A properly read parable has never caused a case of the warm fuzzies. Parables were meant to confuse and disturb, to help the audience question the ways of this world and engage in the counter-cultural kingdom of God. Find out how the lawyer, so certain of his righteousness, responds to a good tweaking.

Literary device of the day: the play-within-a-play

Have I got a literary device for you!  The-play-within-a-play!  I remember meeting this most meta of devices like it was 1995. There I sat in my senior year lit class, jeans pinned, bangs curled, trying to gauge just what percentage of Shakespeare’s Hamlet I actually understood.  Larry Lit paused the tape player to explain what was coming next:  Hamlet is about to request a play for his uncle Claudius.  He plans to watch Claudius’ reaction to the enacted murder of a sleeping king and thereby know whether Claudius killed his dad. Remember that line, “The play’s the thing Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king?” (Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii). Shakespeare uses the play-within-a-play to illuminate the truth Hamlet needs before he can begin his endless debate over what to do about it.

This play-within-a-play or story-within-a-story device is not just a Shakespearean thing.  Moulin Rouge! is Ewan McGregor’s best movie (Sorry, Star Wars fans.) It, too, contains a play within a play called Spectacular, Spectacular. This play cleverly mirrors the events of the movie and the relationship between the two lovers.  

What do Hamlet, Moulin Rouge!, and the first three gospels have in common?  Yes!  They all contain the story-within-a-story device.  I’m not claiming that Jesus and the disciples put on plays for the people, although that is fun to imagine: “Peter!  You’re upstaging me again!”  “Remember, James and John. There are no small parts.” “Thomas, you can do this.  You have to believe in yourself.” “No, Judas.  We can’t charge admission.”   I could go all day.

What I am saying is that Jesus’ favorite teaching method was telling stories.  Except for John, the gospel writers took those stories, called parables, and placed them within the larger story of their accounts of Jesus.  Though the gospels sometimes contain the same parables, they don’t always have the same context and aren’t always interpreted the same way by the author. Like Shakespeare and Baz Luhrman, Matthew, Mark, and Luke used the parables to reflect and inform the larger story they wrote.  It’s all in service to the author’s greater goal, which for Luke is to identify Jesus as savior and to encourage citizenship in God’s radically inclusive kingdom as a way of life.

Parables ≠ fables.

It’s tempting to think of parables like fables.  Remember Aesop’s pithy animal stories that always end with a neat moral?   Pride goes before a fall. Haste makes waste.  Look before you leap. Like parables, fables are short fiction intended for instruction.  But Aesop collected the fables to teach children about the world around them, and to lead them to conclusions.  In C.H. Dodd’s definition, however, a parable’s purpose is “leaving the mind in sufficient doubt about its precise application to tease it into active thought” (qtd. in Craddock, 108). Unlike fables, parables have no easy answer. They are meant to confuse us enough to make us think, to walk away questioning our life choices. In addition, Jesus told parables not to teach what this world is like but to give what Spear calls “counterwisdom” against it, seeking the “transformation of the encultured consciousness of his listeners”  (qtd. in Rule, p.2).  Green and fellow editors claim, “Jesus told parables to confront people with the character of God’s kingdom and to invite them to participate in it and to live in accordance with it” (596).  Their purpose was not to inform but to re-form, calling for self-awareness, reflection, and action (Lambrecht, 5). Rather than teaching about the world around us, parables instruct about God’s kingdom, where God’s justice and love for all people are the rule. Transformation into citizens of that kingdom requires not new information, but a complete change of perspective and priorities. 

Craddock summarizes, “It is easy to understand why parables are not well-received by persons who wish to be told directly what to think, to believe, and do or by speakers who wish to control listeners by these means” (109).  Parables ask more of us than simply learning a moral.  And telling one requires the teacher to let go of the outcome.  Jesus gave up control over the narrative’s interpretation to get audience participation.  He cared more about their engagement in the story than their perfect understanding of it. Who is this Jesus, anyway?

The outside story

Let’s take a closer look now at the story Luke gives us, which is Jesus’ conversation with the lawyer.  Then we’ll be ready to look at the story-within-a-story Jesus gives us next episode, the actual parable.  We start with verse 25, where the lawyer “tests” Jesus with a question. “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”  Amy-Jill Levine points out that the tense of the verb “do” here suggests a limited action.  She says, “The lawyer is thinking of something to check off his to-do list: recite a prayer, offer a sacrifice, drop off a box of macaroni for a food drive, put a twenty in the collection plate” (84).  The lawyer wants something transactional. He wants the password, the secret handshake that gets him in. Jesus answers his question with a question.  “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” In response, the lawyer combines two verses from the Torah “Love the Lord your God, and love your neighbor as yourself,” and Jesus replies, “Do this and you will live.”

The “do” Jesus uses here is different, though.  Unlike the lawyer, Jesus implies not a single action but an ongoing relationship (Levine, 90).  Eternal life is not a one-time coupon to be validated now and cashed in once we die.  It’s a continual re-turning toward a God who is constantly turned toward us.  It’s a continual turning toward our neighbor in love out of gratitude for God’s gifts.  The lawyer wants to justify himself, to skip the turning toward God and neighbor part.  In verse 29, he asks “And who is my neighbor?” He’s following his initial “How do I get in” question with a “Who do I get to leave out?” question.  

Cue the story within the story! Jesus immediately begins, “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho…”  Lambrecht points out that when Jesus starts telling a parable, it gives the impression of changing the subject ( 3, 4). It's not hard to imagine the lawyer rolling his eyes and thinking, “Just answer my question.”  At its inception, the parable already signals an irritant. The provocation continues through the parable and right up to its conclusion in verse 35 when the generous Samaritan leaves the injured man with the innkeeper along with money to pay for his care.  End of the story-within-a-story. Jesus then asks in verse 36, “Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  The lawyer responds, “the one who showed him mercy,” and Jesus summarizes, “Go and do likewise.”

Wait a second.  This ending is pretty neat for a story that’s supposed to be disturbing isn’t it?  Jesus doesn’t seem to be risking any misunderstanding here. We might as well call this a fable and slap the moral on the end: Be like the good Samaritan. 

“The measure of a parable’s success is how many of your buttons it pushes.”

That’s why it’s important to remember the parable ends before Jesus addresses the lawyer again.  The context of the conversation with a particular lawyer may be historically accurate, but it also may be Luke’s work for Luke’s purposes.  Luke loves parables and uses them more than any other gospel writer because they fit his goals so well. Luke wants the community of God to live as disciples, citizens of God’s loving, just kingdom, now, not just after they die. In fact, the 70 followers who find so much success earlier in the chapter are sent out with instructions to heal the sick and tell everyone that the “kingdom of God has come near” (vs 9, 11).  It’s touchable.  Right in front of us, yet hard to understand intellectually. Hence the parable.  Unlike Jesus, though, Luke likes to make his interpretations of the parables very clear. As Diana Butler Bass writes, “For almost every parable, Luke prefaces the story with what he wants you to think about it.  He recounts the story told by Jesus, and then he finishes by restating what he (that is, Luke) thinks the story means.” Don’t take that to mean the parable didn’t disturb, though.  Bass argues the opposite. “The parables were so upsetting and so uncontrollable that even the disciples worked to neaten them up so early audiences would understand” (Sunday Musings, 10/23). 

The lawyer approaches Jesus with certainty.  His motive is to test Jesus and justify himself. As much as I called him a hater and gave him a snotty voice last episode, Jesus loves the lawyer, too.  He loves him enough to drop a parable on him, which causes havoc inside the lawyer’s inflated brain.  Notice that when the lawyer answers Jesus’ question about who was a neighbor, he can’t even say, “the Samaritan,” and for once, the lawyer lets Jesus have the last word.  This man is too tweaked to argue any longer.

I’ve never met a genre quite like the parable.  The measure of its success is how many of your buttons it pushes. If you are wrestling with your faith, Jesus says you are doing something right.  Press on.  

Next time we dive into Jesus’ parable.  I’ve found an interpretation that tweaks me, but I’ll include a few readings in case the poison you’d like to pick is different than mine.

Works Cited

Bass, Diana Butler. “Sunday Musings,” October 2023. dianabutlerbass.substack.com

Craddock, Fred B. Luke: Interpretation, A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching. Louisville: John Knox Press, 1990

Green, Joel B., et al., editors. Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels.  Intervarsity Press, 1992.

Lambrecht, Jan. Once More Astonished, The Parables of Jesus. New York, Crossroad, 1981.

Levine, Amy-Jill. Short Stories by Jesus, The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi. Harper One.

Rule, P.N. “The Pedagogy of Jesus in the Parable of the Good Samaritan; a Diacognitive Analysis,” HTS Teologiese Studies/Theological Studies 73