Subversive
Jesus was a master at subversion. Until the very end, everyone, including his disciples, called him Rabbi. Rabbis were important, but they didn't makes anything happen. On the occasions when suspicions were aroused that there might be more to him than that title accounted for, Jesus tired to keep it quiet--"Tell no one."
Jesus' favorite speech form, the parable, was subversive. Parables sound absolutely ordinary: casual stories about soil and seeds. meals and coins and sheep, bandits and victims, farmers and merchants. And they are wholly secular: of his forty or so parables recorded in the Gospels, only one has its setting in church, and only a couple mention the name God. As people heard Jesus tell these stories, they saw at once that they weren't about God, so there was nothing in them threatening their own sovereignty. They relaxed their defense. They walked away perplexed, wondering what they meant, the stories lodged in their imagination, And then, like a time bomb, they would explode in their unprotected hearts. An abyss opened up at their very feet. He was talking about God; they had been invaded!
Jesus continually threw odd stories down alongside ordinary lives (para, "alongside"; bole, "thrown") and walked away without explnation or alter call. Then listeners started seeing connections: God connections life connections, eternity connections. The very lack of obviousness, the unlikess, was the stimulus to perceiving likness: God likeness, life likess, eternity likeness. But the parable didn't do the work--it put the listener's imagination to work. Parables aren't illustrations that make things easier; they make things harder by requiring the exercise of our imagination, which if we aren't careful becomes the exercise of our faith.
The disciples came up and asked, "Why do you tell stories?" He replied, "You've been givin insight into God's kigdom You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn't been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insiggts and understnading flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight."
Matthew 13:10-13
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