Have you heard of the carnival barker who kept yelling “Alive! Alive! Here! Here! Did you ever see a two-headed baby? Come in! Come in!” The gaff is that they don’t have a two-headed baby inside the tent. They only asked if you ever saw one.

This is the kind of shrewdness being celebrated in today’s Scripture reading.

Carlos Fuentes (1928-2012), the Mexican novelist and playwright whom some called “the soul of Mexico,” gave a long interview about his writing shortly after he turned 50 and began to contemplate his mortality. “I used to write to live,” he said. “Now I write not to die. I’ll live as long as I have another story to tell.”

Jesus was the greatest storyteller who ever lived. But I’ll wager a guess that there’s one Jesus story on which you’ve seldom if ever heard a sermon. It’s…