| Parables and the value of
words
An image can endure for generations. It might be a negative image, such as a hijacked plane plunging into a tall building or a positive image, such as people with mere picks tearing down an “iron curtain.” An image can invoke diverse emotions and thoughts, provoking many words. Whether these words are false, injurious or inspirational, an image nevertheless evokes words. Such words generate events, negative and positive, which in turn, create other images. Words invoke events; events yield images. An image does not displace words. Relationships and communion occur through the exchange of words, ideas and shared understanding. If it is to gain traction in human experience, an image must become words. Idolatry turns a material image into a fetish of ultimate focus, confusing it with reality. This is rejected in biblical testimony with its focus on God who by a word calls to be things that are not. God calls and is known in intimacy by trust in this same word. Images cannot displace words. To presume they can, implies that we think without thought, converse without conversation or act without deliberation. Thought, conversation and deliberation are laden with language. Without words, an image is mute. Reflection is already an internal dialogue. A relationship is not possible without communication. Actions are foolish without deliberative intention. If an image invokes ideas, relationships and decisions, it does so through dialogue that is both internal and relational. Images might be elevated as an ideal connection with others that presumes to bypass language, yet this ideal only exists within solipsism—when the self no longer engages a world of others. An image may be worth a thousand words, yet a thousand words and more are expressed in our ideas, intentions and relationships. v A parable is a compelling word picture or image. It generates further articulation through relationships, decisions and actions. Parables are framed by other words. Without the orientation of proclamation that is expressed in imperatives to respond, parables are stories and images that reflect a range of human ambiguities. Disciples seek out the meaning of Jesus’ parables. Gospels retain the necessity of articulating the meaning of parable images. The only images we have of Jesus too—his personality and actions—are in words. These are cast in aphorisms or brief sayings, parables, encounters, conversations, imperatives and finally, a narrative of death and resurrection. Of Jesus, there are no visual images. The only visual art ascribed to Jesus was something enigmatic—writing inscribed in the dirt. Jesus’ message is devoid of visual art. Within our image laden ethos, this has significance. Consumerism is sustained by images and few words in appeal to vanity, acquisition and security. Consumerism generates images that promise to endorse our existence while diminishing the value of words with which we can think through, articulate and draw back from the illusory influence of such fetishes. A face to face encounter invokes conversation instead of consumption, transposing life’s possibilities from material to personal, relational and ethical ones. Where another’s face is merely an image, as it becomes in consumerism, there is only the possibility of consuming an image. There are no meaningful words; no genuine dialogue, communion and responsibility are invoked. In biblical testimony, the material idol is dumb; it is rejected for the relational word of call and encounter. Jesus, who is only known by the words he speaks or the words spoken about him, gives parable images that translate into dialogue, decision and relationships, for example: Which of these acted as a neighbour? Within parables, people are on the cusp of a new future in a situation of crisis, having to choose between two ways or make a definite response to another. Deliberation is prompted; a decision must be made. There is no space for neutral reflection and deferral of decision by the participants of parables or by their listeners. The future given by God—the reign of God—is pending, interrupting life as it is normally experienced; a new reality has commenced amid the old. This message is ever-present in the gospels in general and associated with the parables in particular. Signatures of this new time can be seen and heard, while not being read as received. They are presented in paradoxes of parable—so we cannot understand without active engagement. Yet there is figuration in familiar images—so we might engage another reality otherwise than our own intersecting our lives. This reality is otherwise, even as through figuration, it calls for active decision; it cannot be known passively, resisting a casual response. In the gospels, the prevailing reason given by Jesus for teaching in parables makes a pervasive biblical tonality clear—disclosure remains cryptic without a willingness to hear another word. The imperative to listen!—so as to risk everything in decision for the reality of God—is conveyed in familiar images with strange edges. This reality makes no sense within our usual perceptions of human existence—humility in which the last is declared first or relinquishing life in order to receive it. The reality of God seems contradictory, without any means of certifying its veracity, except by risking it as a complete way of life. The fruits of another reality indicate its reception; it cannot be fudged; it exceeds the demands of conventional morality. By parables, we are summoned to search out the lost, to restore the improvident prodigal, to express tangible compassion to those we might easily resist—imperatives that are seemingly impossible without prevarication or compromise. Yet impossibility summons a response of faith to grace that gives the resources for such risk. v In their diverse cameos and stories, parables depict real scenarios of human life, further compounding this realism by highlighting human crises, calling us to respond to the gospel against our natural inclination or convenience amid a range of human attitudes—jealousy, belligerence, greed, anxiety, idleness or restlessness. In the reality of gospel, particularly as it is articulated in parables, we are faced with tangible imperatives to forgive without limit, to be grateful for generosity that is apparently unfair, to celebrate a parent’s seeming unequal treatment of siblings or to relinquish everything valuable for one priceless thing. In either small or significant ways, this amounts to losing our grip on life as we perceive it, to receive it as a gift within a different reality. This reality reverses what we think is proper, normal or customary, such as our evaluations of first and last or where true life is found. The gospel’s reality cannot be conjured by our imagination or frozen in an image for our undisturbed reflection. It is encountered in the urgency of life as an ever renewed crisis of decision, yet as a gift received in risking its possibility. Parables summon us to participate in the gospel’s seemingly impossible reality for which we also need resources that exceed our own. We are exposed to the necessity of sovereign resolution; that is, our need of God’s grace is made explicit. In the language of personal encounter and response, parables suggest that God is near as our intimate source of life. Parables
call us to hear an eventful word that is seemingly familiar, yet otherwise than
any of our conjuring and only engaged in the singular responsibility of each who
is willing to bend an ear to hear it. Parable images counter our usual impressions
of life and interpretations of experience to summon—through language that presses
beyond our imagination—response to a reality that provokes animated engagement
by deed and word. Method
source: Levinas |
