So why did Jesus tell stories?
Sometimes we say things like ‘Jesus was talking to simple farming people, not scholars’. Well, yes, he was talking to normal people, but that doesn’t mean they were slack-jawed peasants who couldn’t put two philosophical thoughts together: I think there were other reasons besides.
Perhaps one was that Jesus knew the danger of the abstract. This thought hit me while reading a piece about the Trinity written by Mark Van Steenwyk of the Missio Dei community on the West Bank, Minneapolis:
“Abstracting things usually makes it so that we don’t have to do anything about those things. When we abstract love, for example, we can find ourselves affirming the idea that we are supposed to love everyone, while, at the same time, support war or affirm our property rights over and against the poverty of others. “
Source: http://www.jesusmanifesto.com/2010/05/trinity-sunday
When Jesus was confronted with an abstract question like “Who is my neighbour” he didn’t begin with a sermon on the concept of neighbourliness in Torah, He told a story. Why? Because a story is about real life, people, conflicts, pain and suffering, which is what the flesh-and-blood Messiah was part of, understood and lived. Once we’ve heard the story of the Good Samaritan, We can’t get around the notion that my neighbour is next to me, here, now, and that my urgency to get to the next church event is not as important as loving them. At the same time we can’t wheedle our way around the unconditional love of God in the Prodigal Son, or the clear justice shown in the story of the unforgiving servant.
If, as Van Steenwyk says, abstraction is an enemy of the Christian life, then storytelling is a vital, fundamental, prophetic, part of our faith because it forces us to stop vaguely agreeing to concepts and forces us to confront our own attitudes and lifestyles.
The trouble with that of course, is that it’s dangerous. When we hear a story about people, we can’t as easily put a label on it or package it away as a nice theological idea: we have to do something about it, which makes stories very inconvenient and is why we prefer not to have such dangerous things in our church services, thank you very much: better to stick to nice (abstract, story free) songs, and safe, abstract sermons. If we tell stories, life gets dangerous, and we don’t want that.
(Originally posted in May 2010)

