| Parables and a strange paradox
At the centre of Christian faith is a gospel paradox—whoever clings to life will lose it; whoever relinquishes life for my sake and the gospel’s, will receive it.* This is a contradiction. How can relinquishing and receiving occur at one time? Everything unique to Christian testimony is focused in this paradox. To dismiss it is to dismiss Christian faith. The paradox of relinquishing life so as to receive it is only possible within the passion and resurrection of Jesus Christ in whom life exceeds death—a reality that pervades each gospel—presenting a different horizon for human life. Death terminates every singular expression of life—therefore, people live with anxiety, insecurity and conflict. If life exceeds death as our horizon, then faith in Christ as risen can radically transform every value, decision and relationship within this horizon. The gospel paradox is crucial to Christian faith and expression of its unique testimony within human life. This paradox summons ears to hear as it pervades New Testament testimony and is given vivid expression in gospel sayings and parables. More explicitly than any other literary form of biblical testimony, parables require ears to hear, even in the very success of their simple incursion into our familiar world. Yet as seemingly familiar, parables suspend us within a strange word that is always near, especially in their vocative character of address and response. In the context of New Testament proclamation, parables provide a point of reference within life for a unique word that is otherwise than anything gleaned from the stuff of life. The gospel’s self-relinquishing paradox is unlike the machinations of survival within phenomena; it is only disclosed and received as a gift declared in the gospel as a word otherwise, of God’s reality, for human life. The parables’ invocation of another reality for human life, otherwise than the familiar phenomena of life, requires a further word to be heard, precisely within the tangible, even interpersonal experiences that parables depict. This further word introduces the self-relinquishing paradox, which is contingent on an even more strange word of Christology, death and resurrection. v A self-relinquishing reality is presented in gospel sayings that are often juxtaposed with parables—for example, the last will be first and the first will be last with a parable of labourers in a vineyard; some who are last will be first with the parable about waiting for a bridegroom; or all who will exalt themselves will be humbled and those who humble themselves will be exalted with parables of table places and a publican and Pharisee. Similarly, an excess of tangible deference to another occurs in the imperative to forgive seventy times seven, juxtaposed as this imperative is with a parable of an unforgiving servant. In the parable of a prodigal son, that the dead can come to life presupposes this entire aphoristic impetus toward a strange inversion of life and death in the saying—whoever seeks to save their life etc. Self-relinquishing images are suggested in parabolic sayings such as—loss of pride, even dignity in turning the other check; loss of possessions in relinquishing to a litigant, one’s coat as well as a shirt; loss of time in going an extra distance; or yet, relinquishing the assumption and verbal satisfaction of being right, according to the parable of a log and splinter. An imperative to reconciliation has priority over seeking judicial adjudication or justice, as we see in reconciling an opponent. To defer to another’s claim with excess—in the imperative to go an extra distance and other extravagant concessions—accentuates vocative possibilities. By self-relinquishment, we are inducted into surprising new relationships and possibilities. These imperatives to self-relinquishment can also be spurned as quaint and dismissed as unrealistic, which they are—within a horizon of phenomena alone. The fashionable excision of parables from their wider New Testament context seeks to preserve their aesthetic character in quest of Jesus merely as a wisdom teacher of the human good. Yet this approach removes parables from any reality that would sustain a way of self-giving by self-relinquishment—the kind of reality that is necessary for the imperative, consistently, altruistically to love one’s enemy as we see in the parable of a good Samaritan. New Testament testimony offers a new reality for acting as the Samaritan, without which, the story could be cited as an ideal of human compassion that may or may not be followed in the absence of any other resource to sustain this challenge. Its imperative may also be contested for so many reasons conjured from selected social and political expediencies. Through self-interest and partisan posturing, humans consistently fudge obvious responsibilities. Parables extracted from New Testament testimony in quest of Jesus as a wisdom teacher stripped of “Christian amplification” and plausible to rational assimilation, offers no unique word. Even if phenomena of life are natural ingredients of language within parables, there is no special clarity in parable interpretations that work merely with human and elemental phenomena. v Parables gesture to another possibility in the vocative and self-giving event of grace, which in their immediate context of gospel and more broadly in Christian theology, is given focus in Christ. Christian theology articulates both a relational and a self-giving reality that coheres within the dynamic triune communion of love known as perichõrẽsis. This testimony offers reality as intrinsically relational both within and otherwise than human experience. Unlike theism, which according to Christian testimony is ultimately unknowable, triune communion is a self-giving reality in Christ. The biblical elevation of humans beyond the elemental is invoked, while offering grace within interpersonal life. As the source of a vocative word, triune or perichoretic reality exceeds any possibility within the elemental. Confusion of divinity with the elemental is possible when parables are divorced from Christology. Christology informs the parable’s self-giving imperatives within human freedom and relationships—beyond conflation with the elemental and nature with its blind recurrences in which the competing and violent quest for survival is pervasive. In Christian theology, faith is expressed within an interpersonal and self-giving reality that surpasses any possibility from the elemental. The ordinary can gesture to an otherwise when it concerns others—between people, familiar words are exchanged in address and response. In such vocative encounters, the novel occurs and the unique is summoned in the freedom of human volition, even within seeming arbitrary limits of time, place and circumstance. By the incision of a further personal and imperative word toward a particular self-giving way, God is present to humans in the face of elemental limits and the horizon of death. This incision is Christological and speaks of interpersonal reality that is imbued with grace through the Holy Spirit—not in spite of real human contexts, yet surpassing the elemental as a source of life. The self-giving possibility within grace goes beyond the word of mono-personal-theism that finally, in the ambiguity of religious talk about God, remains ambiguous and therefore no word of God. The self-giving possibility, with its focus in Christ, also goes beyond any word derived from the elemental, which in its anonymous murmur, cannot speak an interpersonal or ethical word, much less sustain a self-relinquishing word. Parables speak this unique word, but only within testimony to Christ and his passion and resurrection.
*Matthew 16:25, 10:39; Mark 8:35; Luke 9:24, 17:33; similarly, John 12:25 Method
source: Levinas |
