Words'nTone

“What is the connection between these two points, the kingdom of God and the stories of Jesus?  I would suggest that the connection is summed up in the maxim: Parables give God room.  The parables of Jesus are not historical allegories telling us how God acts with mankind; neither are they moral examples-stories telling us how to act before God and towards one another.  They are stories which shatter the deep structure of our accepted world and thereby render clear and evident to us the relativity of the story itself.  They remove our defences and make us vulnerable to God.  It is only in such experiences that God can touch us, and only in such moments does the kingdom of God arrive” (John D. Crossan, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, pp 99-100.)

Even before I began studying the “nature” of parables and stories that Jesus used for “Wasted Evangelism” paper and Mark 4, I had wrote down in my outline as my point IV, ‘Evangelism as parable & mystery.’ Throughout the last 30 years of being a Christian, I was always suspicious of many (popular) interpretations of the parables of Jesus.  I can remember being asked to teach a Sunday School class on Luke’s parables—that was the first time I had studied them and found I wasn’t at all that comfortable at even my “teacher study guide” book’s interpretations, or its methodology for that matter.  At the popular level, I was suspicious of the easy, the way too easy, way people made each of the parables into allegories, with deep hidden meanings in every word and phrase.  Each word and turn of phrase had some corresponding meaning—many times outside the obvious referent in the story.  The other thing that always seem to bother me was how each parable seem to speak only to the private world of the Christian, as if Jesus was some 20th century (now 21st century) pop-psychologist.  Crossan’s little book, The Dark Interval: Towards a Theology of Story, was very insightful as I head into the issue of “parable” as a way of explaining the kingdom of God and the gospel.  I am not quite ready—and don’t think I will ever be totally—ready to accept the total deconstruction-view of the parables, as often over emphasized by Crossan.  But certainly, he is right in the idea that the parables are subversive in nature, confronting the world as we like it to be or as we want to experience it.  That’s why we turn them into fables, myths, allegories—we want them to speak to our needs.

We like to read the parable of the prodigal son and make it about how God loves us, let’s us go off on our on way only to love us when we finally come to our senses.  This is the world as we want to experience it, so the parable is turned into a fable, an allegory, and myth that “speaks” to our need, comfort, and desire for stability and security.  Whereas, as a parable it confronts us at our very core as Christians, informing us that we are more like the homebound son refusing to restore the ones we hate, welcoming back the other “sons” who have lived ungodly lives.  The parables are designed to subvert our world because the kingdom of God has arrived, and we are defenseless and vulnerable before the King.  The parables expose to us how the world works where God is seated as king.

In terms Crossan used to illustrate this idea, reading the parable as fable or myth is like someone telling us, “You have a lovely and beautiful home.” But, reading them as parable is as if someone pointed out, “Your house is built on a major faultline.” No wonder we change the nature of parables.

(I will be applying this view of parable to the Mark 4 parables in my paper)

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