taking or leaving

I love this pararble and its hyperparabolic possibilities: Matthew 24:41 (n + 1).

In the same way there will be two guys crossing the country in an old car, perhaps a loaner from one of their dad's or a friend's. At some point they'll discover the gas guage is broken and they'll be stranded in Palestine, TX. At some point a Samaritan will stop and offer them some help. So one will be taken up the road to an open gas station, and the other will be left behind to watch the car and wait.

In the same way two pigs will be feeding at the trough. One day the farmer will come and take one and the other will be left behind. Then the farmer will come back and get that one too.

In the same way there'll be two of anything, cats, zebras, jockeys, lesbians, policemen, unemployed middle managers, incarcerated businessmen, exiled cabinet officials, apocolyptic prophets; invariably differences and divergences will emerge among them that can be summed up as the taking or leaving what they have in common, a place. So it is that two of anykind, unable to exist together will find themselves displaced in relation to the initial reality they'd formed.

So what do we do with this displacement. Is it a displacement that invites replacing? Or is the parable's force in pointing out how slippery it is to label: women grinding, men in the field. One of each can be taken and one of each can be left? What does it matter in view of the culmination of the world. The coming of the son of man.

Here is prime exegetical territory: liberating the text from what it has to mean, whether that meaning is the accretion of orthodox defenses or heterodox insurrections. What is ortho and what is hetero change with the wind - more as expressions of power than of truth.

So two boys are building a tree house in the sand with rocks.

Two dowagers go to see Waiting for Godot and one is taken aback and the other is left speechless.

Two Roman legions are wandering in the forest searching for Arminius.

I think it's best to bombard the text with alternative settings, extrapolating and pushing meaning to the nth - searching for an eternal return.

The son of man is an eternal return. This time coming as a thief. The first time coming in tragedy and the cross - but this time, a thief and in farce? He comes like a flood and in the clouds and gathers his elect. Earlier he came like a mother hen gathering her chicks; now like a fox raiding the hen house.

Two hens will be brooding secure in their hen house; one will be taken and the other will be left behind. Pity the watchdog, Rex, with egg on his face.