The One Thing Kneadful
All of the parables point to the circuit-breaking nature of Jesus’ ministry and kingdom.
Matthew 13.33
He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”
To what may we compare the scriptures?
Or, perhaps more plainly, what’s the Bible like?
Well, the strange new world of the Bible is like a giant house that is full of locked rooms. And on the floor in front of every door there is a key. But there’s a catch: the key doesn’t fit the lock on the particular door.
The challenge, then, is to gather up every single key and begin trying them out on each and every door until the proper key is found that will unlock each room.
So it is with the scriptures.
They are so obscure that the only way to understand them is by means of coming into contact with other passages containing different explanation that are dispersed throughout.
This is a parable about parables.
Consider - the Bible is full of just about every literary form.
Genealogy. Poetry. Prose. Drama. Instruction. Reflection. And, of course, parables.
Take it up and read - you’re just as likely to find something familiar as you are to find something bizarre.
This is the challenge of this thing that we come back to over and over again, like fools wandering around through a house with a pocketful of keys having no idea where any of them go.
So it is that we wander through the Bible while using the Bible to make sense of the Bible.
And, stretching the parable out a little more, we might hope and suppose that if any of the rooms in the house were already unlocked and opened, they would be Jesus’ parables.
That we would so hope is due to the fact that parables are usually used to clarify something about something - they are stories that reveal truths that we would otherwise miss.
And yet, at least with Jesus, the opposite seems to be true.
We don’t walk away from the parables with exclamations of, “Oh that’s what he meant!”
Instead we often walk away only to say, “What in the world was that all about?”
The late great Robert Farrar Capon put it this way: The device of parabolic utterance is used NOT to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings… Jesus’ parables are intentionally designed to pop every circuit breaker in the minds of those who receive them.
Consider, briefly, the parable of the Lost Sheep…
Jesus tells his disciples that God is like a shepherd who, if one sheep among one hundred goes missing, will leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one who went astray. And, if he finds it, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray.
Okay. A lot of us love this parable. We’ve heard it since we were kids in Vacation Bible School and the idea that God will never leave us lost is, truly, a comforting thought.
But, here’s the problem: The only thing guaranteed about going after one lost sheep is that the ninety-nine will go missing too. Going off after one is straight up bad advice because it puts all the other sheep at risk. And, in the end, there’s no guarantee that any of them will be found!
The parable of the lost sheep is, like all of Jesus’ parables, confounding and head-scratching Good News. It is a stark declaration that God saves losers and only losers. God finds the lost and only the lost. God raises the dead and only the dead.
The parables of Jesus, from the Lost Sheep, to the Prodigal Son, to the Good Samaritan, though they vary greatly in form and even function, they all point again and again to the fact that God is the one who acts first and God acts definitely without conditions.
Well, there might be one little condition, and if there is one it is this: we need only admit that we are lost and without a hope in the world unless a crazy shepherd is willing to risk it all on us.
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