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Re-imagine the World (Continued)

Co-ordinates
Scott thinks that "... Jesus told parables to let people in on his experience of God. Parables were his way of making God available to them." To attempt this he discovers three "co-ordinates" to focus the individual parables into a pattern.

The Leaven   The parable of the leaven occurs in Matthew 13.33, Luke 13.20-21 and Thomas 96. Why should this short parable be important enough to form a co-ordinate?

The answer is perhaps because it illustrates most clearly the huge difficulties into which modern interpretation can get. Because the parable is explicitly connected to "the kingdom of God" we have often supposed that the metaphor concerns how God's kingdom grows - quietly and secretly, like yeast in dough rather than by war or through power politics.

The degree to which the traditional interpretation is wrong turns out to be striking:

• An audience listening to Jesus would have understood leaven as referring to sin and evil, not to the action of God. Leavened bread isn't holy. If one wants to talk of the sacred and holy, then unleavened bread is the appropriate metaphor. Leavened bread, in Scott's phrase, swells up like a "decomposing corpse." We must recall, for example, that Jesus warns his followers about the corrupting leaven of the Scholars and Pharisees (Mark 8.15). Paul also cautions about "the leaven of malice and evil" 
  (1 Corinthians 5.8). Leaven corrupts an entire batch of dough, creeping unseen through it like an infectious disease.
• We often fail to credit the degree of male dominance in Jesus' day. Our eye passes easily over the phrase "a woman took" three measures of flour. But in relation to a holy subject like God's kingdom, as an emblem of the sacred, the use of a woman would have immediately seized a listeners attention. Women were not only weak and a source of ritual contamination, but essentially the inferior property of men which could be bought or sold during hard times.
• Because we rely on translations, we don't catch the nuance contained in the Greek word for "hide" which is used here. In fact, the word means "conceal" in the sense that the woman is secreting something which she doesn't want anyone else to see. There's something dishonest or shameful going on here if it needs hiding away!
• Nor do we catch the significance of the "three measures" of dough in the parable. First, it's a reference to the prophecy of the birth of Isaac in Genesis 18. Second, the amount is enough to feed a hundred people. This is no humble pie. Both points would have been instantly recognised by a first-century Hebrew audience. As the author remarks, "Surely such total corruption is nonsense as a way of talking about God or experiencing God."

The Empty Jar  Contemporary willingness to look outside traditional limits has opened up to us the Gospel of Thomas as a possible source of information about the Jesus of history. Scott uses a parable found only in this Gospel to focus his second co-ordinate. Thomas 97 reads:

The imperial rule is like a woman who was carrying a [jar] full of meal. While she walked along a distant road the handle of the jar broke and the meal spilled out behind her along the road. She didn't know about it. She hadn't realised there was a problem. When she reached her house, she put down her jar and discovered that it was empty.

The parable makes more sense when it's related to the tale of Elijah's miracle for the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings17.8-16), as it would have been by a majority of Jesus' hearers. The author concludes, "... the basic narrative is clear. There is no divine intervention. She goes home empty-handed ... the empire of God is identified not with divine intervention but divine absence ... God is not found in the apocalyptic miracle - one must look elsewhere."

The Samaritan   By now it should be evident that even so familiar a parable as that of the so-called "Good Samaritan" may turn out to have hidden depths. And so it does.

Even though the parable occurs only in Luke's Gospel, the Jesus Seminar rates it highly as an accurate rendering of "what Jesus really said." Traditionally the Samaritan has been seen as "the good guy" in contrast to the evil and selfish Priests and Levites. Latterly a common insight has been of the issue of the wayfarer as unclean, making it difficult for the bad guys to touch him and contaminate themselves. Quite recently it's been realised that part of the point for the listeners would have been the unpleasantness of the good guy being a despised Samaritan.

Once again, viewing the parable through a historical lens gives a different result. Scott points out that the victim is "half-dead". This would have obliged both Priest and Levite to help the man. But in the end "..all these speculations are useless. The storyteller provides no reason for the priest's action ... These two members of the religious elite simply pass by on the other side."

Outcomes
All the major parables are dealt with by Scott from the same sort of perspective. They turn out to be characterised by elements of more or less extreme surprise on the part of listeners and no discernable "lesson" to be learned, no obvious moral to be deduced - contrary to the traditional way of taking them.

Central to the parables is the theme of the Kingdom of God. Scott thinks that through this theme what we are being called to re-imagine is "a community's social experience." 

My personal way of making sense of the Empire symbol is to think of "social experience" as "the godly way of doing things" or "the way God does things". There is a normative way of doing things in any society. Jesus knew that his listeners would quickly appreciate the radical difference between the vision he was presenting and the reality of the Empire they all had to live with. The way empires normally do things, and the way God does things are radically different. Never the twain will meet.

Scott describes the way of doing things in the Roman Empire as "agonistic". That is, it's highly competitive in a hostile way. The Empire is a society grounded upon the ruthless exercise of a power used to destroy any and all opposition. Such a society uses negotiation only as a stratagem - never as a normative basis for settling conflict.

God's Empire then is "... at the core of Jesus' re-imagining", in which

• "... the unclean are accepted and welcomed by God just as they are ..." (the creeping, infectious leaven);
• "... the community must accept responsibility for its own welfare and not fall back on the narcotic of a divine intervention to set things right" (the empty jar);
• and "... social co-operation is defined outside the bounds of the traditional agonistic dynamic of a patron-client relationship" (the Samaritan).

This book of more than worthy of careful, open-minded reading. If I have a criticism, it's that Scott's flow of ideas appears somewhat disjointed. There are places where I would have liked greater attention to, and expansion of, a theme or conclusion. 

At the same time, it's only fair to make the point that re-envisioning the Christians canvas in the 21st century is an extremely difficult process. It requires degrees of creativity and courage which few have. Nobody can be blamed for stumbling or faltering. Not only are the images of two millennia difficult to erase from the mind's screen, but new images are hard to come by.

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