I was diagnosed with COVID last Wednesday — my second go-round with the virus — and want to thank everyone who heard the news, prayed for me, and sent notes of good wishes. Your kindness and love buoyed me (as well as Paxlovid!). Just this week, NPR (National Public Radio for those of you outside the States) reported a summer spike in COVID. It isn’t huge, and it isn’t even close to last summer. But I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ugh. Stay safe out there, friends.
I’ve been home in isolation and in bed for the last four days and am feeling a bit better — even though I’ve got a way to go. My husband, Richard, has been the best of companions through this.
As you can tell, I’m well enough to put together a few words to share with you this Sunday — and to offer up a piece from Freeing Jesus on parables.
Sending out Sunday Musings is a highlight of my week. I love putting these reflections, pictures, and poems into the world — and hearing back from you. I didn’t want to miss that! Keeping up this practice — even while recovering — is a good way for me to feel connected and vaguely normal. 🙂
Speaking of parables, did I tell you that the great Amy-Jill Levine will be a guest writer at The Cottage in August? Surprise! You’ll get more details about the coming month next week.
Matthew 13:31-33,44-52
Jesus put before the crowds another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which someone found and hid; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and caught fish of every kind; when it was full, they drew it ashore, sat down, and put the good into baskets but threw out the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.
“Have you understood all this?” They answered, “Yes.” And he said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like the master of a household who brings out of his treasure what is new and what is old.”
Matthew 13 is a parable lightning round — the chapter has seven parables, some explained and some not, with extended quotes from Hebrew scriptures. Throughout the passage, Jesus shows himself a master storyteller.
Today’s lectionary leaves out Matthew 13:34-35, but I think they may be the most important in the text:
Jesus spoke all these things to the crowd in parables; he did not say anything to them without using a parable. So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet:
“I will open my mouth in parables,
I will utter things hidden since the creation of the world.”
Parables aren’t supposed to be transparent. They are supposed to make listeners think and even argue. They are puzzles, koans, poetry, and word prisms — impressionistic more than factual. They are intended to upset those who hear them, raise questions, and confront all our certainties.
How else can even the greatest teacher explain “things hidden since the creation of the world”?
At the end of this passage, Jesus asks his followers: “Have you understood all this?”
They answered, “Yes.”
And, I suspect, that’s when Jesus must have known they hadn’t understood a word. He had much work to do before the disciples would grasp even the smallest shards of the great mystery he had been sharing with them.
The reflection below is from my book, Freeing Jesus — the chapter on Jesus as Teacher. It is one of my favorite parts of the book, and this section underscores how parables are both oddly simple and surprisingly complex at the same time.
* * * * * *
THE NEW TESTAMENT recounts many stories about Jesus, but it also contains many stories by Jesus. Christian Sunday school lessons are replete with them, these memorable stories about all sorts of seemingly mundane things — seeds, baking bread, lost coins, bad bosses, equal pay, lighting lamps, weddings, and parties. The stories are often like this one:
With what can we compare the kingdom of God . . . ? It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade. (Mark 4:30–32)
Although I cannot remember when I first heard this story, I do remember the teacher passing out tiny seeds to us. I looked at them in my palm, marveling that these small things would become large plants, so that birds would make nests in their branches. As I listened to the story, I felt surprised, sensing something just beyond my ability to name or explain. Later, I would learn the words that captured how I felt: mystery, wonder, and awe.
Jesus’s stories are called parables. They are not rules, commands, or doctrine. Instead, they are open-ended tales that invite us to struggle with their meaning, to wonder, to see the world from unexpected angles. Amy-Jill Levine says they are “mysterious,” in that parables “challenge us to look into the hidden aspects of our own values, our own lives. They bring to the surface unasked questions, and they reveal the answers we have always known, but refuse to acknowledge.” Parables are fiction, as Levine says, “short stories by Jesus,” or, as New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan puts it, “fictional events about fictional characters.”
Many Christians are under the misimpression that the parables are like Nancy Drew mysteries — that they bear one meaning, that there is a single solution to these gospel puzzles. But that’s not quite right.
During a recent fall, I preached for six weeks on the parables from the gospel of Luke and posted bits of those sermons on Twitter. Those tweets came to be the bane of my existence, especially when I tweeted about Jesus’s story of a Pharisee and a tax collector. The standard interpretation (and the one too many church people seem to think is the only legitimate one) is that Jesus criticized the Pharisee as a hypocrite and praised the tax collector as a true saint.
For years I thought the same. But when I looked at the story anew, it struck me that both Pharisee and tax collector are accepted and loved, one as a faithful believer (even if a bit obnoxious), the other as a repentant sinner. Maybe the tale of the Pharisee and tax collector was not an “either-or” choice, but a “both-and” mystery.
I learned something from that sermon, an exciting notion that challenged my understanding of piety and grace, of how God loves and whom God accepts. When I shared it on social media, however, my Twitter feed blew up. Three or four days of attacks ensued (mostly from clergy!) about how wrong I was, how the parable was as clear as a bell, how I had violated the whole of Christian tradition. “You can’t say that!” “Don’t you read the Bible?” “Block the heretic” (which is, I suppose, a bit gentler than the medieval alternative of burning heretics). And those were the nice tweets.
“Parable” comes from two Greek terms, para, meaning “to come alongside,” and ballein, meaning “to throw,” and is itself a paradoxical word. A parable is intended to be a story that comes alongside our regular understanding and, frankly, upsets it. It uses ordinary things to draw us to extraordinary ones and crafts understanding using the seen to explain the unseen.
In effect, the parables are Jesus coming alongside us and ripping off our cozy theological comforters. Parables should leave us gasping, out in the doctrinal cold, and shaking with anger, awe, or surprise. Nothing is as we thought. The whole point of a parable is to disturb, disrupt, and perplex us, shaking up what we believe to be true, all without providing an easy answer or simple moral to fall back upon.
If you grew up in Sunday school, you might think you understand the parables. There is a reason for that. Teachers and preachers not only taught the parables, but they also gave students and congregants an approved interpretation, a way of understanding the story, one often passed down through generations, that we have come to accept as the only interpretation. Thus, if you are a Christian, the familiar parables you think you know are subjected to conventional interpretations, almost like a Rosetta Stone of secret knowledge: the persistent widow is always about faithfulness in prayer; parables about Pharisees are always about hypocrites; when the rich are condemned, it is always a metaphor.
Imposing interpretations on the parables is an ancient practice. Indeed, Luke employed it when he reported the original Jesus stories in his gospel. For almost every parable, Luke prefaces the story with what he wants you to think about it, he recounts the story told by Jesus, and then he finishes by restating what he (that is, Luke) thinks the story means. Throughout the gospel of Luke, the same pattern occurs: Luke, Jesus, Luke.
In other words, the parables were so upsetting and so uncontrollable that even the disciples worked to neaten them up so early audiences would understand. To experience the parable as it was first told, however, one needs to lift the frame from the story and set Jesus’s words free to do their wilding work of imagination, without the gospel writer’s editorial intrusion.
Children seem to like parables, because when we are little, we have no fixed ideas to defend. When I preached about the Pharisee and the tax collector, I asked the congregation: “Who does God love in this story?”
A little boy shouted back, “Both of them!”
“Well, you just preached my entire sermon,” I responded.
Children appreciate a great mustard tree and do not question a God who loves both Pharisee and tax collector.
But grown-ups? Not so much.
We have to explain that the mustard tree really is not the biggest tree in the world and that it is fine to exclude those we deem hypocrites. The mystery, after all, has to be solved, the puzzle unpacked, all tension resolved. We have to arrive at the right answer. The possibility of multiple meanings is hard to imagine, especially for those schooled in the notion that texts can only be interpreted in one way, usually by employing some test of source criticism or demanding submission to a particular authoritative tradition. Because pastor says.
But being one who “comes alongside” and “throws down” is a perfect description of a great mystery writer. Jesus, the teller of parables, doesn’t provide a solution. He invites us to ponder. To listen deeply and welcome the unexpected.
INSPIRATION
I have seen the sun break through
to illuminate a small field
for a while, and gone my way
and forgotten it. But that was the
pearl of great price, the one field that had
treasure in it. I realise now
that I must give all that I have
to possess it. Life is not hurrying
on to a receding future, nor hankering after
an imagined past. It is the turning
aside like Moses to the miracle
of the lit bush, to a brightness
that seemed as transitory as your youth
once, but is the eternity that awaits you.
— R. S. Thomas, “The Bright Field”
MATTHEW xiii
I know the ways of learning; both the head
And pipes that feed the press, and make it run;
What reason hath from nature borrowed,
Or of itself, like a good huswife, spun
In laws and policy; what the stars conspire,
What willing nature speaks, what forc'd by fire;
Both th'old discoveries and the new-found seas,
The stock and surplus, cause and history;
All these stand open, or I have the keys:
Yet I love thee.
I know the ways of honour; what maintains
The quick returns of courtesy and wit;
In vies of favours whether party gains
When glory swells the heart and moldeth it
To all expressions both of hand and eye,
Which on the world a true-love-knot may tie,
And bear the bundle wheresoe'er it goes;
How many drams of spirit there must be
To sell my life unto my friends or foes:
Yet I love thee.
I know the ways of pleasure; the sweet strains
The lullings and the relishes of it;
The propositions of hot blood and brains;
What mirth and music mean; what love and wit
Have done these twenty hundred years and more;
I know the projects of unbridled store;
My stuff is flesh, not brass; my senses live,
And grumble oft that they have more in me
Than he that curbs them, being but one to five:
Yet I love thee.
I know all these and have them in my hand;
Therefore not seeled but with open eyes
I fly to thee, and fully understand
Both the main sale and the commodities;
And at what rate and price I have thy love,
With all the circumstances that may move.
Yet through the labyrinths, not my grovelling wit,
But thy silk twist let down from heav'n to me
Did both conduct and teach me how by it
To climb to thee.
— George Herbert, “The Pearl”
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I understand. I appreciated your thoughts on parables. And next time I will be clear I am citing you, to be sure. While I have you, what do you think of the idea of the parable as a verbal hand grenade that Jesus launches into the unsuspecting crowd? I've been using that illustration for a couple decades now, complete with the visual of me lobbing my pretend hand grenade into the congregation ;-) . . .
God's grace and peace to you my sister in Christ!
I apologize, Diana.