Picasso's Guernica as Parable

 

(Note: There’s a painting following this text. Please give it a look before going on.)

Were Jesus to be listening in on the current conversation in Western politics, and if he were to be asked what he made of it all, given that many who count themselves as his followers are loudly involved, what would his reply be?

I, of course, can’t claim to know. I expect he would have replied with a parable like “The Good Samaritan,” or “The Prodigal Son,” and like the scribes, the pharisees and the teachers of the law (and his disciples, frequently) in his time, each would interpret what they’d heard as support for what they’d already embraced as truth.

Maybe he’d shrug and say, “It appears subtlety won’t work … again, so here’s a thought: whatever you do or say, I judge on its conforming--or not--to one very simple standard, and that is that your words and actions respond to your love of God and that which he’s created for your benefit, and that it wishes for your neighbour everything you wish for yourself. If your words or actions can’t be shown to conform to this standard, then you are no part of me, no matter what else you do or think.”

“But that leaves me with a question,” some placard-waving bystander might add. “Am I expected to consider that (woke guy, Trump guy, Antifa guy, Q-Anon guy, Socialist, Republican, Democrat) my neighbour?”

And Jesus might say, “You wave your Bible at me and still feel you have to ask that?”

Or maybe he would take Picasso’s hand, sit down on a rock and with pencils, draw a picture and say, “If you don’t understand my words, perhaps you will be moved by art.” And he’d hold up what he had drawn and say, “What do you see here?”

And they would all look and some would nod, and others would say, “that’s nothing but a horrible picture,” and a child might say, “that’s a world where people don’t love their neighbours.”

And Jesus might say, “Blessed are they who have ears to hear and eyes to see. Not everyone who says, ‘Lord, Lord,’ finds his/her/their way into the Kingdom!”