A Jesus Original Series

I remember when Netflix was a service that sent DVDs that you requested to your house. The hard debate was whether to get the plan that sent only one DVD at a time, or the one that sent multiple DVDs at once. The benefit of the “more-than-one” plan was that you were never left without something to watch after you finished the first DVD. As the year 2000 began, more TV series’ were written as stories that brought the viewer along to the next episode. They wanted to see what would happen next. With more ways to catch up on missed episodes (i.e. DVDs), producers were able to string series’ together. The days when writers wrote as if the viewers were hit or miss were long gone. Today, this is just extended by the ability to stream the shows using the Internet. There is no need to wait patiently (or impatiently) for a DVD to arrive in your mailbox, rather now you can watch show after show until you are so tired at work the next day that you can barely stand it.

The idea of a story has become more and more important in our culture. Sure, people have always loved books, movies and plays, but now we see almost an addiction to a certain story or show someone is watching. We claim people have limited attention spans, but that is not the case if they willingly watch hours and hours of TV shows in a row. It allows us to ask big questions, such as, what is it about these stories that draw people in?  And what ways can we engage people with the story we hold onto so dearly during Lent?

Jesus was constantly using parables, or stories, to help people understand the great master plan God had for us. The challenge for us today is that these parables are told in settings and with language that was relevant to the time of Jesus, which can make them more difficult for us to understand. They take work, on our part, to understand them ourselves before we can relay them to someone else.

This week’s parable is more clear cut, but the context surrounding it leads us to believe that it is only about Pharisees or church leaders. That, along with the fact that it is set in a vineyard at the time of Jesus, often causes us to loose interest. While the meaning of the story may be simple, without the proper understanding or interest in the story, the meaning may be lost. The simple meaning is that although many prophets came to provide guidance to God’s people, they were rejected. Then, finally, Jesus came to the people as well, and He was killed. While much of the Lenten season is about us reflecting upon the story of Christ on His way to the cross, this weekend we take time to hear how this parable was heard by the leaders of the day, how it is intended for us, and how to take a story like this into our heavy story culture.