So - if I went to Jesus and told him I wanted to lose weight, what would he say? Okay, Jesus knows all, and is omnipotent and would have an excellent answer, but he has yet to speak to me directly, and I doubt that he will in this case, so I had better do what I always do and guess.

As a poor Jew growing up in Palestine, he would have thought that losing weight was weird. His audience would have thought the same. Can you imagine the parable?

There was once a man who was cursed by too much food. No matter where he looked there was food. What’s more, demons made him eat the food. He had been a little peckish at times in his life, but he had never known real hunger. Instead he ate when he was happy and he ate when he was sad. At times the man had nothing to do. He did not have to collect sticks for his fire or harvest grain or work at backbreaking labour. This doing nothing was called being bored and the demons made the man eat when he was bored. The man kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger and had to get bigger and bigger robes. He got so big that he could no longer fit into his house and had to sleep outside. The demons did not like being cold, so they left him, but the man kept eating. The demons then realized that they had nothing to do with the man eating! But they did not want the man to know that. So the demons went out and got fancy robes to dress themselves in. They put water in bottles, added a bit of spice and told the man that if he paid them a piece of gold a week, he could partake in drinking this water and it would make him thin. And the demons became rich and the man stayed fat.

But 2000 years ago that parable would have made no sense so Jesus would not have said it. Maybe he would have said something like this:

There once was a very wise king who knew the land very well. He knew how many subjects he had and he knew the size of his vineyards and how many fields of sheep there were on the hillsides. He knew how many fields of wildflowers there were and he knew how much land a mother bear needed to raise her cubs. He knew that he had a great trust that was imposed on him as a result of the gift of his wisdom. The Great Trust was the Great Balance. He knew that the needs of his subjects and the needs of the wildflowers and the needs of the mother bear were always to be in balance and harmony with each other.

So the king figured out the needs of each subject and put in enough vineyards and fields of sheep so that each child, woman, and man would always have plenty. And yet there would be space for the wildflowers to bloom and the mother bear to nurture. But some of his subjects took more than their need. This caused the wildflowers to wilt and the bears to flee the land. With no wildflowers and no bears the balance and harmony collapsed and there was great wailing and gnashing of teeth.

So what if that had been the parable? The homilist today would no doubt say :“Have a good Earth Day and do not exceed your Weight Watchers' Daily Points”