Eighth Sunday after Pentecost: "Once Upon a Time...."

Amos 7:1-17

Psalm 82

Colossians 1:1-14

Luke 10:25-37

 

Few things get people involved as much as a story.  The instant one says “Once upon a time” or “Long, long ago” there is a shift in the energy of the room, a shift in people’s attention.  They literally become attentive.  They want to know more.  As the story unfolds images begin to form in people’s minds. They identify with one or more of the story’s characters; they wonder or even decide what they would do if they were placed in similar situations; their own hopes, dreams, or even fears become reflected and perhaps explored within the context of the story.  Stories can be ways of exploring our fantasies and their meanings, illustrating difficult concepts and ideas, or effecting personal transformation at a level deeper than simply conscious thought, since they often address us at the sub-conscious level.  Most probably, it is on account of all this that Jesus told so many stories.  What we call parables are really just stories – stories to illustrate the deep and ultimately unspeakable realities of the Kingdom of God; stories to challenge our assumptions of ourselves, others and the world; stories to effect a transformation of our minds, spirits and bodies.

The parables of Jesus invited-in their contemporary audience by always speaking in terms of the familiar – masters and servants, farmers and sowing, travellers and robbers, hosts and guests, parents and children, mustard seeds, fishers, yeast.  He places his stories within the familiar, the everyday, the ordinary.  They are about situations and experiences which would have been commonplace to those who gathered to hear his message of the Kingdom of God.  The story which has come to be known as the Parable of the Good Samaritan happens on a well-traveled road between Jericho and Jerusalem.  A road on which many of his audience would undoubtedly have traveled themselves.  And as he begins his story, immediately their minds would turn to that Roman road comprised of eighteen long miles of desert and rocky country which connected the town of Jericho and the city of Jerusalem.  They would also recall the robbers and brigands which frequented that territory; the dangers they had themselves faced and the fear they had experienced as they had traveled through it.  And so from the beginning they are able to identify with the story, with the place and the potential dangers, and with the traveller.  Think for a moment of the less salubrious parts of our own town.  If I told you a story which began, “Some time ago on a dark winter’s evening, a woman was driving along 10^th Avenue on their way to north Hanford from an event at the Clark Center.  Near 10^th and Houston her car breaks down, perhaps it is a flat; she isn’t sure, but at 10 o’clock at night she finds herself stranded in Home Gardens.”  I think that you would begin to see what was going to happen.  Given the information of those familiar surroundings, you would almost instinctively begin to place yourself in her shoes.  Jesus gets people personally involved in his stories from the very beginning, by placing them within the context and experiences of their lives and of the familiar in their lives.

Yet a good story does not only create an atmosphere of the familiar, but rather uses the familiar to encourage us to see things in a new way, in order to deliver new insight, to encourage us to look beyond the surface of things and there discern some fundamental truths about ourselves and reality.  A good story always carries with it and brings to us something of the unexpected and surprising.  It is there – in the surprising and unexpected elements – that usually lies the great truth of the story.  It is almost as if the familiar elements exist only to give us a sense of comfort so that when the unexpected happens it is doubly surprising.  Think, for example, of familiar stories as if for the first time – it is unexpectedly the wretched servant girl who sleeps among the cinders that marries the prince and ultimately becomes a princess herself; it is the monstrous beast who by the transforming power of human love and dedication is revealed to be a handsome nobleman; it is the youngest and least powerful of the children whose ingenuity saves the entire family from starvation and death; it is the hated and heretical Samaritan, not the religiously observant priest or Levite, who enacts God's compassion and loving care.  It is the unexpected twist in a story which really makes us think, and perhaps even change our minds.  Those who listened for the first time to this story would have hardly expected the Samaritan to be its hero.  As I mentioned two weeks ago, to the Jews of Jerusalem the Samaritans were the “hated people of God”, faithless and perverse.  Jesus’ audience would have expected a religious story to vindicate and demonstrate the virtues of the religious class – the priest or the Levite.  But that is exactly what Jesus’ parable does not do. Instead, by doing the unexpected, it points to its own underlying message and truth; it sets people thinking, it introduces the element of possibility – the possibility that the neighbour is the hated Samaritan and that the truly religiously observant are not the professional men of God, but the one who goes out of himself, out of herself, in compassion.

Good stories always also leave room for the hearer.  Good stories rarely give clear cut interpretations.  In their very telling, good stories ask questions of their hearers, of us.  They always leave room for us to make our own interpretations, for us to struggle with them and hopefully allow our minds and thoughts to be renewed and transformed by them.  Throughout the gospels Jesus only ever specifically interprets one of his parables.  He knows that the really good stories always ask questions of us.  While stories sometimes arise out of a question: “A young lawyer asked Jesus ‘And who is my neighbour?’ ”, they also usually only offer to us the challenge of another question: “Which of these three [the priest, the Levite or the Samaritan], do you think, was a neighbour to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  “What do you think?”  “How did the story change you?”  “What new viewpoint has it offered you?”  By letting the listener bring to the story his or her own interpretation a storyteller allows the story to become the listener’s own.  The storyteller realizes that ultimately the story is not his or her own, but it belongs to all who listen and to all who by their own experience, intellect and insight interpret it and gather for themselves the story’s riches.  It is in this aspect particularly that stories can transform us and offer the possibility to us of new realities.  For these reasons Jesus sometimes ends his parables, not with an interpretation, but with the simple statement: “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!”  “Listen to the story.  Listen to yourself.  Listen to the effect the story has on you.  Listen how it works to transform and renew you.”

Stories are important.  Good stories, like the ones Jesus told, take us down the road of the truly familiar, then offer us an unexpected, and sometimes not readily acceptable, twist by which the story carries for us the possibility of transformation and renewal.  But this possibility is only made manifest when we take the story as our own.  When we allow it to speak to us at the deepest level, when we engage in it personally, and take the risk of asking the questions of the story that make sense in our lives and situations.  The same story may carry different messages for different people.  That is as it should be.  Stories are not scientific proofs of anything.  They are at their core works of the imagination.  In the week to come take this parable of the Good Samaritan (or any of Jesus’ parables) and read it quietly every day.  Let its riches speak to you and listen to what you respond.  Where are you in the story?  Who are you in the story.  What is the story calling you to do or be?  What does it mean?  Not what have others told you it means.  But what does it mean to you?  Let the power of the story gently work its transforming magic.  Let its questions bubble through you.  Give yourselves ears to hear and to listen.