Summertime is just around the corner, and that means
vacations and family trips. One kind of trip that a lot of families enjoy is
camping, getting out of the suburbs and out into nature, more or less. Quite
often they are accompanied by a travel trailer or an RV that provides many of
the conveniences of life, but one thing that seems to stay as a standard is a
campfire. Many of us have memories of sitting around fires in the gathering
dark, listening to stories, often scary ones, but we also heard family stories
and reminiscences, stories that taught us where we came from, who our ancestors
were, and how they lived. That particular kind of adventure has been going on
since time began.
When a baby is born, they grow up hearing stories and having
books read to them. The books are full of pictures because pictures convey
ideas that they haven’t the words for yet. It teaches them the words and the
concepts of the story, and their love of images in books can help determine how
able they are to learn school work. I never could get the hang of math because
there weren’t any pictures, plus I’m a dud when it comes to figures. I lapped
up the stories in history, English, and literature, though. Those made a great
deal of sense to me. Even when I couldn’t see the words or had only the words
in front of me, my mind could make them turn into pictures as I read. Now,
almost three-quarters of a century later, they still do.
Jesus frequently taught using stories. We call them
parables, stories that represent concepts and practices that marked the
difference between good and evil, hopefully allowing the listeners to
understand the abstract concepts in a more concrete fashion. In today’s reading
of the gospel, Jesus told three stories, each one was illustrating something
that he wanted his listeners to learn and to understand.
At the end of the passage, Jesus told his disciples that he
taught in parables. Those who understood would be like wheat in a field while
those who didn’t would be like weeds. Workers couldn’t pull up the weeds while
the crop was growing because they would pull up stalks of good grain with them.
So the weeds had to remain until it was time to harvest the wheat and then they
would be separated.
The storyteller has been an essential figure in communities
and rural areas. The storytellers not only brought news from outside the village
where he was visiting but had often had a
long apprenticeship under older storytellers, learning the epic stories
and tales word by word so they could pass them along to the next generation.
That is still found in several cultures around the world, for instance, the
Navajo. Their stories and chants must be learned without any deviation before
the young man can become a shaman or a medicine man. For the Jews, stories are essential,
especially those about the patriarchs and the Exodus. The Passover story is their
prime lesson repeated every year without change. For Christians, the stories of
Jesus are foundational; the most important of these is that of his
resurrection. We still listen to the parables Jesus taught and see them as
valuable aids in learning and models for the teaching of younger members in
ways that they can comprehend long before they’re able to understand abstract
concepts.
Today, we use the Sunday school class curricula and programs
like Godly Play, which are ways of presenting Bible stories geared to the
individual levels of children’s understanding. I think any person exposed to Christianity
in their early years will recall stories like Adam and Eve and Noah’s ark. As
they grew older, they learned about Abraham and Isaac, Joshua and the walls of
Jericho, and the stories of Saul and David. While many of those stories are not
parables, they are tools for learning our religious history. We still look at mythological
stories like the Star Wars films and the Harry Potter books. Both of those
series are stories of made-up people and places, but incorporate realms
somewhat different than we are accustomed to but where many of the lessons that
young Luke Skywalker and Harry Potter had to learn to gain in wisdom and
ability. I don’t know how many older folks can enjoy such stories, but I know I
do. Good stories are ones that can be appreciated by all ages.
When we read the parables of Jesus, we look to see what he
is using to make his teaching applicable. We remember the good Samaritan, which
is probably one of his best-known parables. While there was never a Samaritan
who stopped by the roadside to help an injured Jew, Jesus used that story to
point out that we are all neighbors no matter what our differences are and we
need to care for those neighbors no matter what. Just because something never
really happened doesn’t necessarily mean it’s false; often the best lessons are
taught through myths which show truths without being factual.
This week will look I think I will look at the parables
again under a microscope, looking to see exactly how Jesus structured his
parables, what they pointed out, and how he made them understandable to the
people. I know there will be many things that are strange and foreign to me in
this modern world, but if I look through the eyes of first-century followers, I
will look for the things that just don’t fit or that seem to go against logic
and investigate life at that time that the listeners would see and think of. It’s
going to be an exciting journey. I hope you’ll join me.
God bless.
No comments:
Post a Comment