Of Seeds and the People of God

Preaching as Parable, Crucifixion, and Testimony

Knowles

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781630878740
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Preachers mount the pulpit steps terribly burdened by the conviction that they are somehow responsible for the growth and spiritual well-being of their congregants. How, they ask themselves, can mere words communicate the reality of God, bring life to a congregation, or foster spiritual growth?This study argues that effective sermons function much like Jesus' parables--by bearing witness to divine power. Parables and preaching both testify to something beyond themselves: to a life-giving dynamic that far outstrips the force of words alone. Preachers are not go-betweens or gatekeepers for the kingdom of heaven: rather, they imitate Jesus by dying to themselves in the very act of proclamation, relying directly on God for their sermons to bear fruit.As well as offering a novel interpretation of Jesus' agricultural parables, Of Seeds and the People of God presents a Christ-shaped theology of preaching. Beyond exegesis or rhetoric alone, faithful proclamation is a question of spirituality, of preachers and listeners together yielding to God's gift of new life.

Part One

God’s Field

Chapter 1

Parables, and Parables of Growth

Who Has Ploughed These Fields Before Us?

“You know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God” (Mark 12:24).1

In an essay published during his tenure at the University of Chicago—to all appearances the text of a sermon from the Divinity College chapel—Paul Ricoeur confronts the challenge of preaching the parables of Jesus:

To preach today on the Parables of Jesus looks like a lost cause. Have we not already heard these stories at Sunday School? Are they not childish stories, unworthy of our claims to scientific knowledge, in particular in a University Chapel? Are not the situations which they evoke typical of a rural existence which our urban civilization has made nearly ununderstandable? And the symbols, which in the old days awakened the imagination of simple-minded people, have not these symbols become dead metaphors, as dead as the leg of a chair? . . .

To preach today on the Parables of Jesus—or rather to preach the Parables—is indeed a wager: the wager that in spite of all contrary arguments, it is still possible to listen to the Parables of Jesus in such a way that we are once more astonished, struck, renewed, and put in motion.2

The way forward, according to Ricoeur, begins with a recognition that parables cannot be reduced to principles, propositions, or concepts. Because they concern “something Wholly-Other,” One who is beyond our immediate experience or control, parables appeal instead to our imagination. In speaking of this ultimate reality, Jesus intends to surprise, even to overwhelm us:

Look at the so-called parables of Growth: Matthew 13:31–33. This unexpected growth of the mustard seed, this growth beyond all proportion, draws our attention in the same direction as finding. The natural growth of the seed and the unnatural size of the growth speak of something which happens to us, invades us, overwhelms us, beyond our control and our grasp, beyond our willing and our planning.3

At three levels—in terms of narrative action, analogical language, and intended reference—parables point beyond themselves, toward a reality that far exceeds the scope of individual words, intellectual categories, or human experience in general. As to narrative action, parables speak of ordinary events that lead to extraordinary outcomes; with regard to language, parables tell us what God’s kingdom is like rather than what it is. Just as metaphor cannot be reduced to proposition, so parables cannot simply be mined for moral truisms, still less so systematized into conceptual abstractions. Nor, when it comes to their intended meaning, can “the kingdom of God” to which these parables refer become a merely human construct, subject to human control. In part by confronting us with the limitations of human language and surprising us with unexpected outcomes, the parables of Jesus tantalize their hearers with the possibilities of God’s reign:

To listen to the Parables of Jesus, it seems to me, is to let one’s imagination be opened to the new possibilities disclosed by the extravagance of these short dramas. If we look at the Parables as at a word addressed first to our imagination rather than to our will, we shall not be tempted to reduce them to mere didactic devices, to moralizing allegories. We will let their poetic power display itself within us.4

By virtue of their elusiveness, the parables seek to engage us with the transcendent reality of God.

Over the years there have been many approaches to parable interpretation. A good example is the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has been read at different times as an allegory of Adam’s journey from this world to the heavenly Jerusalem (Origen), or of the unfolding of salvation history from Israel to Christ and the counsels of Paul (Augustine of Hippo), or else as representing the conflict between law and grace in response to human sin (Martin Luther), the exile and restoration of Israel (N. T. Wright), psychological tension between id, ego, and superego (Mary Ann Tolbert), or dysfunctional family values (Richard Rohrbaugh). Or from another perspective entirely, the parable has been viewed as a “language event” that confronts its hearers with the values of the kingdom (Eberhard Jüngel, Robert W. Funk).5 But the acid test for all such interpretations—however congenial they appear to the sensibilities of our day—is whether they would have made sense to Jesus’ contemporaries. Set within their proper social and historical contexts, parables communicate by means of their arresting juxtaposition of familiar and unfamiliar: they speak of a world that Jesus’ hearers immediately recognized, populated as it was by fishermen, farmers, and tax collectors; masters and servants; poor workers and ruthless landowners; rural peasants and urban elites. As Ricoeur observes,

The first thing that may strike us is that the Parables are radically profane stories. There are no gods, no demons, no angels, no miracles, no time before time, as in the creation stories, not even founding events as in the Exodus account. Nothing like that, but precisely people like us . . .6

Of course, this is not quite true: neither Jesus’ parables nor his original audiences consist of “people like us”; much that would have been obvious to a first-century Palestinian Jew is utterly foreign in our day. We fail to see the point of the parables at least in part because we are far removed from their most basic social and economic dynamics: the majority of readers in the global North have been urbanized for generations, with little practical experience of sheep and goats, cycles of planting and harvest, rigid social stratification, or the economic constraints of subsistence farming. Still deeper concerns include the pervasive atheism of post-Enlightenment culture, together with the characteristic modern conviction that religion is a matter of private and personal—rather than public or political—concern. The most pious North American farmer would not seriously entertain the idea that crop germination, seasonal weather patterns, or the business of the slaughterhouse should be directly theological concerns, as they would certainly have been for Jesus’ first hearers. The divide between us is not only cultural and historical, but conceptual and theological as well.

Yet even for Jesus’ original audience, recognition of the scenarios he describes might have been short-lived or incomplete, for the characters in his parables behave in ways tha...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Texts and Abbreviations
• Permissions
• Introduction
• Part 1: God’s Field
• Part 2: God’s Body, God’s Building
• Part 3: God’s Word
• Appendix A: Questions for Preachers
• Appendix B: Sermons
• Bibliography