'Sunday School' teaser

Reading the Parables Backward and Forward

Matt Messer and I are co-writing an essay to introduce our upcoming Sunday School class. I finished my half. Help me think, if you would, about this analogy I’m playing with — that reading Scripture in context is like listening to our favorite music.

This bit feels more clear than the methodology chapter of my dissertation:

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Reading the Parables Backward and Forward

Rev. Jack Franicevich & Dr. Matt Messer

What does it mean to read a parable ‘in context’?

The concept of ‘context’ is tricky, because each of Jesus’s parables has so many different kinds of context.

For the sake of analogy, consider what it might mean to listen to your favorite piece of music in context. There’s the album on which it was released. There’s what was going on culturally when that album came out. There’s the story behind the song, and the artists whose work formed them. There’s the popular covers that have come out since. There’s what it meant to you the first time you heard it. Listen with a musician, and they’ll point out the production techniques that you wouldn’t have noticed without their expert eye. In order to really appreciate what’s going on in a piece of music, there are a lot of ‘contexts’ to consider.

Over the next few weeks in Adult Christian Formation, we’re going to read four of Jesus’s parables in two different kinds of context. Jack will read them backward, listening to the ways in which they draw from the first five books of the Bible. Matt will read them forward, paying attention to the ways in which they were read by early Christian interpreters.

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The Parable of the Good Samaritan begins when an “expert in the law stood up to test Jesus” (Luke 10:25). The word Luke uses for ‘test’ is ekpeirazōn, which should make us readers nervous. Why? The only other time Luke has used this word is when Jesus tells Satan, “Do not test (ekpeiraseis) the Lord your God” (4:12). Is Jesus comparing this lawyer to Satan?!

He’s not. When Jesus says this to Satan, he is directly quoting Deut. 6:16. In that passage, Moses tells Israel, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test, as you tested him at Massah.” Massah is where the people had “quarreled with Moses,” and then complained, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst?” (Exod. 17:2, 3).

Then Moses struck the rock. Water came out. He called the place Massah and Meribah, “because the Israelites quarreled and tested the lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord among us or not?’” (17:7) When Jesus rebukes Satan, he implies that Satan is (diabolically) attacking Jesus’s faith by making Him wonder whether God really cares for Him.

By reusing the word ekpeirazōn that he had used in 4:12, Luke introduces a different kind of test—one which Jesus welcomes and even engages.

The lawyer tests Jesus by asking tis estin mou plēsion, “Who is my neighbor?” (v. 29). The thing is, in Jesus’s day, this was an actual question that was being debated by Jewish lawyers. The question came from Lev. 19:15–18. At the end of this passage, God tells the people to “reprove your fellow citizen (ʿāmîṯ)” and “love your neighbor (rea’).” The two words had different connotations.

But when Torah was translated into Greek, the scribes erased the distinction. It now read, “reprove your fellow citizen (plēsion)” and “love your neighbor (plēsion).”

Back in the day, Jews distinguished between their ʿāmîṯ and their rea’, and the different duties a person of faith owed each of them. But who is your plēsion? This lawyer tests Jesus the way a well-credentialed debate moderator tests (or should test) a political candidate. He wants to hear Jesus’s moral reasoning.

When Jesus answers, he tells a story, and the peculiar law he echoes in this story surprised and challenged everyone.

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