G. K. Chesterton once commented that it's always easier to forgive an accidental injury than a deliberate insult. Some people do just seem to have the knack of opening their mouth and putting their foot in it. Everywhere they go they quite unintentionally make offensive and tactless remarks. But usually it's not too difficult to laugh off such clumsy insensitivity, precisely because we know they don't really mean it.
On the other hand, some insults are deliberate, premeditated and calculated to hurt, and they can deliver devastating emotional wounds especially if those who deliver them are people close to us. I remember some years ago being shown a letter written by a daughter to her mother. It was the most concentrated verbal vitriol I have ever read, and it broke that poor mother's heart. If her daughter had publicly spat in her face she could not have felt more profoundly humiliated.
'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can never hurt me.' That was the standard playground retort for such oral malice when I was at school. But the bluff is as poor as the rhyme, for names do hurt. Words have a capacity to draw tears and prey upon our minds, to sting our feelings in a way that no physical blow ever could.
Chesterton then is surely right. Perhaps a memory of some such slap in the face haunts you. If so, you'll be able to empathize profoundly with this final parable. In Luke 20 Jesus is telling us the story of what I reckon can justly be called the most shameless, the most cruel insult ever administered in the history of the world. I've called it 'the ultimate insult'. No other insult has demonstrated more brazen impertinence, left such permanent scars or been so totally undeserved. For this insult was delivered not against a human being but against the loving heart of God himself.
And Jesus tells us about it in the last of his parables which Luke records and which I think may well have been tire last parable that Jesus ever told.
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