Last weekend, we attended a Celtic Eucharist at an
Episcopal church. This small gathering
was less formal than a normal service, with the seating arranged in a
circle. After reading Jesus’ parable of
“The Prodigal Son,” the group sat around and discussed the story. The priest suggested that the title could have
been “The Loving Father,” and that the story formed the core of the Christian
faith. Then he went further to suggest
that, if everything else in our Bible, Church History, and Theology were
somehow lost, everything essential to the Christianity could be reconstructed
from the parable. One woman then asked, “Isn’t a parable designed to turn a
particular belief or teaching on its head?” The priest nodded, and said that was a key
characteristic of parables.
As "The Prodigal Son" illustrates, Jesus was one of the most unique
religious teachers in history. Sure, he
preached many sermons during his time on Earth, and those outnumber his
parables. But, while we can remember a
couple of his sermons, such as "The Sermon on the Mount" or "The Great Commission," his parables engrave themselves on our hearts. Of all that Jesus
said, what we remember most is his fiction.
Parables are just that: a simple narrative invented to
convey a principle or moral. Unlike
sermons, in which we cannot help but understand the lesson being
communicated, it is possible to misinterpret a parable. While teachers and
scholars may study a parable and declare that it communicates an objective,
unarguable truth, each of us understand fictional stories
subjectively, based on our unique perspectives. It’s impossible to argue with a statement
such as “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor." However, each of us will come away from "The Prodigal Son" with a different message, depending upon on our experiences, and with whom we
relate most in the story: the father, the obedient son, or the foolish son.
While Jesus’ parables stick in our brains (and our hearts) more
resolutely than his straightforward sermons, we yearn for teachings that we
don’t have to process, that we cannot possibly misinterpret. As the interest in the current papal
selection process underlines, we look for churches, teachers, and religious
leaders who stand for the values we most want upheld, who represent the kind of
people we wish to be, and whose statements give us the assurance that if we
live according to their proclamations and interpretations, then we are living
according to correct principles. We
may love Jesus’ parables, but we don’t want to be “confounded and perplexed”
over the proper interpretation of the stories, as the crowds Jesus spoke to
sometimes were. We yearn for safety and
security, rather than trusting in ourselves to correctly interpret His teachings for our lives.
Still, even if we prefer mortal man’s teachings to those of
the Son of Man, still we love his stories.
Stories like "The Prodigal Son" reside in our hearts, and remain as
meaningful and important to us as the classic fairy tales we were told as
children, the stories we read in school, or the novels we purchased
yesterday. Even if we don’t identify
ourselves as Christians, a story like "The Prodigal Son" may mean as much to us as "Cinderella," Moby Dick, Pride And Prejudice (the version without the
zombies), or my personal favorite, Dune. As the woman's question indicated, Jesus even concluded his endearing stories with surprising, and yet satisfying endings. For me, that makes Jesus the
greatest short story author who ever lived.
Now, if only he had written a few novels!
Dragon Dave
