Jesus said to the chief priests and elders of the people: “What is your opinion? A man had two sons. He came to the first and said, ‘Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.’ He said in reply, ‘I will not,’ but afterwards changed his mind and went. The man came to the other son and gave the same order. He said in reply, ‘Yes, sir,’ but did not go. Which of the two did his father’s will?” They answered, “The first.” Jesus said to them, “Amen, I say to you, tax collectors and prostitutes are entering the kingdom of God before you. When John came to you in the way of righteousness, you did not believe him; but tax collectors and prostitutes did. Yet even when you saw that, you did not later change your minds and believe him.” (Matthew 21.28-32)
Perhaps no one expressed as well what exactly Rabbi Jesus was saying as Flannery O’Connor did in her short story that carried the title, “Revelation.” Published in 1965 and a winner of the prestigious O’Henry Award, the story precisely encapsulates in narrative form the message that Rabbi Jesus was trying to make when he offered the parable that we hear in the gospel today.
Born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925, O’Connor wrote about the things she knew best, particularly the South and the morally flawed people whom she so often found in those parts. It is not that she believed such compromised people were only in the South, but she knew them in a special way because they were her neighbors and friends.
In the short story “Revelation,” she tells the story of Mrs. Turpin, a forty-seven year old woman who “was fat but she had always had good skin,” as O’Connor describes her in the opening scene of the story that takes place in a doctor’s office where Mrs. Turpin has taken her husband who had an inflamed leg where a cow had kicked him.
It doesn’t take the reader long to realize that Mrs. Turpin adheres to a strict code of behavior, a code that makes it easy for her to have a critical eye for anyone who fails to meet the standard, including the doctor whom she feels should have had a larger waiting room, given all the money he had made, or the nineteen-year old girl who sits in the waiting room and who Mrs. Turpin decides had an ugly face because of the acne that covers it. Mrs. Turpin is happy that she always had good skin and not a wrinkle in her face.
It isn’t long before Mrs. Turpin has made an evaluation of everyone in the waiting room, from “the ugly girl who acted ugly” to the woman with the snuff-stained lips who Mrs. Turpin inwardly decides should have washed her face more thoroughly with a wash rag and some soap before showing up at the doctor’s office. Outwardly sociable, always a prim and proper person, inwardly Mrs. Turpin is derisive and dismissive of those sitting in the chairs around her.
With her moral code anchoring her to a clear sense of right and wrong, Mrs. Turpin is quick to pass judgment on each person, including the old woman in the feed sack dress, and takes particular offense at another woman who wipes her mouth with the back of her hand all the while saying how she doesn’t like hogs because they’re nasty, stinking things. Mrs. Turpin feels compelled to answer the woman, telling her, “Our hogs are not dirty and they don’t stink. They’re cleaner than some children I’ve seen.”
As that statement makes clear to the reader, Mrs. Turpin isn’t content for long to keep her thoughts to herself, in a matter of a few minutes excoriating blacks who refuse to pick cotton and suggesting that it “wouldn’t be practical to send them back to Africa because they wouldn’t want to go [because they] got it too good here.” She garners some comments of approval from another woman in the room.
At one point in the conversations in the waiting room, Mrs. Turpin announces that “if it’s one thing I am, it’s grateful. When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, a little of everything, and a good disposition besides, I just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is.’ It could have been different!”
As soon as she repeats the words, “Oh thank you Jesus, Jesus, thank you!” a book flies across the room and hits Mrs. Turpin in the head, thrown by the young girl named Mary Grace whom Mrs. Turpin has decided has an ugly disposition as well as an ugly face. After throwing the book, the girl jumps up and gets in Mrs. Turpin’s face, viciously whispering, “Go back to hell where you came from, you old warthog.”
Pandemonium breaks out in the waiting room with Mrs. Turpin frozen in her seat and with Mary Grace being given a sedative before being taken to the hospital. As Mrs. Turpin looked at the young girl, she had “no doubt in her mind that the girl did know her, knew her in some intense and personal way, beyond time and place and condition.”
After leaving the office, Mrs. Turpin’s day is spent in trying to make sense of the episode and particularly the words that Mary Grace had said to her. “I am not a warthog. From hell,” she says to herself, questioning why the lunatic girl had singled her out “though there was trash in the room to whom it might justly have been applied.” Instead, “the message had been given to [her,] Ruby Turpin, a respectable, hard-working, church-going woman.”
Later in the evening, she decides to wash off the hogs with a water hose. As she lets the hose slosh across the backs of the hogs, she turns her eyes to the high heavens and asks out loud, “What do you send me a message like that for? How am I a hog? Exactly how am I like them? ” Her fists are knotted and the hose shoots water blindly into the hog pen.
Her outrage continues, as she pours out the venom from her soul, saying aloud, “If you like trash better, go get yourself some trash then. You could have made me trash . . . if trash is what you wanted, why didn’t you make me trash?” She shakes her fist heavenward, the water hose becoming much like “a watery snake.”
As the sun set in the western sky, Mrs. Turpin looked closely at the purple streak that looked like a highway. As she stared at the streak, it became a vast bridge “extending upward from the earth through a field of living fire.” And as she gazed at the ethereal sight, she saw “whole companies of white-trash, clean for the first time in their lives, and bands of blacks in white robes, and battalions of freaks and lunatics shouting and clapping and leaping like frogs.”
And there, at the end of the procession, she spied “a tribe of people whom she recognized at once as those who, like herself and Claud, had always had a little of everything and the God-given wit to use it right.” Looking more closely, she saw the shock on their faces as even their virtues were being burned away. Immobilized by the vision, she stood for a long while outside the hog pen, finally turning off the faucet and making her way back to the house.
And there ends O’Connor’s tale of the revelation that came to a woman who prided herself on her good standing and on her proper ways, a story with sharp parallels to the stories that Rabbi Jesus offers in the gospel of Matthew where he continually reminded his listeners that “the last shall be first and the first shall be last.” We find the same message in the parable placed before us today, a story that echoes the point Rabbi Jesus has been making throughout his public ministry.
Here, as always, context is important. When Rabbi Jesus tells this particular parable of two sons, one of whom disagrees with his father’s bidding, but then changes his mind, the other of whom agrees to do as his father asks, but never follows through, he is addressing the priests and elders of the people. In other words, he is now in Jerusalem, the end point of his ministry. He has traveled from Galilee and has entered the holy city where he comes face to face with his chief antagonists, the religious leaders of the Jews.
By this point, he has cleansed the Temple of the moneychangers, causing further ire to be directed at him from the elders who confront him, demanding to know by whose authority he says and does the things he has said and done. Confounding them with his answer, he proceeds to tell this story of the two sons, ending it with a question addressed to the elders, “Which of the two did his father’s will?”
The answer is obvious and the elders provide the clear cut answer when they tell him that the first son did his father’s will, even if initially he had failed to follow his father’s request to work in the vineyard. Using their answer as a springboard, Rabbi Jesus challenges them, informing them that tax-collectors and sinners can be compared to the first son for they too failed at first to do the father’s will, but came around in time.
Conversely, as he points out, they–the elders and leaders–could only be seen as the second son who openly said he would do as the father had asked, but who never followed through, choosing instead to spend the day not doing any work in the vineyard. “You did not later change your minds,” he tells them, pointing out that they had refused to listen to the call for conversion that John had made, whereas tax-collectors and sinners had listened and had changed their ways.
This story of the two sons is only the first of three similar stories that Rabbi Jesus will offer to his antagonists here at the end of his mission, each one emphasizing the same reality, the fact that the scribes and Pharisees have failed miserably to heed his message, while tax-collectors and sinners, on the other hand, have openly embraced his words and his ways, seeking to amend their lives in conformity with his message.
After these three stories, Rabbi Jesus will conclude with a series of woes or curses against the scribes and Pharisees, laying bare their hypocrisy and shamelessness, a truth-telling that will result in a short while in his arrest and arraignment, culminating in his crucifixion, the final proof of the hardheartedness and failure of the religious leaders to see the truth about their own failures and wickedness.
They are, in short, Mrs. Turpin, a person convinced of her own righteousness, blinded by arrogance to her own wrongdoing. Like her, the scribes and Pharisees look down their noses on everyone else, believing these lesser persons to be moral rejects and wasted space. Like Mrs. Turpin, the elders pat themselves on the back, saying, as she did, “When I think who all I could have been besides myself and what all I got, I Just feel like shouting, ‘Thank you, Jesus, for making everything the way it is!’”
But her failure is their failure, her own words condemning her when she says, right before Mary Grace slams the book in her face, “There are just some people you can’t tell anything to. They can’t take criticism.” And so it was with the scribes and Pharisees, as blind to their own failures as Mrs. Turpin was, and, for that matter, as equally resistant to any criticism of their ways.
So, the story that we hear today is but one of many stories that Rabbi Jesus tells in Matthew’s gospel, warning his listeners that the last will be first and the first will be last, a warning that, as we see today, fell on deaf ears and hardened hearts, a failure on the part of the chief priests and elder that ensures that tax-collectors and sinners will be processing into heaven’s gates well before they will, regardless of how prim and proper they see themselves.
–Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 