The strangeness of this parable lies in the dissonance between the story and what Jesus usually teaches about wealth and reward in the Kingdom of God… …which should make us suspect that this parable isn’t actually about wealth – and may not be about the Kingdom of God, either.

So what, then, might it be about?

A brief reflection on the Greatest Commandment before the congregation entered into a lively discussion amongst themselves.

This is what true Thanksgiving does. It changes us at a deeper level than our skin. It acknowledges our true nature as creatures radically dependent on God in times of plenty as well as in times of want. It refocuses our concerns and our desires and our commitments from the things we have or the things we wish we have to the One to whom we belong and on whom we can rely.

As someone whose last name begins with a “W”, I’ve always appreciated those rare moments when a teacher would say something like “and, just for a change, let’s go in reverse alphabetical order” and, just like that, I would be moved from the back to the front of the line, displacing all those smug As and Bs as the last became first and the first became last.

It is easy to lose sight of just how unreasonable Jesus actually is – partly because we – and our forebearers – have worked very hard to make him less so. Finding it impossible to actually live as he says, we have come up with justifications and rationalizations and approximations to make our failure feel more acceptable. We accuse Jesus, either openly or covertly, of being too much of an idealist – of not taking into account the complications of the real world; the necessary compromises of real-politic – whether at the level of the nation-state or of the community or even at the level of our own all-too-human hearts.