This week’s play is about yet another parable that doesn’t seem to quite work. Moreover, tacked onto the end of it is a seemingly random outburst of emotion by Jesus that’s so hard to explain that the Episcopal lectionary leaves it completely out of the reading. I do my best to suggest an imaginatively plausible reading of events, and then I have Jesus come along at the end and smash it to smithereens.
“Well,” you might ask, “if you didn’t believe that your version of events was the best possible solution to the various puzzles in the story, then why offer it in the first place? What’s the better explanation that Jesus is about to reveal when the curtain crashes down on him?”
I have no idea!