Why doesn’t he just give in? Why, in fact, does he ultimately give in? Only