The Violence
I think it’s important to clarify something about today’s gospel passage right off the bat. For some of us who came through a more, perhaps, conservative theology, this passage was often used as a clear biblical mandate on the realities and the dynamics of Heaven and Hell. Live a godly life, die and go to heaven. Live a life of sin, you end up in a literal Hell chock full of the fires of damnation and eternal suffering. Of course, taken in its total context and what we know about the gospel of Luke, it becomes difficult to read this passage as simply a “turn or burn” altar call. And many of us have a difficult time with that kind of theological thinking anyway. No, not only is this a parable being told by Jesus, parables being the metaphors or theopoetics that Jesus used to convey larger messages that usually had little to do with the story on its face, we here have discussed several times how the gospel of Luke was far more concerned with the social ramifications of our actions v