Hide and Seek

The Sacred Art of Indirect Communication

Benson P. Fraser

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781532670589, 9781532670596
• eBook ISBN: 9781532670602
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

As bearers of the divine image, all of us are storytellers and artists. However, few people today believe in truth that is not empirically knowable or verifiable, the sort of truth often trafficked through direct forms of communication. Drawing on the works of Soren Kierkegaard, Benson P. Fraser challenges this penchant for direct forms of knowledge by introducing the indirect approach, which he argues conveys more than mere knowledge, but the capability to live out what one takes to be true. Dr. Fraser suggests that stories aimed at the heart are powerful instruments for personal and social change because they are not focused directly on the individual listener; rather, they give the individual room or distance to reconsider old meanings or ways of understanding. Indirect communication fosters human transformation by awaking an individual to attend to images or words that carry deep symbolic force and that modify or replace one's present ways of knowing, and ultimately make one capable of embodying what he or she believes. Through an examination of the indirect approach in Kierkegaard, Jesus, C. S. Lewis, and Flannery O'Connor, Fraser makes a strong case for the recovery of indirect strategies for communicating truth in our time.

Section Three

Practitioners of Indirect Communication: Jesus, C.S. Lewis, and Flannery O’Connor

Chapters 7–9

7

Jesus: Parable and Provocation

It seems to me that more often than not the parables can be read as high and holy jokes about God and about man and about the Gospel itself as the highest and holiest joke of them all.

—Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth

Introduction

The great scholar known as the Vilna Gaon once asked the Preacher of Dubno,

“Help me to understand. What makes a parable so influential? If I recite Torah, there’s a small audience, but let me tell a parable and the synagogue is full. Why is that?” The dubner maged replied, “I’ll explain it to you by means of a parable.

Once upon a time Truth went about the streets as naked as the day he was born. As a result, no one would let him into their homes. Whenever people caught sight of him, they turned away or fled. One day when Truth was sadly wandering about, he came upon Parable. Now, Parable was dressed in splendid clothes of beautiful colors. And Parable, seeing Truth, said, ‘Tell me, neighbor, what makes you look so sad?’ Truth replied bitterly, ‘Ah, brother, things are bad. Very bad. I’m old, very old, and no one wants to acknowledge me. No one wants anything to do with me.’

Hearing that, Parable said, ‘People don’t run away from you because you’re old. I too am old. Very old. But the older I get; the better people like me. I’ll tell you a secret: Everyone likes things to be disguised and prettied up a bit. Let me lend you some splendid clothes like mine, and you’ll see that the very people who pushed you aside will invite you into their homes and be glad of your company.’

Truth took Parable’s advice and put on the borrowed clothes. And from that time on, Truth and Parable have gone hand in hand together and everyone loves them. They make a happy pair.”535

I wonder sometimes whether we have forgotten that one of the tellers of Jesus’s story insisted that “he did not say anything to them without using parables” (Matt 13:34). Matthew reminds us that Jesus’s use of parables was prefigured in Psalm 78, which declares, “I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter hidden things, things from of old” (Matt 13:35). Jesus continually used the language of images and metaphor, not merely to elucidate hidden things, but also to make them come alive. In his parables, Jesus suggests what the kingdom of God is like, rather than spelling it out in detail. His parables hint rather than explain. Again and again he catches his audience by surprise with an unexpected turn of events in the plot or with the unanticipated appearance of a strange character.

In this chapter we will discuss Jesus’s indirect approach to communication through the use of parables. Specifically, we will look at three parables Jesus told: “The Rich Fool,” “The Good Samaritan,” and “The Sower.” Finally, we will discuss what it means to hear the word of God (the appropriation of the word) and what it means to make the familiar strange when communicating the gospel.

Jesus the Storyteller

We live in images and we feel our way into our views or beliefs every bit as much as we think our way into them. We have seen how the indirect approach focuses more on feelings or images than ideas or doctrine, and therefore, how it speaks to the imaginative or emotive part of a person. Therefore, the indirect method contends that human transformation occurs when we are awakened by images that carry deep symbolic force that modify or replace our present structures of knowing and being.

James A. K. Smith asserts the artist with Christian concerns is directed by a vision that “captures our hearts and imaginations not by providing a set of rules or ideas, but by painting a picture of what it looks like for us to flourish and live well. This is why such pictures are communicated so powerfully in stories, legends, myths, plays, novels, and films,” rather than in dissertations, instruction manuals, laws, Twitter messages, and monographs.536 Smith argues that “we are affective before we are cognitive (and even while we are cognitive), visions of the good get inscribed in us by means that are commensurate with our primary affective, imaginative nature.”537

Parables that interest us succeed as clever stories. They entice us to attend to the narrative and they avoid becoming tedious by their cryptic and brief nature. They avoid unrealistic details that only get in the way of entering the story and they frequently describe startling behavior, but in doing so they never abandon the realm of credibility. Parables invite us to make judgments and interact with the storyteller or story. They tend to invite rather than persuade.

A parable is intended to challenge our previously held convictions or ideas. By design, they involve familiar subjects, but they are not necessarily easy to fully understand. As Harrington suggests, parables follow the conventions of good storytelling: “concision, repetition so as to set up a pattern, and surprise or contrasting ending.”538 As Thomas C. Oden states, they are “like a gift that one first needs to open and then has to figure out what he has to do with it.”539 In this way, the “parable seeks to facilitate a capacity that can only be set in mot...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Section One
• Section Two
• Section Three
• Bibliography