· Zephaniah 1:7, 12-18
· Psalm 90:1-8, 12 (12)
· 1 Thessalonians 5:1-11
· Matthew 25:14-30
Sometimes you have to wonder what in the world the translators were thinking. They translated Zephaniah 1:12 as "I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs", but then they put a little footnote in tiny letters that says "Hebrew: who thicken." So "I will punish the people who thicken on their dregs."
Of course if you know nothing about making wine, the original makes no sense at all. But here is the thing: first of all you crush the grapes in a wine press. Out comes a slurry that contains grape juice, but also the pulp, skin, seeds, stems, and other things that were thrown in or fell into the press, such as insects, spiders, who knows what else. So now you have to separate the juice from the solids by filtering. But once you have filtered out the visible solids, there is always a certain amount of suspended particles that have passed through the filter, and that remain suspended as long as the liquid is agitated. If you let the liquid sit, the particles will gradually fall to the bottom. That's the dregs. If you let the wine sit on the dregs, it will get a bad taste, so you carefully drain out the liquid without disturbing the bottom, so the dregs aren't stirred back into the wine. But you can never get all the liquid out, or you'd be getting the dregs along with it; so when you have drained as much as you can, there is still some wine sitting on the dregs. Now if you let that sit instead of cleaning the container right away, it will congeal into a sticky mass that is impossible to clean out of the wine jar, so now your jar is ruined and you can throw it out. This residue is so tenacious and typical of wine-making that archaeologists have identified it in old clay jars from Egypt dated to 3150 BCE, and that slurry is the earliest evidence we have of wine-making.
So that's what Zephaniah wrote down. It's not just about "complacency", which is bad enough. It's about people who sit in their impurity, out of laziness, until they harden into a vile sticky gunk that ruins the container.
Now as much as Zephaniah lost in translation, the Gospels are even worse. The Gospels are the greatest journalistic fiasco in history. The son of God comes down and walks around teaching and doing miracles; nobody comes to report on it. There were reliable journalists back then, you know. Like Pline the Elder. Went to see the eruption of Vesuvius, got killed by the ash falls. What we call today "extreme journalism." And yet none of these great Roman or Greek reporters came to see Jesus. At one point "some Greeks" came to talk to him, but they weren't famous enough to be named.
After his arrest, torture, death and resurrection, his followers scatter across the known world, where they face constant persecution. Take Paul: "Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I received a stoning. Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters; in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty, often without food, cold and naked." (2 Corinthians 11:24-27) So these are traumatized people, physically and psychologically. The fact that they go on carrying this message tells us how convinced they were, but it also means that their recollection of fine details was probably poor.
Forty years later, some guy finally decides to put together a compendium of all the stories he can find about this Jesus dude. He's never met him, so he collects writings from other people and puts together his own story – no bibliography, no sources named, and it's in Greek, whereas Jesus spoke Aramaic. Then other guys take that guy's story and then another guy's story and edit them together and add more stuff they've heard or read, still no attribution, and still in Greek. And then another guy writes another version, still in Greek, and it sounds totally different from the other guys. This whole process takes about thirty or forty years. And then on top of that, copyists, editors and church politicians modify the original, and then it gets translated over and over by other people with agendas.
So when we quote Jesus, we can hope we're quoting Jesus, but none of the statements that are attributed to him would be admissible in court. And when you look at the parables in particular, there is something weird about them: they're not construction metaphors. Think about it. Jesus was a construction worker. That's what "carpenter" means; carpentry is not widget-making as most people think, or finishing and renos, but the structural work of a building. A carpenter is a construction worker. You could make tons of parables about construction. In fact there are many construction metaphors in the Hebrew scriptures. So how come Jesus' parables are mostly about agriculture and money?
And why are Jesus' parables so lame? Zephaniah's thing with the "thickening on their dregs" is awesome and you know exactly what he's on about. The parable of the talents? BO-ring! Maybe the evangelists only kept the ones that spoke to them, or maybe Jesus was actually not a very good prophet.
And you know what, that's kinda the whole point. If God wanted to send his son to flap his lips and do nothing, he would have sent him to a different foster father. Like a lawyer or an accountant. But no, God sent Jesus to be raised as a construction worker. He wanted a big burly dude who would do physically arduous work and not talk so much. If you spend a lot of time talking instead of physically getting things done, you're not gonna be employed in construction for very long. Talk is cheap and God has plenty of prophets. If he just wanted more talk, he'd have sent more prophets. But he sent a construction worker. He sent somebody who was going to do something about it.
Maybe that's also why things weren't written down in a timely way. Because writing down words was not the priority, like it is with prophets. The important thing was to do something. Jesus did something. People were impressed by his actions. Then the disciples also took action. The words were not written down for a long time, but the actions were immediate. And you can be sure that God had a good reason for sending his son to be a man of action rather than another mouthpiece.
And that's what this parable of the talents is about, whether it's authentic or apocryphal. Jesus is telling us: do something. Get to work. Don't sit there with what I gave you and wait for me to get back and tell you what to do. All that stuff with the kingdom of God, that could have been added for church politics, but the moral of the story is still: do something. Take action. Take responsibility.
It's the same thing Zephaniah said. If you sit there in your filth and impurity and wait instead of doing what needs doing, and turn into a vile useless gunk that ruins the vessel, God is gonna smite the crap out of you. Zephaniah said it much better, but Jesus did it. And Jesus calls us to follow him. To take action instead of sitting in a circle moving our mouths.
You know why I think Jesus ended up dying on the cross? So we'd shut up about who's holier than who and get to work. If it was just about forgiveness, God didn't have to let us kill his son. Jesus died to prove a point to us about taking away the sin of the world. And the point is, stop bickering about what's a sin and what's not, which sin is the worst, which sins can or can't be forgiven, what you gotta do to be forgiven, who's forgiven and who's not, and on and on. God doesn't want to hear all this nonsense anymore. So Jesus died to put an end to the discussion and make us get to work. Toolbox meeting is over: now go get 'er done. And so far we've completely missed the point.
Praise be to God, the Maker, the Shaper, the Disposer of affairs, the Most Strong.
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