what’s the story?

I veered away from the Lectionary passage this week because I was captured by the story in Luke 7:1-10, which is about, well, stories.

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One of the things I like about living in Guilford is being able to shop at Forte’s Market, mainly because they have a real butcher counter where they grind the meat when I order it and are happy to cut steaks to my preference instead of inviting me to choose from an array of shrink-wrapped packages.

It is a family business that goes back almost a hundred years and is run now by Ron Forte—or at least he’s the one I know behind the counter. I say I know him, but what I know of him is a small slice of his life. I come into his store and we greet each other and then I tell him what I need and we usually have a short food-related conversation while he is getting things ready for me. He’s always pleasant, he treats his customers well, and he has a great laugh.

Still, I don’t know much of anything about him beyond his life as a butcher, nor does he know much about me, though if someone were to ask, we would both say, “Yeah, I know him. He’s a good guy.” (At least that’s what I think he would say about me.) But there’s much more to both of our stories than what we share at Forte’s Market.

In a similar way, we see news stories about people in the public eye and we can come away with the notion that we know them as well, perhaps because of the article, or because of a role they played in a movie we loved, or maybe an interview. I’ve heard more than one story about people who finally got to meet someone famous they felt really connected to only to find the person was not at all like they expected.

Jesus appears to have had such an encounter in our passage today.

Not long after he had preached, admonishing everyone to love their enemies, which is another way of saying not to settle for the simplistic story of who someone is, he was approached by the some of the religious leaders who had a message from a Roman centurion—a commanding officer in the Roman army—asking Jesus to help his servant who was deathly ill—and the servant was probably an enslaved migrant who had been forced to move to Palestine from another Roman colony.

The religious leaders were not being strongarmed by the Roman commander. It seems they really wanted to help him because he had been instrumental in making sure the town had a synagogue. “He loves our people,” they said—an odd thing to say about an officer in the army oppressing the country.

Can you hear the multiplicity of layers in this interchange? Most of the time the gospel writers paint the religious leaders as the bad guys, those who are critical of Jesus and do what they can to undermine him.

In this account, Luke tells a different story about them. They came to Jesus asking for help on their enemy’s behalf. And Jesus went with them. Before they could get to the house where the sick man was, another group came with a message from the centurion—this time, Luke says the officer sent “his friends,” and they told Jesus that the commander didn’t feel worthy to host him and trusted that the servant could be healed without Jesus having to go in the house. When Jesus heard their words, Luke says he was impressed and astonished.

“I haven’t found anyone who trusts like this,” he said, “even among those who grew up in faith.” And when the centurion’s friends got back to the house, the servant was feeling better.

Most of the miracles of Jesus are what one of my seminary professors called “parables in event,” which is to say the gospel writers told them to convey a deeper message in the same way they wrote down the parables so we would have to unpack the stories. And most of the miracles created situations where Jesus used the moment to teach a lesson that people don’t seem to be grasping.

It feels different here.

Everyone in the story plays a crucial role in creating the space for the servant to be healed. It’s as though they actually listened to Jesus’ sermon!

The centurion risked asking for help from the religious leaders, who then spoke to Jesus on his behalf. Then the friends came to convey how much the commander trusted Jesus could change things. And Jesus responded with amazement and compassion. Had the centurion or the religious leaders or the friends held to the common stories about each other, none of the conversations would have taken place and the servant would have died. Everyone was willing to be more and do more than was expected of them.

No one’s life can be summarized in a single story—a label, a characterization, an affiliation. I don’t mean to say there aren’t bad people. There are people who choose to damage and who encourage evil. We have to be aware and awake. What I am saying is to be human is to be complex. We are a lifetime full of stories that have shaped us. We are walking libraries, which means we have to be willing to do the work of learning more about each other than the most convenient or most recent or most sensational information if we want to be the kind of peacemakers Christ calls us to be.

The writers Joan Didion and Gregory Dunne were married for forty years. After his death, she wrote a book about her grief called The Year of Magical Thinking in which she said, ““We imagined we knew everything the other thought, even when we did not necessarily want to know it, but in fact, I have come to see, we knew not the smallest fraction of what there was to know.”

She’s a writer, so you have to give her room for a bit of overstatement because I’m sure they knew a lot about each other. Still, she learned, there was more to know—and she gives us something worth remembering: No one’s story is that simple. To love one another means to listen and to learn instead of label. To love means to open our hearts to be caught by surprise, to be curious rather than concise in our understanding so we can truly love our neighbors as ourselves. Amen.

Peace,
Milton