Why on earth had he come to church? Was it because of the row he'd had that morning at home, thrown out on his ear for stealing his mother's housekeeping again? Or was it because of the sense of humiliation he was feeling as a result of Julie slapping him around the face last night and telling him in unambiguous four-letter words to get out of her life, just because she discovered he was also sleeping with Karen? Yes, it was both of those things and neither of them. Somehow, as he tried unsuccessfully to drown his sorrows in that pint, he'd just been overcome with a sense of how dirty he was, and what a mess he'd made of things. Suddenly, sitting in that back pew, guilt and shame brought tears to his eyes, a blush to his cheek and a lump to his throat. 'Oh, God,' he sighed quietly, into clenched fists. 'Oh, God.'
I tell you, it was Joe who went home a believer that night, not Jack.
For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, and he who humbles himself will be exalted (Luke 18:14).
We said earlier that one of the great problems in reading the parables today is the difficulty of recovering the shock factor that they undoubtedly possessed for Jesus' original hearers. Too often, familiarity with these stories has disarmed them of their punch for us, deprived us of the sting in the tale.
Take the story of the good Samaritan which we studied in chapter 2. The very word 'Samaritan' has become proverbial for goodness. So when Jesus tells us that it was a Samaritan who stopped to help the injured man, we're not surprised, still less outraged. There's no scandalized intake of breath at the mere mention of the word, as there certainly would have been when the parable was first told. The hammer-blows the parable delivered to the prejudices of Jesus' original audience are reduced, for us,
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