Lent: Anna #21

Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,

   but you say that the place where people

   must worship is in Jerusalem. (John 4:20)

Dear Anna,

Okay, let me try to sum up the parable. To the Sultan’s question: “Which faith appears to you the better?” Nathan answers with a parable about an heirloom ring given to a man of the east. The ring had the power to make the wearer pleasing in the eyes of God and mankind. The ring was to be handed down to the most beloved son regardless of order of birth. “At length,” as Nathan weaves the story, “this ring descended to a father who had three sons.” The father loved all three equally and ended up promising the ring to each. To keep his promise, he secretly had a great jeweler make two replicas of the original so that on his deathbed he gave a ring to each. So ends Nathan’s tale, but as Nathan tells the Sultan, “All that follows may be guessed, of course.”

What follows is the predictable quarrels over who owned the real ring. Nathan will pick up the story by bring in a “modest judge” to adjudicate. Since the rings were so perfectly duplicated, the judge points out that all three could be duplicates of the one true ring which has now been lost or hidden. Since one could not decipher the original ring, the judge offers his advice: “Let each vie for the virtues of the true ring” by living lives of “gentleness, benevolence, forbearance with inward resignation to the godhead.” The “modest judge” will leave ultimate judgment to the “greater one” before whose judgment-seat we will someday stand.

The parable is told during an armistice in Jerusalem at the end of the Third Crusade (1189-92). It is a reminder to us that there were times when each of the Abrahamic religions, as you call them: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; lived peacefully together with robust banter and non-violent mischief.

Love, Papa