Steven Schroeder | parables
I grew up in North Central Texas and the Panhandle, in a family that was devoutly Lutheran on one side, devoutly Baptist and militantly Church of Christ on the other. Anyone who knows these traditions knows that’s not really two sides, but three or more – full of unpredictable encounters and explosive intersections. Lucky for me, the explosion my Church of Christ Grandpa favored was the explosion of laughter in the play of a good argument. That meant I cut my teeth on argument as a form of play, and I didn’t need an academic course on Luther to get acquainted with table talks. It helped me read between the lines of words cradled in books, pious sermons, and solemn rituals to encounter Jesus as a character who liked to eat and drink with his friends and never doubted a stranger was nothing other than a person you hadn’t had a chance to sit down with yet.
It was common for folks where I grew up to ask if you’d met Jesus personally – and to be concerned for the fate of your soul if you couldn’t answer “yes, I have” without hesitation. If you told these folks that you’d had a long talk with Jesus the night before, they’d say “yes, yes.” But if you told them you’d had a long talk with Socrates or had been visiting with Vladimir and Estragon, they’d call for psychiatric evaluation. So I didn’t find it puzzling when I went off to Valparaiso and Søren Kierkegaard, who I hadn’t met before, said there is no disciple at second hand. We’ve discussed that at length since, and I have continued to be intrigued not so much by the disciple concept as by the nature of the first handedness of every personal encounter. It’s the poetics of such encounters that I’ve danced around in my academic work with the assistance of the author of Luke-Acts.
Most academic writing on the parables reads like an attempt to explain a joke, and I’ve always felt a little guilty about contributing to that with a dissertation almost thirty years ago at the University of Chicago. But even an academic argument, if it’s a good one, is a form of play, and in every form of play there is possibility.
I find myself returning to historical Jesus research not because I expect (or desire) to find an historical Jesus distinct from “a Christ of faith” but because I expect to encounter a character depicted as an artist of language within an artifact of language – a user of language we come to know as users of language by way of language other users of language have put into play with specific ends in mind. In every beginning there is a word, and in every word there is a play of possibility. I offer this little sequence as such a play, drawing on two masters, Luke and Jesus. These are people I want you to meet, and there’s no place to meet them but in their stories. And that makes them divinely ordinary. Every person comes with a story, every story begins with a word, and every word invites something new.
Thank heaven we can’t contain ourselves.
Chicago, 2009 (written as an introduction to "how to be a good shepherd")
