Jesus

by James Martin

  I remarked how amazing it was that we could hear their voices so clearly. One older Jesuit said, “Well, of course. Sound travels over water very easily. You remember that story of Jesus preaching from the boat, right? That’s one reason he did it that way. It was probably easier for the crowds to hear him.”

  His casual insight delighted me. It reminded me that some of what we may not “get” in the Gospel often turns out to have a real-life explanation, once we think about the context of the story. Perhaps because I felt that I’d been let in on a kind of secret, I had a renewed desire to learn more about that story, and about the Gospels.

  Finally, the third chapter: George and I arrive in Jerusalem about a decade after my encounter with the noisy sailing school. At dinner on the first night, Father Doan, the Jesuit superior at the PBI, asks me what we’d most like to visit. The first place I want to see, I tell him, is the Bay of Parables.

  Doan replied, “The what?” Now, here was a Jesuit priest who has lived in the Holy Land for years. “I’ve never heard of it.”

  Okay, I thought, maybe it’s the one place he hasn’t heard of. George looked doubtful.

  A few days later, we made the four-hour drive to Galilee and found our way to the Franciscan hostel on the Mount of Beatitudes. After we settled ourselves in our rooms, Sister Télesfora asked us, “So, Fathers, what would you most want to see?”

  “The Bay of Parables!” I said.

  “The what?”

  When I described it, Sister Télesfora shook her head and furrowed her brow, as if I were deluded. Or insane. And she is not simply a Franciscan sister—she also teaches New Testament Greek, so she would presumably know about the site.

  George rolled his eyes and said afterward, “It’s like you were asking about Santa’s workshop at the North Pole.”

  A few hours later, we made our way to Tabgha, the traditional site of the miracle of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes, and we prayed briefly in the small chapel there. Afterward, in the gift shop, I noticed one of the Benedictine monks, screwed up my courage, and asked, “Do you know where the Bay of Parables is?” I fully expected him to say, “The what?”

  Instead, he said in a heavy German accent, “Ja, ja! Zee Bay of Pah-rables!” He stumbled in English, so I called over George, who speaks German. “It’s verry cloze to here,” he said.

  The monk grabbed a small map from beside the cash register and scribbled some directions. Then George translated his German. “Just walk along the road and you’ll see . . . an opening in the bushes. Then go down into the bush and you’ll see . . .” George paused, looked at the man, looked at me, and then asked him to repeat a word. George said to me, querulously, “I think he said to follow the stones . . . painted purple?”

  “Ja, ja!” he said excitedly. “Wie-o-let. Wie-o-let paint on zee rrocks.”

  So under the blistering hot sun—it must have been 110 degrees—George and I followed his map and, sure enough, almost tripped over several boulders marked with violet bars.

  “Wie-o-let,” said George dryly.

  As we walked farther into the dry grass, a handful of wood hyraxes, squirrel-size rodents, scurried around our feet and zoomed up the low trees.

  Immediately (euthus!) the ground dropped away from us, and we found ourselves on the rim of a natural amphitheater. People had likely stood here and listened to Jesus preaching from the boat. Or, as is often said in the Holy Land, “If it didn’t happen here, then it happened a few hundred yards from here.” As I gazed on the blue-green water sparkling under the sun, I could easily picture Jesus sitting in a boat just a few hundred feet from where we were standing. I couldn’t stop smiling when I realized what we had found.

  “Zee Bay of Pah-rables,” said George.

  Then I saw something that amazed me even more. All around us was this: rocky ground, fertile ground, stony ground, and even a thorn bush.

  DOES THAT SOUND FAMILIAR? In the Parable of the Sower, Jesus tells the story of a farmer who goes out to sow and whose seed falls on different kinds of ground. Told in all the Synoptic Gospels, the parable illustrates (among other things) the way that Jesus’s message is received, in both his day and our own.3 Jesus even explains the parable at length in the Synoptics. The rocky ground represents those who hear the word, but do not allow it to take root; when trials come they “wither away.” The thorny ground is an image for those who hear the word, but the “cares of the world” and “lure of wealth” choke it off, and the seed produces no yield. But the fertile ground represents those who hear the word, accept it, and bear great fruit, “in one case a hundredfold, in another sixty, and in another thirty.”4

  As I stood under the broiling sun, I was gobsmacked to see rocks, thorns, and fertile ground. No one planted the thorn bushes, carted in topsoil, or arranged the stones to make the locale look as it did in Jesus’s time, as if we were in a theme park called Jesus Land. They were just there.

  It dawned on me that when Jesus used objects from nature to convey his message—seeds, rocks, birds, clouds, water—he may not have been talking in generalities, but about these things right here. Not “Think about rocky ground,” but “Look at that rocky ground.” Not “Those people are like thorns,” but “Those people are like those thorns.” It grounded the Gospels, and Jesus, in a way that I never could have imagined. It made me think more about the way Jesus drew on nature in his parables.

  Then I remembered another insight I once heard about this passage. The Parable of the Sower may refer not only to which individuals are open, or not open, to receiving the Gospel message. It may also refer to those parts of ourselves that are open, and not open. Can you see your whole self as the field and consider what parts are fertile, what parts are rocky, and what parts are choked with weeds?

  Where, for example, are you open to God’s word in your life? Perhaps you are easily able to find God in your family. That may be your good soil. Where is your rocky soil? Perhaps you are compassionate at home but less so at work, stubbornly clinging to old grudges. That aspect of your life may be unyielding, and God’s word cannot penetrate the soil of your soul. What part of your life is choked with weeds? Perhaps you desire to follow God but are obsessed with wealth, which chokes off the fruitful growth that God might wish.

  To continue the metaphor, God may want to dislodge a few rocks and pull out some weeds in order to clear a space for God’s word to take root. This may take the form of a friend confronting you on some selfish behavior, a sudden recognition of your own stubbornness, or even a period of suffering that opens you to God in a new way. God plows, unearthing the good soil where God’s word can be planted, take root, grow, and flourish.

  Facing the Sea of Galilee, I wondered about the people who, in Jesus’s day, sat where I was standing now. What did they think when they heard these parables for the first time? I thought about how glad I was that I had listened to Drew and come to the Holy Land. I thought of all of these things as I stood at the Bay of Parables.

  I also thought about C. H. Dodd.

  IN OUR INTRODUCTION TO the New Testament class, Father Harrington began our discussion of the parables by quoting a definition from the Scripture scholar C. H. Dodd, which was memorable in its precision. In his book The Parables of the Kingdom, Dodd defines a parable as “a metaphor or simile drawn from nature or common life, arresting the hearer by its vividness or strangeness, and leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought.”5

  The Greek paraballō means “to place one thing beside another.” As Harrington notes, “A parable is a form of analogy that seeks to illuminate one reality by appealing to something better known.”6 The complex reality of the reign of God, the main theme of Jesus’s preaching, is illuminated by something as simple and familiar as a mustard seed. But Jesus used this device creatively, and he spun out parables in many forms. Some are elaborate stories with multiple characters. “There was a man who had two sons,” begins his Parable of the Prodigal Son.
Others are the briefest of metaphors: “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field.”

  The parables are poetic explanations of spiritual concepts impossible to comprehend fully. The reign of God is far too rich to be encompassed by any one definition, no matter how theologically accurate. True forgiveness is impossible to explain in a few words, no matter how well chosen. And where a strict definition can close down a person’s mind, a story is more likely to open up the imagination. Jesus saw the benefit of telling a parable about a shepherd seeking out a lost sheep and allowing the hearers to “tease” out the underlying meaning for themselves. When people find meaning in stories on their own and discover the truth for themselves, it’s easier for them to make the message their own.

  The parables are endlessly rich, and Jesus’s brilliant use of these images remains unmatched. As an experiment, try coming up with a parable of your own and you’ll see how difficult it is to create one that is short, fresh, memorable, easily understood, and open-ended enough to allow a person to enter more deeply into the mystery of the reign of God.

  But beyond that, the parables, says N. T. Wright, are not simply information about the reign of God; they are “part of the means of bringing it to birth.” Jesus’s frequent use of parables was intended to jump-start the reign, not just by giving people something to think about, but by inviting them to live in the new world being created.7

  Many of the parables also go against the expectations of the audience and are therefore subversive, as in the Parable of the Good Samaritan, when the man from a hated ethnic group was ultimately revealed to Jewish listeners as the good guy who cares for the stranger.8 Jesus thus forced his listeners—gently, through stories and images—to confront their prejudices about others and their preconceptions of God. “The deep places in our lives—places of resistance and embrace—are not ultimately reached by instruction,” writes the Protestant theologian Walter Brueggemann. “Those places of resistance and embrace are reached only by stories, by images, metaphors and phrases that line out the world differently, apart from our fear and hurt.”9

  Jesus grasped all this about the parable form—either through divine inspiration or through the human experience of having lived among the people of the region and knowing how to speak with them. Besides, if Jesus had given an abstruse philosophical lecture to the predominantly peasant audience, they wouldn’t have understood him. And if he had taken an hour to explain a complex theological point to farmers worried about returning to their crops, they would have just walked away. Far better to grab them with a provocative story or a piquant metaphor.

  Or to draw on what is happening in the here and now that might illuminate the reign of God. As Jonathan Reed notes, the construction of the nearby towns of Sepphoris and Tiberias for people far wealthier than those living in Capernaum and the smaller towns might have increased people’s awareness of income disparities. So Jesus’s stories about the rich and the poor would have been applicable in general, but the presence of the towns then being built by Herod Antipas would have given the stories added punch. Archaeologists have found that the well-built houses in Sepphoris were far more lavish than the single-room dwellings found in Capernaum and Nazareth; in wealthier towns houses were covered in roof tiles and had frescoed interiors and occasionally mosaics. The building of Tiberias and Sepphoris, notes Reed, meant the “accentuation of social stratification” to people living in poorer towns.10 So Jesus’s listeners might have heard Luke’s parable about the rich man who lives in comfort while the poor man starves outside his door and thought, Yes, just like in Tiberias and Sepphoris.11

  More basically, Jesus uses things (rocks, birds, seeds) and people (the farmer planting his crops, the woman sweeping her house, the son who wastes money) that were part of everyone’s daily life. As John Donahue writes in The Gospel in Parable, “The parables manifest such a range of images that the everyday world of rural, first-century Palestine comes alive in a way true of few ancient cultures.”12

  You can almost see the people nodding in agreement as Jesus spins out earthy tales of people, places, and situations they would have known well. One of the challenges for current-day readers, then, is to learn as much as we can about that time, so that we can better understand these wonderful tales and metaphors. As Gerhard Lohfink says, Jesus’s parables betray a “deep love for reality.”13 All the more reason to understand the historical reality of Jesus’s world.

  ALMOST TWENTY YEARS AGO, I worked with the Jesuit Refugee Service in Nairobi, Kenya. My job was to help refugees begin small business to help them support themselves and their families. One day I was driving my jeep outside of the city, near the Rift Valley, to visit a farmer who had started a cattle farm with some assistance from JRS. As I wound my way up a steep mountain pass, I was transfixed by the verdant green grass that carpeted the hillside. Suddenly, seemingly from nowhere, a lone white sheep clambered down the hillside and darted in front of my car. I swerved to avoid hitting it (there were no other vehicles around). Then I watched the sheep gingerly climb down into the valley on the right side of the road.

  Just then, from my left, a figure darted across the road. It was a young Maasai shepherd. In the Maasai culture the youngest boys, sometimes as early as five, tend the sheep; the older ones herd goats; and the oldest, including men, take care of the cattle. The shepherd dashed in front of my idling car. Barefoot, he smiled and waved to me as he passed. He scrambled down the side of the hill in pursuit of the sheep, raising clouds of dust, calling loudly all the while. I watched him climb down the hill for a few seconds. Then I looked up and saw the rest of the flock, about twenty or thirty sheep, up the hill on my left.

  How stupid! I thought. He’s leaving behind the whole flock for that one sheep. Then something dawned on me, and I laughed out loud. It was the Parable of the Lost Sheep in action! In its entirety the parable reads as follows, in Matthew:

  What do you think? If a shepherd has a hundred sheep, and one of them has gone astray, does he not leave the ninety-nine on the mountains and go in search of the one that went astray? And if he finds it, truly I tell you, he rejoices over it more than over the ninety-nine that never went astray. So it is not the will of your Father in heaven that one of these little ones should be lost.14

  If God pursues us with even half the energy as that young Maasai boy, then humanity has nothing to worry about.

  That concise parable is just one example of Jesus’s use of an image that his listeners would have known well, a shepherd who loses a sheep from the fold. Now, as a person who had never seen a shepherd outside of the movies before coming to Kenya, I had no clue that a shepherd would leave a flock behind. But notice that Jesus says “Does he not leave the ninety-nine?” He’s not telling his original audience something new; he’s drawing on what they already know. That is also clear in Luke’s version: “Which one of you, having a hundred sheep,” he asks, “does not leave the ninety-nine?” His listeners also know that the search for the sheep is not always successful: the audience grasped the importance of the words “if he finds it.”

  The story would have spoken to them of God’s profound desire to find us, especially those who are in any way lost, or one who is, as in Matthew’s version, a planōmenon, a “wandering one.” There is a palpable sense of God’s pity on the one who inadvertently wanders off. How often this happens in our lives; we find ourselves, almost without realizing it, far from God and from others. But there is no judgment here, only compassion.

  Luke’s version adds a touching note. “When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders and rejoices. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and neighbors, saying to them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost.’” With this physical detail Luke evokes both the psalmist’s imagery of the shepherd who cares for his sheep and the pastoral practice of the time.15 (Ancient statuary shows shepherds carrying sheep in the same way.) This deeply personal addition sounds like something Jesus and his listeners would ha
ve seen often. Thus, Jesus offers from his listeners’ everyday lives an image that powerfully evokes God’s love for them.

  In Luke and Matthew, Jesus explicitly connects these parables to God’s rejoicing over the finding of “one sinner who repents,” which is greater than God’s joy over the ninety-nine who “need no repentance,” as Luke says. To illustrate, he offers yet another image, one of a woman who has ten coins, loses one, and sweeps the entire house to find it.

  It is not beneath Jesus to speak about common things, so intent was he on conveying the message of the reign of God. If talking about sheep does the trick, he’ll tell a story about a shepherd. If talking about a woman searching for a coin helps, he’ll talk about her.

  His use of parables, then, parallels the gracious entrance of God into our human existence. Just as it was not beneath Jesus to approach his listeners in ways they could understand, so it was not beneath God to come in a way that we can understand—in Jesus. With a parable Jesus says, “Do you want to know what the reign of God is like? Let me tell you a story.” In Jesus, God says, “Do you want to know what I am like? Let me be a story for you, the story of Jesus.” In a sense, Jesus is the parable of God.

  Stories, which human beings seem hardwired to remember, are also more likely to “stick” than definitions are. When preaching at Mass, I will often relate a real-life anecdote to illustrate a point. Inevitably, that’s what people remember most. “Oh, I loved that story about your nephews!” someone will say afterward. The challenge is offering stories that make the point but don’t detract from it, a challenge that Jesus mastered perfectly.