Parable of the Monk and the Thief

At the fork in the river Martine, by the neck of the Rhine and the crest of the lowlands, sat a church far beyond its years with ivy and crawling vines snaking their way to its fractured steeple. A lawman rounds a bend on a defile, having apprehended a thief with the intention of bringing him back to town to stand trial. The thief had up to this point asked more than once for the lawman to let him free, accompanied with bribes and oaths and wisdom and wile. Each time the lawman struck him and commanded him to speak to him no longer.

As they pass the church and hear the sound of carpentry from within, the lawman curiously turns to see the source of the sound. Thief in tow, the lawman goes inside the church and sees a monk hard at work, apparently attempting to restore the church. Saw in hand, the monk sways back and forth cutting a log into a pew for the small structure. The lawman hails the monk and asks him who sent him to repair the abandoned building.

“Why, God Himself has given me two ears to hear and two hands to work, and thus says the Lord: ‘Go and rebuild this church.'”

Before the lawman can reply, the thief chirped a question to the monk what happened to the church in the first place.

“Oh, but you fail to see what is plainly before you. This church belonged to heretics, believers of a false religion, and they cast their calumnies and distributed their doctrines to the unsuspecting folks of the town nearby. Only by the pure grace of God did a bolt of fire fallen from Heaven ignite the straw-house of this wolves’ den and burn them all to the cinders of their bones! Now it belongs to God, who baptizes what is evil and makes it so it is good.”

Puzzled, the lawman ignores the intrusion of the thief into the conversation and asked him how he could know such a thing about a church as long-forgotten as this, and for what blasphemy did God consign an entire church to a judgment as what befell the place before them. The monk meekly replied that he asks not God for mistruths and so asks not of what heresies condemned the old church.

The thief turns his head to look behind him at the lawman and again makes an offer, “Should you bind me in a chain and leave me here with the monk, I will do a penance here by rebuilding this church for a time as you determine. You have retrieved the goods I have stolen, so to none am I culpable now but to our Lord Jesus Christ.”

The lawman considers this and agrees to the service the thief has offered. He procures a chain used to stabilize the sawing logs and binds the thief to the stone arch supporting the belfry. “I will return in one week to monitor your behavior,” the lawman warned, “and must respect the monk as your master or I shall discipline you as I see fit.” The thief and the monk agreed to this arrangement, and the lawman departed for town.

The Sunday following, six days later in fact, a smoking pyre appeared from the magistrate’s window in the town, and so the lawman was dispatched to investigate. The wild conflagration sent forth waves of heat on the defile as the lawman drew near to the horrible sight of the burning church, engulfed in pure scarlet flames as bright as the sunrise. The lawman called out for the thief, but no reply returned. Instead, he heard a whimpering sob muted by the thundering crackle of fire, to see the monk prostrate before the ruination of his work.

“Woe to me, woe to me!” cried the monk in repetitive verse, “I have sinned against the Lord God and condemned the thief to death in my negligence.”

The lawman inquired with fury as to what had transpired in his absence. The monk sobbed again with wet tears and did not look up as he confessed.

“I uncovered a cache of writings from those heretics who had managed this holy place before, and in cursory interest I did not destroy them but sought to properly examine them, as to refute these errors of theirs. Oh, unhappy am I to have done so! For their words of misfortune soundly accorded to my reason and for this I spoke to the thief as to confirm my suspicions. The thief often rebutted my words with Scripture, but my learning was so great that I overcame his objections with these wretched things staining the pages of effaced tradition. Now, God has struck the very church he asked me to rebuild, and his death is on my head!”

The lawman seized the monk by the habit he wore, unconvinced by his tale, and dragged him many steps to the township while the monk pleaded and cried out the whole way long. The church had ceased burning by the time they returned, light smoke on the fair clouds and the orange sky returned to a soft violet of dusk.

Before the court of the magistrate, an open-air court of cobblestone and musty oak-wood, the monk denied having slain the thief, and repeated his claim with his hand on the Bible. Concern crossed the magistrate’s face from his seat, and he called over the lawman. He quietly wrote quickly on parchment and sealed it with hot wax. “Take him to the bishop, he will see himself defrocked and see their judgment.”

The lawman proudly delivered the monk, still ambulating with much distress, to the old bishop at the more impressive church in town. Replete with stained glass images of the Passion all around and standing upon stones laid since the most antique kings, the bishop seemed a judge of angels who, upon hearing of his disobedient actions, sentenced the monk to the dungeon of the magistrate until such a day arrives when he sees otherwise.

The lawman thanked the bishop and again carrying the now unclothed monk, returned with the judgment from the bishop, and the monk was imprisoned in the rank depths of a dungeon beneath the gray-stoned court of the magistrate.

Not half of that night had passed when another flame caught alight. The dry, bleached wood of the magistrate’s court erupted in that same, unearthly scarlet mantle as the church, and no stone lay upon the other by the time the lawman arrived. His crew of men stanched the fire licking the heels of heaven, but by then it was far too late for those in the dungeon to be saved, even the recently punished monk. The entrance caved in from the collapsing of man-sized stone blocks, the court had toppled into the hole of the dungeon and none could move its scorched foundations to free the damned.

For this story the lawman has oft repeated unto this very day,

Sinners in their churches are in chains,
Clergy to the human law of their land,
Burning with it when God unrestrains
A judgment by place as much as by hand.