We somehow imagine that the disciples, living with Jesus each day as they did, had some clear advantages over us in the faith department. But the disciples have the same reaction to hearing Jesus’s view of the world that we do, they say, “Give me more faith.”
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What God has joined together no human being may separate. I say these words at every wedding I do. They were probably said at your wedding. Like many words we hear all the time, we tend to take them for granted. Today, we get the context of where they come from, though, and it’s possible that hearing the context they will make us a little uncomfortable. Because today we are back in touch with a Jesus we don’t know how to deal with — the uncompromising Jesus. He is asked a question about whether divorce is possible, since under the law of Moses it was very possible, especially for a…
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Being a tenant farmer back in the first century looks like a bad deal, when you take a close look at it. Because here’s how this relationship worked, the relationship that in this gospel parable goes so very, very badly. You, the tenant farmer, are in charge of a vineyard you don’t own. You do all the work, you plant the grapes, you fend off the vermin, you worry about the rain, you pick the weeds, you do all the backbreaking manual labor that goes along with running a vineyard. If something breaks, you fix it, even though it’s not yours. And then, at the end of the season, when…