| Everything hinges on ears
Modern epistemology—how we know what we know—is based primarily on questioning phenomena to ascertain what, how and why anything is. Phenomena are objects to be interrogated. This can also occur in the social realm, yet any vocative or face to face encounter is already an implicit question posed to ourselves, even if no question is asked. If another person reserves personal aspects that remain unknown as yet undisclosed, this reserve represents implicit questions concerning myself—for example: Who am I in relation to this person? What is my responsibility to this person? Parables occur in the context of vocative encounter. They pose questions. We are not the questioners; implicitly, we are questioned. Presuppositions that linger behind our interrogation of life are also subtly contested. To be contradicted is invariably to be affronted. To rethink implicit values is an aspect of repentance. We do not easily recognise that our contemporary approach to life is based on an epistemology of interrogation that also avoids being questioned. In biblical testimony, truth is only given where there is a willingness to listen and to engage earnestly with heart and mind. As the truth is revealed, it is concealed from the disinterested. Good news is disclosed by appeal to having ears to hear; the gospels contest as they also compel listening for the truth. Their parables jostle us into being questioned instead of questioning. Parables do this, even as we willingly eavesdrop on a story about others. v Parables expose our ability to hear. Hearing can change our engagement with life. In the absence of hearing, our perspective of life might remain as it has always been. Parables invoke hearing; they also provoke resistance to hearing. If what we hear in a parable is difficult to accept—such as workers in a vineyard receiving the same wages for working different lengths of time—we are likely to resist hearing with ears to hear, even if we have heard the story through. The parable implies accepting one form of inequality, based on just-desserts, so another form of equality, based on grace, can emerge. This is not easily heard. In reality, we want everything to be equitable. We think we know where we stand if it is; we also think we know what is equitable and how to give it unequivocal effect in human life. The parable of a prodigal son generates a similar challenge. If we empathise with the eldest son having been faithful, we are likely to resist hearing a word otherwise in the prodigal’s lavish welcome home by the father. Each time the parable of a prodigal son is told, contradiction is sustained. The elder son’s protest occurs explicitly within the parable and implicitly in our evaluations of faithfulness. In hearing the parable’s extravagant spirit of grace, we cannot avoid contradiction if our reception of this parable implies that our perceptions of faithfulness are unfairly flouted. Subtle shifts of expectation within parables contradict our naturally assumed values. Such contradiction is resisted by ignoring what is heard or refusing to listen further. A parable can also be reinterpreted through a particular prism—political or sociological—to make it acceptable within our criteria for hearing. In this way, a parable can be used to confirm a method of interpretation. No parable is heard but instead, an allegory of a theory that explains what a parable is “really saying” politically or sociologically. A parable’s realism combined with a surprising, even surreal twist confronts the way we think life should be, even as familiar as we thought it to be. Yet in resistance to any word other than our own, interpretation can alleviate being questioned by such a word. Our hearing of the gospel hinges on having ears to hear. Why do some have ears to hear? What are the implications of not having such ears? Is the gospel in general and are parables in particular unfair in making everything hinge on having ears to hear? This is the crucial challenge of the sovereignty and freedom of God. Sovereignty alone would ensure that unequivocal hearing occurred, yet God in freedom invites hearing within the possibility of refusing to hear. All biblical testimony hinges on this paradox. In the human propensity for self-standing righteousness, which is exhibited in self-justifying attitudes, we resist the grace of God that can only be perceived in recognising our actual paucity of righteousness. We are in deficit concerning integral human life. We do not readily admit this; its admission is repentance, which is the crucial response hinging on hearing in openness to grace. Hearing with ears to hear is the heart’s recognition of our humanity before God in responding to our only source of genuine human dignity, which is given as a gift. This requires a hearing heart—a constant refrain in biblical testimony that resists human resentment. Resentment is generated by self-justification in the rightness of a perspective in the face of generosity that unhinges our seemingly plausible ideals. Remember the vineyard labourers. Such resentment is consolidated in hubris. Parables do not work by our values but instead, by crises of human perception before God. The actions of a dishonest steward or a judge reluctantly conceding justice for an annoying widow are praised within values that seem to bear no correlation with our own. With their familiar gospel signature—let the one with ears to hear, hear—parables are told to sift the values by which we hear. Such sifting is a source of contradiction. For example, that the first will be last and the last will be first is impossible to countenance within our values. This strange value represents the reality of God bursting our reality in excess of our possibilities—in both our inclination and resources. Parables sift our hearing through the responses they invoke to the reality of God declared in the gospel. v The gospel invites us to participate in another reality that exceeds our existing possibilities, yet in the midst of life within which we are confronted by seemingly familiar scenes within parables. The gospel speaks and people hear. In hearing, they can be transformed. The relay of Christian faith is renewed in surprising trajectories beyond the sum of tired questions posed in cynical self-justification concerning the “strange” values of grace. Something new is ignited within human life as Christian faith is engaged through hearing and response to Scripture’s testimony to the gospel. This testimony invites us to trust a word that anticipates the future of God who, in creativity, calls to be things that are not. Parables disclose God’s creative reality, which invokes a response. As apocalypse, all Scripture is anticipatory toward this end. By hearing in anticipation of wholeness that is received and sustained as a gift in the gospel, grace is encountered in unique ways, as each is called to respond within a particular context and by specific gifts and experiences. With their images of familiar human experiences, parables endorse such particularity of human life. Listening for the word of God is indigenous to the gospel; eavesdropping on how it is heard by others in parables is indigenous to its interpretation. By another word, Christian testimony discloses possibilities beyond human purview, which are only understood in our willingness to hear and only substantiated in our tangible response. A surprising and sovereign claim on our lives necessitates humility in deferring to this claim for it to be heard as sovereign and trustworthy in testimony to grace and truth given in excess. Where we listen to this by eavesdropping on others hearing and responding within parables, we can hear how everything concerning the grace of God disclosed in Jesus Christ, hinges on ears that hear. |
