The parables of Jesus, which rank among the supreme literary creations of western literature, testify to the consummate religious genius who had a unique vision
of God, a vision he discovered and communicated in parables.Those parables have remained riddles or mysteries almost from the very beginning. Mark seems to represent the position of many. "To you has been
given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables" (Mark 4:11, NRSV). For Mark a parable is a riddle.
This saying in Mark indicates that from a very early time Jesus' parables have mystified. Allegory has trod this path sorting out those on the inside who understand from those on the outside who don't.
Yet for many others, the parables are simple stories, illustrations for the common people. Such interpreters almost always end up with trite meanings
for the parables or import the meaning from elsewhere.
I have never found Jesus' parables simple. The arrogance of modernity sees the ancients as simple and ourselves as complex and sophisticated. Yet
Homer, an oral poet who could neither read nor write, composed two of the greatest poems of all times.
How do we know Jesus?
The focus of this book is on Jesus' parables. By Jesus I mean the historical Jesus — the Galilean, Jewish peasant as reconstructed by the tools of
historical criticism. I am trying to understand what Jesus intended by the parables. This focus does not deny the importance or legitimacy of studies
that deal only with the parables as they appear in the gospels. My focus is elsewhere, on the historical Jesus. (pp. 1-2)
To my mind the two strongest arguments for the authenticity of the parable
tradition are the rarity of parables in the Christian tradition and the coherence of the themes of the parables. Parables only occur in the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke) and the Gospel of Thomas. No
parables are ever placed on the lips of Jesus' opponents, nor does Paul or any other New Testament author use or create parables. The Gospel of
John contains no parables. In the later Christian tradition, many different sayings of Jesus are reported, but no new parables. The narrowness of the tradition impresses me and appears to point to one source.
When we examine all the parables as a corpus they cohere, they make sense as a group. One of the burdens of this book is to indicate this
coherence. We find in the parables phrases and words that are clearly the hand of an evangelist. In this regard the parables of the Gospel of Thomas
seem to me to exhibit about the same degree of editing as those of the other gospel writers. That is what I would expect. After a while, the editing style
of each evangelist becomes easy to spot. Well, maybe not so easy nor always so clear, yet patterns begin to emerge. None of the gospel writers
was a stenographer interested in preserving the exact words of Jesus. They retell the parables in their own way, just as we would expect. (pp. 4-5)
From Chapter 2, On Parables
In his parables Jesus re-imagined a world in which to live. And through them his followers learned to live in a re-imagined world. Furthermore, they
are our only means of access to that world. He called it the kingdom of God. How can parables re-imagine a world?
Parables belong to the wisdom tradition and so are related to proverbs and
aphorisms. Actually, in Hebrew the same world, mashal, stands for all three. But parables differ from proverbs and aphorisms in that they consist
of short narrative fictions that serve as metaphors. This way of employing fiction gives the parable a distinctive quality: it is not really about what it
seems to be about. Its real subject is disguised and can be discerned only through insight.
Myth and parable
A parable is a short narrative fiction. To properly interpret a parable, we must pay careful attention to the story — its plot and characters, the way it
tells its story. The power of story is its ability to release and empower the imagination. In story we can re-imagine the world, we can be other than we
normally are. But stories can work in one of two ways — they can either support the world as defined and perceived by the dominant culture, or they can subvert that world. (pp. 13-14)
Jesus' parables take the other path that is open to story: they re-imagine a world that subverts the status quo. To attack myth, a story must sometimes
be outrageous and offensive. When the Samaritan turned out to be the hero, Jesus' Jewish audience was more than surprised. It was outraged at such an
offensive notion. And by comparing the kingdom of God to leaven he necessarily violated the religious sensibilities of most, if not all of his hearers.
Because parables expose myths as false answers to life's hard realities, they also expose their audiences to discomfort and pain. We no longer take
offense at the parables, because myth has reclaimed the parables for us, and we no longer experience their assault on myth and their re-imagining of
life apart from myth. We must pay attention to the parables' stories and understand them in their historical, cultural context in order to experience
anew the way they shook the cultural foundations of Jesus' world. (pp. 15-16)
One of the distinctive ways Jesus subverts the mythical world is by employing minor themes from the tradition of Israel.
. . .
The Prodigals invokes the traditional theme of two sons, one elder and the other younger, with the sons playing stereotyped roles. The elder son,
usually loyal and upright, is rejected in favor of the younger son, usually cast in the role of a rogue. (In mythic form, this motif was used by Israel for its
own self-identification.) At the conclusion of Jesus' parable, when an audience expects the father to reject the elder son for protesting the
younger son's reception, the father instead responds, "My child, you are always at my side. Everything that's mine is yours" — a profound shock to the audience's expectations. (pp. 16-17)
From Chapter 12, Re-Imagining the World
. . . Jesus' language offered to his audience an alternative to the world in
which they were trapped — a world burdened by purity laws segregating the unclean from the clean and into further degrees of purity or shame. A
world where those on the bottom are imprisoned in unchangeable structures and await a divine solution. A world in which enemies threaten at every
point. Jesus in his language offers a counter world, a vision, an openness to experience. It is a "glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is
denied or constantly threatened by circumstances." It may be only an imagined or re-imagined alternative, but it derives its weight from its
opposition to and careful observation of the historical world. Apart from the gravitational pull of that historical world, it is without meaning or open to whatever one wants it to mean.
Jesus revolts in parable and the parables create a counter-world, a hoped-for world that redresses the world as it is and surely makes sense,
regardless of how it turns out, even it if turns out to be his crucifixion.(p. 140)
