Kenneth E. Bailey

So the gist of it was that if you think of the talents as the Holy Spirit, So, you know, if you take the view, as I do, that the Holy Spirit, you know, gives us everything we need, then the two, the first two slaves, you know, I think it's absolutely pointless counting up the difference between them.

That's, you know, again, Kenneth Bailey is so strong on all of this, the Semitic idiom, everything happens in threes.

You know, there's a duh, duh, and there's a duh.

And you expect the third one to be the big one, but the third one's actually the letdown in this story.

I'm not saying this is what Kenneth Bailey says.

It's just the kind of thing he does say about parables.

And so ignore the differences.

It's like you can picture where there wasn't any room in the main room.

If you're familiar with Kenneth Bailey writes about the seeing and understanding Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes.

He talks about how, you know, our Western concept of what a home looked like is wrong.

And that there's a home in that village where the family all was and there was no room for people like Jesus to join them.

And there are multiple ways to come at it, to really address it.

So I think it's a powerful... message to kind of come at it and say, live in this, you know, to steal from the old Ken Bailey, Jesus through Middle Eastern eyes, live into this passage a bit more like you're being in a room and see what shows up and the context of what your congregation needs to hear right now.

All right, Rob.

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No, no.

I mean, there is a sort of, Kenneth Bailey is, you know, he doesn't write about Amos that much, I don't think, but I'm a huge fan of Kenneth Bailey.

And, you know, he does talk about Semitic idiom and the exaggeration and the sort of, you know, when he says hate, and obviously it's biased to Jesus and the Gospels as well.

uh you know it doesn't necessarily mean what you or i would mean by by hate it's more what a you know a footballer would say when i hate it when somebody dives in the area or something like it's more that sort of yeah this is not what we should be doing yeah um but i think the point you know the point about amos is is about justice rolling down like waters which is how that passage finishes and um You know, again, justice is, who's against justice? You know, you ask your congregation, who's against justice here? Well, I mean, we are in an unusual time in the world where there are people against justice.

That's one of the reasons.

I think another thing that I saw after reading the work of different scholars, like Kenneth Bailey, is that there's just such a different take on the whole story and how it looks.

Not the foundational parts of the story, like Jesus is the Son of God, the Word became flesh.

That's not under question.