The Poet's Chair | Part 4

Jesus told an audacious parable, or bare-bones story, (Luke 15) in which he depicted God as a woman* who experiences domestic violence.

She has lost one of the coins on her head-dress, symbol of her status in the community - and of her husband’s standing. Such coins could be drawn on in economic emergency, but only with the woman’s husband’s permission. In this case, there were only 10 coins to begin with, few enough for him to notice that one is missing. She is terrified. How could she have failed to notice the thread fraying? Her husband will accuse her of parting with the coin as token to a lover, of defying and humiliating him in public. She is in for a beating tonight.

In desperation, she turns the house up-side-down looking for the lost coin, until she finds it.

And when she does, she is so relieved that she calls all of her friends, to share in her joy. Because she has been spared another beating.

And Jesus said that the joy in heaven whenever a sinner repents can be compared to that of a desperate woman. It is that visceral.

And the powerful men who knew that this parable was spoken against them – God’s abusive husbands; the sinners who need to repent - conspired to kill Jesus because of this parable.

We might want to tell the woman to leave her husband. Certainly, it puts more weight on the parable than it can bear to use it to insist that women put up with domestic violence. That is not the point Jesus is making.

But we might want to say this: by all means discount Jesus’ God because you have no use for a god who chooses to identify with our pain, and transform it from within; but not because you believe that God to be indifferent to human suffering.

*in his parables, Jesus often depicts God in as a human character, often a man such as a merchant or father or king, but also as a woman kneading bread or searching for a lost coin. This is not to say that God is human, is male or female; but it is to fully-identify God with men and women. Sometimes Jesus locates himself in his parables, such as the younger son who goes on a long journey (from heaven to earth), squanders his father’s wealth in partying with sinners, makes himself ceremonially unclean, was dead and is alive again, and is given by his father symbols of authority. On other occasions, Jesus tells parables to contrast the way of the world with the ways of the kingdom of heaven: not every king in every parable should be assumed to represent God.