As a part of my class I am reading Crossan's In Parables: The Challenge of the Historical Jesus. In this post I provide three points of the first chapter. This is a helpful way for me to digest the material and I hope it is helpful in comprehending the parables themselves.
1) Poetic Metaphor: Crossan describes the parables generally as 'poetic metaphor.' Crossan keeps the non-poetic (me) afloat by explaining the relationship between the experience and the expression. The experience (life; existence) which leads to the expression (parable; poetic metaphor; words) are in a circular relation to each other. To illustrate this circular nature Crossan quotes T.S. Eliot:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time
Only by exploring the expression can one grasp the experience and through the expression both audience and poet confront the experience anew. Again, Crossan: "The metaphor here contains a new possibility of world and of language so that any information one might obtain from it can only be received after one has participated through the metaphor in its new and alien referential world." The newness conveyed in the expression (parable) creates a newness to the world. Thus, the parable as it refers to an experience can only be understood if one is drawn into the world it illustrates. Crossan writes "A great poet or a great artist is one who establishes in and by and through his work new criteria for artistic or poetic greatness by establishing a new world in which it is such." Indeed, within the poetic power of Jesus' parables the foreign is brought to the common. We are drawn into it, experiencing something new of a world Jesus conveys through parable.
2) The Kingdom of God: This new world in poetic metaphor is the Kingdom of God. Crossan avoids a definition that would make the Kingdom of God a location and instead insists that the Kingdom of God is "the action of God in which kingly rule and dominion was clearly manifested" (emphasis mine; Psalm 145:11-12). The Kingdom is power and deed, and Jesus is the advent of God's kingdom. The Kingdom of God is the central topic of Jesus' parables.
Three key parables of Jesus concerning the kingdom: 1) The Treasure (Matt 13:44); The Pearl (Matt 13:45-46); and the Great Fish (Gospel of Thomas 8). The Kingdom-movement exemplified in these parables is three-fold: advent-reversal-action. For example, in the Parable of the Treasure the main verbs are finds-sells-buys. The main character of the parable finds a treasure (advent of the kingdom), which alters his plans and creates a dramatic change for the future (reversal) and leads to the unexpected action of buying the field (action). Thus, the parable is the the expression of the experience of the Kingdom of God: advent-reversal-action.
3) Past-Present-Future: In the experience of God's Kingdom as expressed through the parables, one's past ceases to define the present because both are consumed in the experience. The future cannot remain the same. Something new is happening, altering paradigm and place. The individual moves to redefine the future in reverence to the advent.
"The one who plans, projects, and programs a future, even and especially if one covers the denial of finitude by calling it God's future disclosed or disclosable to oneself, is in idolatry against the sovereign freedom of God's advent to create one's time and establish one's historicity. This is the central challenge of Jesus." - Crossan
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