The Ambiguities: Two Parables

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Two Parables

September 25, 2014
I am all too serious but not serious enough.

Here is my version of a pair of parables, though I am cheating, my educated friends tell me, every rule of modern exegesis since the Germans invented it in the late 19th century. For example, one cannot pair a parable from Luke with one from Matthew – they aren’t a pair; it doesn’t matter that both occur in 18th chapters, dumb-ass. Nor can one draw no conclusions whatsoever; and that there may be no conclusions to be drawn is not a satisfactory finding.

That there must be proof in the pudding: Here is where, I ignorantly propose, we actually go wrong with how we read Jesus’ parables. We come to an end of our reading and, instead of living, even sleeping, with the story he’s told, we begin to explain it – we exegete, we preach, we theologize, we make a conclusion; from the delightfully, purposefully thin air of the parables, we create structures of steel, we draw lessons of iron. Where the parables end with only the almost inaudible pip-hiss of Jesus' closing his lips on his laughter, we make as much moral noise as the man proclaiming his prayer in the first of those parables here (Matthew 18).

So, when I try to wrangle these two parables into shape, I find my hands around the neck of no-shape at all. There are just two parables, one and then the other; then Jesus is turning away, chuckling to himself. Also at us. There’s the lesson, if there must be one.