Hearts are Trump

This week’s Good Story is an easy one to memorize, to play over and over in our heads. (Click fora link and go down to the Gospel) Its simplicity and brevity invites us to Enter the Story, to walk into it, to be present within it, to allow it to open to us the truth that it has for us, the truth about ourselves. The scribes and Pharisees, the ones who follow the letter of the law without compassion, bring an adulteress to Jesus, and he cleverly finds a way not to overturn the law, but to make it impossible for them to carry it out. They have pointed to her unworthiness, and he points them to their own. They walk away. He helps her see that she is free.

Nobody played cards in our house when I was growing up. When I was in second grade, my Uncle Joe and Aunt Arlene brought we with them to her parents’ dairy farm in Wisconsin. She would tuck me into the big double bed in the room under a dormer at the top of the stairs, and I’d fall asleep to the sounds of the four of them playing pinochle. Ten years later I went away to college, and a lot of the guys in the dorm played euchre. I’ve never been a card player. Too much work, too much attention to the game. I’d rather enjoy conversation, the freedom to go wherever it leads. But euchre was so much of the culture that I was often put into service as the necessary fourth player and nursed along in the rules of the game. Like pinochle, I found it too much work, and my attention often wandered. I was never invited to the same game twice. But both games had this thing called “trump”, where any of a whole suit of cards would beat any card of the other suits, even the highest. I was slow, but I knew that having a lot of trump cards was always a good thing.
I think I know why Jesus was crucified. In these card games, you always have to follow the suit of the card played, playing the same suit. If the player puts down a club, you have to put down a club, too; whoever has the higher card wins that “trick”. But if you have no cards of that suit, you can play a trump card, and you win. Again and again in these Good Stories, the scribes and Pharisees play power, and Jesus trumps it with mercy. They play law, and Jesus trumps it with love. I think he was crucified for making hearts trump, and having a hand full of them.

I’m up in that big double bed in the dormer room, feeling the warmth of the feather comforter, looking at the stars out the low, wide window with all those little panes. The laughter and the teasing of the four voices at the bottom of the stairs don’t give me a sense of how the game will end. I always fall asleep too soon to know.
But in this game that Jesus is playing, he calls us to stay awake, to watch with him as those playing power cards get fed up with his trumping them with mercy and compassion, and rendering their high cards useless. The end of the game gets ugly. Memorize this short scene. Let it fill your mind during the day, and from time to time find a quiet place and let it occupy you. Let’s stay awake together.

Tomorrow – power and love in our Examen


 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.