A Progress Report: On Reading the Parables of Jesus
If I were picking up the Bible and reading around in the
summer parables - the prodigal son, the unjust steward, the good Samaritan, the
wedding feast, the narrow gate – I would likely make some connections to my
life and then think about them for a while, take it away to my den like found
bones. So, for example, I read about the farmer who hatches a plan to secure
his future by building new barns for a large harvest. He is surprised when he
dies before the barns are finished. Reading that, I say: ‘Yes, I am always
looking ahead, making plans on the assumption of extra life. Clearly, if I knew
I was going to die soon, lots of that activity would seem pointless, and I
would do other things: visit my friends, spend time with my dog.’ The story of the
farmer who builds new barns reminds me of a way of thinking that is very familiar
to me, the grab for security and safety. It makes me look at my own first
impulse in a critical way. (I might go home and pet the dog.)
Reading the gospels in Word Team is different from reading
them by myself. The Word Team gets so many meanings out of the text. We go
around in a circle, giving our first responses; usually, every person has
something different. This information about how the story will be heard is very
useful for preaching; one gets a feel for the possible mindsets of this
audience. One’s question as a preacher is: how do I say something helpful to
people who begin with all these interpretations, making all these connections
to issues in their lives?
Stepping back from the process, remembering how it goes,
week after week, I want to ask, “So, what is the real point of any particular
story?” The story may provoke various thoughts, even obviously helpful and new
thoughts, but are they anywhere near to what Jesus had in mind?
In some moods, I dismiss this question. The parables provoke
thought. Thought is good. End of story.
But wouldn’t it be a shame if I missed the point?
So I think about what limits can be put on readings, how to
winnow down the mass of possible ways of thinking. One might look at the moral
as stated in the passage. Usually, after Jesus tells a story, he goes on to
explain it to the disciples, or he draws the moral from it. This stuff is often
taken by scholars to be later than the parable itself – an attempt by editors
to apply the tradition they have received to the needs of a particular
community. (The work of the Jesus Seminar is very important in separating the
layers of additions from the basic texts.) This commentary is not trivial material.
It articulates one community’s experience, a point that some community has found
valuable. It is at least a starting point for understanding the text. But any
explicit moral is usually just one more interpretation - not authoritative
advice on how to read the story.
One might try to use historical scholarship to limit
meanings. One knows that the First Century was different from the Twenty First
Century, that thoughts are available to us now that would have been just
impossible then, and also that the First Century had family structures, economic
realities, community relationships assumed as background that we would find
very strange. So, one has some hope that one can eliminate readings that rest
on realities of our time and search out readings that would have been natural
in Jesus’ time.
This is important work. It has limits. History at a distance
of two thousand years can identify, from sketchy evidence, general patterns of
life. We know, however, that such an account, in our own time, would miss many
variations on themes and exceptions to rules. Historians in the future may know what laws
were on the books but not necessarily how they were applied or enforced. They
may get pictures of the ideal family, the normative career, the People Magazine
version of success, but not necessarily a sense of the compromises and
resignations and creative adaptations that intelligent people made to those
ideals and norms and versions. If one becomes conscious of what an historian even
two hundred years from now would miss about our own lives and time, the texture
that doesn’t get captured in documents and pronouncements, one gets a sense of
the limits of historical context reading as a guide to scriptural interpretation.
This general worry about history is complicated by the fact
that Jesus lived at a cultural crossroads, at a time of social change. We might
be inclined to think of his teachings as arising in a sleepy village, from the
experiences of a simple carpenter, but the sleepy village is a mile away from a
large, energetic Roman city, Sepphoris, with huge building projects that might
well have lured craftsmen from the whole region. In such a city, one might
encounter an astonishing range of teachings and life experiences – including
Greek philosophic teachings.
Then there is the problem of genius. Ask a music historian
what kind of music a composer born in 1756 might have produced, and the
historian will be able to say a lot with certainty, based on what such a person
would have heard, what lines of development were emerging, what sorts of
patronage were available in the late 18th Century. But the historian
could not predict Mozart, could not predict what a mind fixed constantly on
music from early childhood might come up with. So, if we think of Jesus as a
person obsessed with certain relationships and problems from very early on,
working something out steadily over time, we have to admit that the things he could
have come up with may not be well explained by his context.
Is theology relevant? Some people in the early church understood
Jesus to be a cosmic principle, equal to God, the sole mediator between
humanity and God. Does the question, “What would a person with that status
say?” give us any help in reading the gospels? I can’t see how it could. If
Jesus was very different from other human beings, as a god among mortals is
different, that just eliminates any possible platform for interpretation. We can’t
say how a mind like that might think. So my working hypothesis is that, if this
grand picture of the ultimate significance of Jesus has truth to it, whatever
Jesus became arose out of an understandable human experience. It is not
impossible that the meaning of a life might be larger than the person living it
can understand. But, so far as I can see, if one attributes god-like
consciousness to the author of the parables, one simply gives up on the project
of discovering what they meant. Any “good” reading is as likely as any other.
One might be forced to come to this conclusion, at the end of the day, but it
is a shame to give up too early on the idea that these stories might teach us
something radically new, if we pay the right kind of attention.
How do we proceed?
One way I begin is to look for a minimal content to the
stories, a set of ideas that come up over and over and that might be the basic
insight, out of which various applications arise. I want to ask: what did Jesus
tend to notice and think about? He tells a lot of stories, for example, that show
how different perspectives change one’s way of seeing. A coin in the box of ten
is just one tenth of one’s wealth. But a lost coin becomes an obsession. One
thinks about it to the exclusion of everything else. Building a new barn seems
like a great idea when one is healthy and looking forward to many years of
prosperity. If one learns one is going to die very soon, it suddenly seems like
a totally crazy project. The steward who is fired from his job comes to view
business practices that would have seemed bizarre to him the day before the
firing as just the right way to secure his future. If one pauses to consider
what this structure means before rushing on to the next, moral thought, one is
left with a general attitude toward life: whatever you value or pursue or take
to be obvious, there’s likely a perspective from which that is not valuable,
not a good project, obviously false. One
can imagine Jesus observing rigid commitments and noticing that they can be
dissolved by a simple shift in perspective.
I suspect that, whatever moral or social-critical direction
Jesus’ teaching eventually takes, it begins its life as a cluster of mental
habits and approaches, a way of seeing through things.
Here is another possible member of this cluster. Think about
that story of the feast where someone sees a place next to the host and runs to
grab it. That is a natural move. One wants honor. One goes for the best place.
But the natural move, the first thing that occurs to a person, risks disgrace,
in certain very likely circumstances: the host is saving that place for a
distinguished friend. One can add the moral point: don’t be concerned about
honor, practice humility, stuff like that. But, again, if one pauses just
before the moral point, there is a general habit of mind evident here: be suspicious
of the direct approach, of your first impulse, of what comes naturally. Again,
one can imagine Jesus watching people go astray in that way and gathering
stories.
Daniel Kahneman, a behavioral economist, talks about two
systems of judgment, one very fast and tending to simplify choices, the other
much slower but also likelier to get it right. He shows with some very elegant
experiments that people are often ruled by a set of decision standards that
they would never endorse if they really looked at them. We are animals who once
had to make some decisions very quickly, and we carry with us intuitive
mechanisms that often don’t serve us very well. So, perhaps like Jesus,
Kahneman recommends a habit of mind that tries to get some distance from first
impressions and first impulses.
I think about the recommendation that one choose the narrow
gate. When one is coming back from the State Fair, after the grandstand show,
one is inclined to take the freeway home. One imagines all those lanes, no
stoplights, a direct route. One might then pause a minute and reflect that tens
of thousands of people are having that same thought and heading in the same
direction, and choose instead to take the back road. (See A Beautiful Mind for an economic version of this idea.)
My project over the last couple of years has been to
identify a way of thinking and seeing underlying different stories and sayings
in the gospels. It seems to me likely that whatever moral and social revolution
the gospels contain is somehow founded on a new way of seeing, one that breaks
the hold of established conventions and assumptions.
I have been influenced in the last few years by the hopeful
story Norman Doidge tells in his books, The
Brain that Changes Itself and The
Brain’s Way of Healing, both introductions to the science of
neuroplasticity - the idea that basic ways of processing experience can be
rewired by conscious effort, and that there is a clear direction toward health
and human connection that provides a rationale for such rewiring efforts. These
books, which remind me of the New Testament in their spirit, raise an important
question for me: did Jesus discover a new kind of mind, and was his fundamental
teaching – at some point in his career - a recommendation of that mind?
One of our Easter readings, Ezekiel 36, puts these words in
the mouth of a very frustrated God, a God at his wit’s end: “I will
give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart
of stone from your flesh and give you a heart
of flesh.” Every year, this reading alarms me. I think of bio-engineering, and
of all the projects dictators have undertaken to remake their people into the
right sort. Mao and his cultural revolution come to mind. And yet reform has to be something more than
new beliefs, a new enthusiasm. People who are still the old person just keep
making their old mistakes in new ways. (The picture of Peter in the gospels
makes that point over and over.) Is it possible that Jesus, at some stage in
his career, is offering people a set of exercises to build a new mind, out of
which new relations and a new society might emerge?
That’s what I’m working on. More later.
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