What is a parable? What are they for?
This week I am at a series of lectures on the parables by two scholars. Bernard Brandon Scott is up from the United States, changing our perception of the Biblical Parables and Alyda Faber is helping us explore parables in modern film.
Here is a quick talking point for you to consider: the movement Jesus was part of used parables to shock people, to make them think differently, to upset them and make them laugh.
Some couple of thousand years later, we have heard those parables so many times that we do not hear them in any way close to the way they were intended. Not only that, but the church has softened the edges, has taken away the humour, has made them so they hardly affect us at all except to think they are like proverbs, words of wisdom...
But they are not.
A parable is supposed to be a trap door in a much travelled sidewalk.
And I guess the thing is we are so familiar with some of these stories that we have lost the impact. I mean, whether you go to church or not you are probably familiar with the Good Samaritan and you probably understand it to mean that we are supposed to take care of everyone.
What would it mean of the story was not meant that way at all? What would it have to say to shock you and make you think about life differently?
Remember the parable of prodigal son. A father had two sons, the younger of whom was unhappy with life on the farm and asked for the inheritance early only to waste it on bad decisions and partying. When the money ran out he took a chance and decided to ask to come home and was welcomed graciously.
In British Columbia there was a father who owned a farm, became quite wealthy and had two sons. One used the money and did good things in the community, became quite well known and made a difference. The younger son was Robert Pickton and murdered countless women, burying their bodies on the farm.
There is a parable in there, is there not?
One of the things that may be hampering the church in our era is the fact that we seem irrelevant. People think we are simply peddling information that they can get other places better, or we are so old fashioned that we do not matter in a technological modern world.
And we have done this to ourselves. We have never come to terms with who we were meant to be... The troublemakers, the sarcastic background commentators, the ones who looked at the government, the scientists, the bankers, the leaders and said... "Yeah right..."
Maybe we need to be telling new stories, shocking people by holding up the familiar and the modern and asking, is it still true... Should Robert Pickton be forgiven?
So this is a call to reclaim the use of parables, not as familiar Internet memes, but as rebellious interjection, shocking stories that change people. When we learn to tell it that way again, we will make a difference.
