Study Guides for
Parables Christian Reflection A Series in Faith and Ethics
These guides integrate Bible study, prayer, and worship to help us explore how Jesus’ parables lead us to know God’s love and loving demands on our lives. Use them individually or in a series. You may reproduce them for personal or group use.
The Contexts of Jesus’ Parables
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Hearing a Parable with the Early Church
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Hearing is Believing
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Violent Parables with the Nonviolent Jesus
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Wealth: Hazmat or Good Gift?
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Hearing Parables in the Patch
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Jesus’ parables were created and preserved in conversation with both Jewish and Greco-Roman cultural environments, and they partake, vigorously at times, in those cultural dialogues. As we become more aware of these diverse webs of meaning, we can respond more fully to the message of the one who spoke parables with one ear already listening for our responses. What would it mean to hear Jesus’ parables in their final literary form in the Greco-Roman world? Perhaps we too hastily have stripped away the allegorizing of the early and medieval church as secondary embellishments that lead us away from the “original” message of Jesus. Jesus’ parables cannot be understood by standing apart from them with arms folded in neutral objectivity. They can only be understood by “entering” into them, allowing their stories to lay claim on us. How do we drop our guard so parables may have their intended effect? Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount instructs us to not return violence for violence; instead, we should be like God, who offers boundless, gratuitous love to all. But in the same Gospel Jesus tells eight parables in which God deals violently with evildoers. Which of the divine ways are we to imitate?
Christian Reflection
Center for Christian Ethics Baylor University One Bear Place #97361 Waco, TX 76798-7361 Phone 1-866-298-2325 www.ChristianEthics.ws The Center thanks the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship for its financial support of these study guides.
Jesus’ striking parables on wealth in the Gospel of Luke paint a vivid portrait of the two-sided impact of money and possessions on our lives. These are clearly “hazmats,” or hazardous materials, to be handled with extreme caution. They are also good gifts with an equally positive potential. Clarence Jordan was an unusually able interpreter of Jesus’ parables. Not only his academic study, but also his smalltown background and experiences in establishing the interracial Koinonia Farm in the 1940s shaped his ability to hear the parables in “the Cotton Patch.”
© 2006 The Center for Christian Ethics 1