by Robert Gregory
The year 2021-2022 marks the eighth year since the founding of the Joseph and Alice McKeen Study Center at Bowdoin College. It is also the eighth year of the publication of the Agathos Journal. We encourage the students at the McKeen Center to contribute essays to this Journal connected with our weekly study of the scriptures that follow a four-year recurring cycle: creation, justice, the final judgment, and the parables of Jesus. The scripture texts vary from year to year, but we hold to this pattern as a way to help students to orient themselves to the coordinates of time (past, present, and future). The parables of Jesus embed abstract principles of justice and the ethical life in narrative stories over which Jesus controls characters, time, and space. Jesus makes the actors do and say what he intends, and the elements of nature also respond the way he wants them to. All of this requires the reader to describe the world the way he does. Why not? He is in charge!
For by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers: all things were created by him, and for him: (Col 1.16 KJV)
My purpose for contributing to this journal each year is to leave a literary record for those who might follow us. Continuing the tradition of Joseph McKeen, the first president of Bowdoin College, we encourage these students to in scholarship bearing witness to the remarkable claims of Jesus Christ on a New England college campus. The Agathos Journal serves that purpose of letting future readers know how this generation of students secured themselves to their Christian moorings during the first quarter of this millennium.
This is the second year that we will publish this journal during a worldwide pandemic. We have often reminded one another of the words of Jeremiah to his scribe Baruch:
“Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, to you, O Baruch: 3 You said, ‘Woe is me! For the LORD has added sorrow to my pain. I am weary with my groaning, and I find no rest.’ 4 Thus shall you say to him, Thus says the LORD: Behold, what I have built I am breaking down, and what I have planted I am plucking up—that is, the whole land. 5 And do you seek great things for yourself? Seek them not, for behold, I am bringing disaster upon all flesh, declares the LORD. But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.” (Jeremiah 45 ESV)
We are proud of these students who have persevered during the school year and through the summer and vacation breaks, both in the study of the Scriptures, and importantly, in late night sessions of weekly prayer. But we decline to say that we are proud of students without reminding them, as Jeremiah reminds Baruch above, that these are not words of flattery. For these Christian students, the prize of service is life itself: "But I will give you your life as a prize of war in all places to which you may go.”
This Study Center has published three historical monographs securing Joseph and Alice McKeen and this Center to its forgotten mooring. Bowdoin College was established to prepare students to minister the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Sober Consent of the Heart: The Bowdoin College Chapel Message of its First President (2011); All Governing Providence: The Beverly Massachusetts Sermons of Joseph McKeen from 1783 to 1801 (2013) (Both volumes edited by Robert B. Gregory) and Joseph McKeen and the Soul of Bowdoin College, by Stephen J. Tracey. M.Th. (2016). For those of us who do our life work on the coast of Maine, the image of the marine mooring is precisely the right one. Small boats free to drift yet tied to the fixed anchors of divine authority that set limits on the arc and range of that freedom. The parables of Jesus help us redefine what that freedom looks like when attached to the moorings of reality and a divinely authored universe.
The word authored points to the word authority in the rest of this essay. Christian freedom is infinite possibilities, but the gracious achievement of the one work which God has prepared in advance for us to do. And the first of those works is the command to obey the Gospel - what the apostle Paul calls "the obedience of faith." (Romans 1.5 and 16.26 ESV)
The mooring knots appearing at the top of this essay are placed there to remind us of the great shipbuilding heritage of Midcoast Maine. This heritage continues in one of the world's great shipbuilding yards in Bath, Maine located just 10 miles north of us here in Brunswick. While the coastline of Maine is only 228 miles long measured on a tie line from southwestern Maine at the New Hampshire border to the northeast and our border with Canada, the extended coastline, including inlets and bays in Maine, measures a remarkable 3,478 miles. Dotting that coast are many drifting vessels, many fixed moorings, and an equal number of mooring knots securing the one to the other.
In this essay I will record two observations from our studies this year. As I have in a past journal, I will address Jesus and John the Baptist with the parables. I will observe that Jesus resists all efforts of critics to discredit John the Baptist in his public ministry and to separate his call for repentance and warnings of coming judgment from the gracious earthly ministry. King Herod, the Pharisees, and the Sadducees each had their own way of attempting to separate John from Jesus and Jesus from John. I understand the parables as a response, in part, to the effort to untie that mooring.
The second observation, related to the first, is that Jesus uses the parables to teach divine authority in relational terms. Most of the parables feature an authority; a father, master, vineyard owner, or a King. Each such parable invites the reader to ask how the actors (sons, servants, tenants, invited wedding guests) are to respond to that authority. In one beautiful trilogy of parables in chapters 21 and 22 of Matthew’s Gospel Jesus invites the listeners to think of a father who issues a command, a vineyard owner who solicits tenants to share the fruit of the field as fair rent paid for their privilege, and a king who extends a gracious invitation to come attend the wedding of his son. We learned that the command, the opportunity, and the invitation expressed in these three parables are bound together in such a way that each summons from us a duty to respond. As we read in a later parable, you knew therefore you ought. (Matthew 25. 26-27 ESV)
John the Baptist Moored to Jesus
God ordained that Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist would be set apart from birth to announce the coming of the long-awaited Messiah. John was the only New Testament figure, other than the Messiah himself, whose life and ministry was specifically foretold in Old Testament prophecies. (Isaiah 40, Malachi 4) John preached a baptism of repentance and prepared the people for the long-awaited Messiah who would offer pardon from the coming judgments. When King Herod arrested John because of his prophetic rebuke of the monarch’s sexual infidelity with the wife of Herod’s brother, John experienced some doubts and uncertainties about his own pronouncement about the Messiah.
Was Jesus the Messiah or should he expect another? Did John the Baptist possess an excess of expectation that the end had come when there was plenty of time left on the clock of history? Tempering the expectation of God's premature closure on human history appears to have been the purpose of many parables taught by Jesus the Messiah who awakened those expectations. Yet, Jesus publicly esteems John the Baptist not merely as the greatest of the prophets, but also as the greatest of men ever born among women:
7 As they went away, Jesus began to speak to the crowds concerning John: “What did you go out into the wilderness to see? A reed shaken by the wind? 8 What then did you go out to see? A man dressed in soft clothing? Behold, those who wear soft clothing are in kings’ houses. 9 What then did you go out to see? A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and more than a prophet. 10 This is he of whom it is written,
“‘Behold, I send my messenger before your face, who will prepare your way before you.’
11 Truly, I say to you, among those born of women there has arisen no one greater than John the Baptist. Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he. 12 From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom of heaven has suffered violence, and the violent take it by force. 13 For all the Prophets and the Law prophesied until John, 14 and if you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah who is to come. (Matthew 11 ESV)
The political and religious pressures to drive a wedge between John the Baptist and Jesus were persistent and would continue even after John was beheaded in Herod's prison. After John was executed, Herod even had nightmares thinking that Jesus was John the Baptist resurrected from the dead.
…and he said to his servants, This is John the Baptist. He has been raised from the dead; that is why these miraculous powers are at work in him. (Matthew 14:2 ESV)
In Matthew's gospel this culminates when Jesus turns the questions about his relationship with John the Baptist back on his critics with this simple question:
23 And when he entered the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people came up to him as he was teaching, and said, “By what authority are you doing these things, and who gave you this authority?” 24 Jesus answered them, “I also will ask you one question, and if you tell me the answer, then I also will tell you by what authority I do these things. 25 The baptism of John, from where did it come? From heaven or from man?” And they discussed it among themselves, saying, “If we say, ‘From heaven,’ he will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him?’ 26 But if we say, ‘From man,’ we are afraid of the crowd, for they all hold that John was a prophet.” 27 So they answered Jesus, “We do not know.” And he said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things.
At the heart of the parables is this question of messianic authority. Who is in charge? When Jesus teaches his disciples in parables, he is answering this question. Jesus is in control. Jesus is sovereign. Jesus will judge his rivals. Jesus is the Son of David:
The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD and against his Anointed . . . As for me, I have set my King on Zion, my holy hill. (Psalms 2:2 and 6 ESV)
Moored to the Command, the Opportunity, and the Invitation
The question of Jesus’ authority and the authority of John brings us to our second heading that ties the gospel invitation to commands and other opportunities by which we are confronted to respond to authority. Jesus began his public ministry teaching in parables with the greatest invitation ever given, to come, take, and learn:
28 Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. 29 Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. 30 For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11 ESV)
Beginning in Matthew chapter 13, and continuing to the final week before his crucifixion in a discourse with his disciples on the Mount of Olives, we find Jesus teaching primarily in parables. The discursive narrative teaching of the Sermon on the Mount and his other ways of instructing teaching give way almost exclusively to parables.
All these things Jesus said to the crowds in parables; indeed, he said nothing to them without a parable. (Matthew 13.34 ESV)
We turn now to these three important parables: a father’s command to his sons, a vineyard owner’s rent collectors, and a King’s wedding invitation.
In the first of these parables a father commands his two sons to work in his field. The first son declines to go but changes his mind and obeys. The second son confirms to his father his willingness to go, but also changes his mind and never enters the work. Which son does the will of the father? (Matthew 21.28-32)
In the second parable, a vineyard owner sends his servants to collect a share of the vintage as rent. His servants are beaten, and the rent is unpaid. The vineyard owner finally sends his own son who is beaten and killed, and rent is again unpaid. What will the owner do to these tenants? (Matthew. 21.33-46)
In the third parable, a king sends out invitations for attendance at a wedding he is preparing for his son. Remarkably, the invitations are refused and those receiving the invitations pay no attention. The king will go out into the highways and byways with other invitations so that the wedding hall will be full. One guest appears improperly clothed for a wedding and is not permitted entry for the reason that he is inappropriately dressed for this special day. What will the king do to those who refuse to come to the wedding dressed and ready to celebrate his son?
We observed three anticipated responses to authority: obedience to command, fulfillment of purpose, and acceptance of an invitation, and all share a common feature. The invitation sounds like a command. The opportunity to pay fair rent to the landowner is weighted like a command. While an invitation can't be reduced to a command, and the invoice to pay rent is not exactly the same as an invitation to do so, the parable is meant to teach us that there is an appropriate human response to divine initiative. That response is grounded in the complex attributes of authority. This point is driven home for us when we observed that these parables were told in response to Jesus living parable. When Jesus entered into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, he was fulfilling the prophetic expectations of the Messiah:
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem! Behold, your king is coming to you; righteous and having salvation is he, humble and mounted on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. (Zechariah 9.9 ESV)
As if to leave no doubt about the meaning of this enacted parable, upon arriving in Jerusalem Jesus upsets the tables of the money changers in the temple, reminding the assembling pilgrims of the words of another prophet:
He said to them, It is written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer,’ but you make it a den of robbers. (Matthew 21:13 quoting Jeremiah 7. 11. ESV)
Conclusions
During a summer meeting with other directors of Christian study centers across the country, someone made the comment that my parents’ generation (children of the Great Depression) wanted to answer the question what it means to be right. My generation of Baby Boomers wanted to answer the question what it means to be free. This generation wants to answer the question what it means to be me. The answers to all of these questions point to these mooring knots of divine authority. Our mission at this Study Center is to help Christian students see their life as the activity of those under authority when the Master has gone away and is delayed in his return. How will the disciple respond when the Master is away?
These and other parables of Jesus have worked something very special among these students this year as they have grown together in a hunger for something deeper in their life of public readings and common prayer. By these means, they are seeking the answers to how they should appropriately respond to divine authority - however that authority presents itself, whether in commands to be obeyed, purposes to be fulfilled or invitations to be accepted - and invitations to be extended as those who are gathering with Jesus.
Whoever is not with me is against me, and whoever does not gather with me scatters. (Matthew 12.30 ESV)
Our privilege as mentors and advisors to these students is to gather with them, as they gather for Him.