Tell it Slant: Parables in Luke’s GospeL
The Revised Common Lectionary (RCL) for this season takes us to the middle of Luke’s gospel, where we find several parables. Parables are not exactly metaphors or allegories, but rather stories that illustrate larger truths about the Reign of God. Hearing parables is a discipline, because our tendency is to look for one-to-one correlation between the items and characters in the parable with equivalencies in real life (“the father in this story is God,” e.g., or “the thorny ground represents people who resist the gospel”). I’m hoping that over the course of this six-week series, we can practice together the discipline of reading, hearing, and internalizing parables without attempting to transliterate them into one meaning. (Most have lots of potential meanings!) The parables for this series are proximate to one another, within five chapters of Luke’s gospel. We won’t read every word of those five chapters, but we’ll read some in between the parables for context.
Finding shit you had lost. Jesus tells these stories like they make perfect sense. “Which one of you…does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness?” But is that really the obvious thing to do? What would you do, if you were a shepherd? Or a teacher, maybe, with 99 (or let’s say 19) kids? Leave them in the wilderness? What about the other stories, do the responses of the characters make sense to you? Is that what you would do? Does it seem like the obvious course of action, or is it surprising? The RCL separates the Prodigal Son story from the sheep and coins parables. Why do you think Luke puts them together? Are they related? How?
Too weak to dig, too proud to beg. Once again, Jesus tells this story like the manager’s response is rational. Is it? What about that line in v. 8, “the children of this age are more shrewd in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.” What does that mean? Is that true today, for this generation? And then the turn in vv. 10-11. “Whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.” And so, it follows that we should be faithful with dishonest wealth? Not that we should be faithful and honest? Huh?
Prophets over ghosts. In what way is this parable a response to the ridicule of the VRPs? Luke tells us they were “lovers of money” (hence their ridicule in response to the previous parable about the dishonest manager). Jesus responds to their ridicule with a series of seemingly disjointed observations. John (the Baptizer) ushered in a new era, or good news over law. But the law is still active, also. And, this weird comment about remarriage. And then, the rich man and Lazarus. What is the train of thought here? The parable is about riches, surely, which tracks with Luke’s aside (“who were lovers of money”), but how does it track with any of the rest of this? And what do you make of Abraham’s assertion that if Lazarus’s family didn’t believe the prophets, they also won’t believe “even it someone rises from the dead”? Who would you believe, a prophet or a ghost?
Persistence over performance. I’m ready to give this widow a standing ovation. You? One of the tenets of Critical Race Theory is “interest convergence,” the idea that laws do not change because of the kindness of lawmaker’s hearts. They change because the interests of the lawmakers or the powerful converge with the interests of justice advocates. “Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone,” he says, “this widow is on my everlasting nerve.” And then we have the pray-ers. Why do you think this parable immediately follows the previous one? What common themes do you see?
A nasty nobleman and those he enslaves. This is one of the ones where I struggle the most not to seek one-for-one equivalencies. Does the nobleman = God? (I hope not!) Do the slaves = us? What are the pounds? In Luke, “pound” is a translation of “mina,” about three months’ wages. Other gospels have a similar story with “talents,” or more than fifteen years’ wages. Some people have used an English pun with “talents,” understanding them as our gifts and, well, talents. What will we do with what God has given us? But Luke’s version also includes some violence. This nobleman is not well liked, and he slaughters those who don’t want to be his subjects. Luke says he told this parable “because he was near Jerusalem”—indeed, chronologically and geographically, we are very close to the start of Passion Week in this passage. The very next verse concerns his triumphal entry. What does this parable mean, in that context?
Chronic naivete with tragic results. Jesus is now in the final days of his life. He has entered Jerusalem, and cleansed the temple. The VRPs are looking for a final solution. Luke has just a couple chapters of last-minute sayings and stories from Jesus, and then he will be betrayed and crucified. In that context, he tells this parable, which seems thematically similar to the previous one: it concerns a wealthy ruler and his enslaved persons. But in this one, the master is not the villain, rather his tenants are. Why does the landlord continue sending his enslaved persons to the tenants? Why does he think they will behave any differently than they always have? In what way is this parable an answer to the VRPs’ question of Jesus’ authority? And in what way does it introduce how Jesus’ life is about to end?