Having previously heard Amy-Jill Levine offer perceptive and lively lectures on a number of the parables she discusses in this book, I was prepared to open Short Stories by Jesus, kick off my shoes (an inside joke for others who have also had the pleasure of hearing her speak), relax in an easy chair, and benefit anew from her scholarship and wit. These qualities were certainly in evidence in her book as she guides readers through a dozen or so parables. She offers many unexpected twists on these familiar anecdotes, which she believes have been damagingly “domesticated” over centuries of preaching using allegorical or metaphorical interpretations.
One of Levine's aims is to encounter the parables as they would have been heard by their original first-century Jewish listeners. She insists throughout the book that by their very nature parables are provocative: to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. They should “provoke, challenge, and inspire” (275) and never be “tamed into banal statements of the obvious” (277). As becomes clear in her discussions of the selected parables, she believes they should provoke self-critical questions among individuals and communities and not simply yield self-satisfying platitudes.
After reading Levine's thought-provoking work, I found myself reflecting mostly on two topics: (1) hermeneutical and pastoral challenges, and (2) the persistent power of anti-Jewish interpretations of the parables.
Hermeneutical and Pastoral Challenges
The effort to hear the parables in their original, first-century Jewish context is largely a historical and exegetical venture, one that Levine is very well prepared to undertake. Her mastery of the New Testament, rabbinic, and late Second Temple literature is impressive and judiciously handled. Part of her method is to bracket off the earliest “domestications” of the parables of Jesus offered by the Evangelists themselves as they frame, introduce, or offer proverbial summaries of them.
This is an important and necessary step in order to enter into the precrucifixion content of Jesus' teaching, but it raises complex pastoral challenges for today's Christian preachers and teachers, who, after all, are seeking to actualize the parables in the context of the resurrection faith of the contemporary church community. (The gospel writers faced a similar task even in the first century, as Levine notes.)
For example, given the number of parables that appear in the Sunday lectionary, especially in Ordinary Time, the preacher who takes up Levine's call not to domesticate them will be confronted with explaining why he or she is disregarding the gospels' framing. Perhaps even more challenging is how to preach and expound on “the mysteries of the faith and the guiding principles of the Christian life”Footnote 4 while at the same time following Levine's admonition to resist thinking about what the parables “‘mean’ and more about what they can ‘do’: remind, provoke, refine, confront, disturb” (4). The first-century context of Jesus is quite different from that of twenty-first-century Christians, not least in the radically altered liturgical and canonical settings in which the parables are met today. Perhaps the congregation that Sunday needs to be comforted, not afflicted.
To put this in terms of Catholic hermeneutics, the 1965 Second Vatican Council dogmatic constitution Dei Verbum and a 1964 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, Sancta Mater Ecclesia, describe three “stages” in the composition of the gospels: (1) the ministry of Jesus; (2) the postresurrectional preaching of the Apostles; and (3) the writing of the Evangelists.Footnote 5 By seeking to hear the parables in the setting of Jesus' ministry, Levine is quite properly focusing on stage 1. In liturgy and catechesis, however, preachers and teachers necessarily focus on stage 3, since in Catholic teaching “everything asserted by the inspired authors or sacred writers must be held to be asserted by the Holy Spirit” (DV §11). If the stage 3 Evangelists are understood to have been divinely inspired to present the earlier stage 1 parables of Jesus in certain ways, then the resurrection faith of the congregation cannot be completely set aside when preaching and teaching the parables. In other words, the scriptural character of the parables inevitably exerts a powerful “domesticating” force to read and interpret them in terms of Christian faith.
This is not to say that Levine's exegetical/historical project is unwelcome—far from it! However, in terms of the life of the church, the parables not only “need to make sense without any knowledge of how Jesus's followers came to understand him after the Romans crucified him” (17), not only do they need to be “translate[d]…so that they can be heard still speaking” today (ibid.), but in Christian worship and education they also must be actualized to deepen the Christian covenantal relationship with God in Christ. Levine's volume complements and provides crucial historical background for this larger pastoral task.
The Persistent Power of Anti-Jewish Interpretations of the Parables
If it is insufficient for Christian faith to engage the parables only in their first-century Jewish context, it is nonetheless also essential for Christian faith that the Judaism of Jesus be encountered accurately and on its own terms. Levine makes an invaluable contribution in this regard by demonstrating how often Christians have read and continue to read the parables in polemical, anti-Jewish ways.
In parable after parable, Levine presents assertions by recent interpreters that are based upon and reinforce an oppositional understanding of Jesus in relation to Judaism through caricatures, distortions, and sometimes outright falsehoods about Jewish ideas and practices. Some commentators seem so unable to situate Jesus within late Second Temple Judaism, or so eager to present (anachronistically) the church and the synagogue as fundamentally opposed institutions, that they apply this binary outlook even to parables that have nothing to do with such issues.
Thus, for example, one recent interpreter sees the yeast in the Parable of the Yeast in the dough as “mightily permeating the dead lump of religious Judaism” (110). Regarding the father of the lost or prodigal son, another opines, “The typical Jewish father would have forever ‘cut off’ his son with a formal ceremony” (55). The Parable of the Lost Sheep becomes in the hands of some interpreters an occasion to assert this false distinction: “In contrast to rabbinical contempt for shepherds … Jesus, who has fellowship with the despised and sinners, knows and appreciates them as people” (38). The widow who badgers a judge is described as the victim of the “ugly and oppressive socio-legal world of first-century Palestine” (229). A certain interpreter claims that the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector serves to “undermine the authority of the redemptive media” of the Temple (170), while with regard to the Parable of the Valuable Pearl another makes the questionable assertion that “merchants were generally held in high regard by Jews” (132). In each case Levine exposes the inaccurate understandings or false images of Judaism that undergird such claims, often by deftly citing late Second Temple or rabbinic literature.
A few topics seem particularly liable to be read to promote opposition between Judaism and Christianity. One such subject concerns Temple purity laws. Some interpreters fancifully see the Parable of the Mustard Seed as predicated on a violation of Jewish laws that prohibit the planting of two types of crops together, or insist that the mustard seed is somehow “unclean” (154). Despite the fact that the priest in the Parable of the Good Samaritan is described as traveling away from Jerusalem and the Temple, his apathy toward the beaten man by the wayside is explained in terms of ritual impurity. Thus, one reader cited by Levine erroneously explains that if the priest came within four cubits of the victim, he “would be defiled and was liable to disciplinary flogging” (92). Another stated that “if any part of the priest's body were to be above any part of a corpse, he could contract impurity” (92). Levine demonstrates that the mitzvah to bury a corpse supersedes any purity concerns even had the priest been rushing to perform priestly duties in the Temple. Concerning the story of the Pharisee and Tax Collector, one interpreter doesn't notice that both characters are presumably ritually pure, since they are both praying in the Temple and so cannot be characterized as “one more incompatible pair, the clean and the unclean” (188).
The Pharisees are another nexus for the misrepresentation of Judaism, and, again, this sometimes occurs even in parables where they are not mentioned. In explicating the Parable of the Laborers in the Vineyard, one commentator concludes, “There can be little doubt that these grumblers represent the Pharisees and their attitude toward Jesus and his ministry” (200). Another commentator states that the parable attacks the Pharisees' “impenetrable legalistic understanding of [life in the kingdom as] grounded in the effort to secure their own security” (200). Some of these approaches to that parable may be indebted to John Wesley, who saw in it the lesson that “many of the Jews would be rejected, and many of the Gentiles accepted” (201).
The elder brother in the Lost or Prodigal Son narrative represents to one interpreter, “the Pharisaic refusal out of envy and resentment to accept this good news extended to the outcast.…And they resented others being allowed into the people without cost” (32–33). Even a parable with a single human character that is hiding the yeast in the dough can be read to condemn the totally absent Pharisees: “The world in which the scribes and Pharisees were at home was shattered upon a new world designed for the poor and destitute, the tax collectors and sinners. The righteousness of the Pharisees was devalued as confederate paper” (110).
Surely Levine proposes a sound axiom about these interpretive patterns: “When Jewish practice or Jewish society becomes the negative foil to Jesus or the church, we do well to reread the parable” (211). Her section “Pharisees: A Brief History” (175–79) admirably summarizes much of the current scholarship on these “proto-rabbis” (177) and undercuts their stereotypical portrayals in too many sermons and lessons.
This aspect of Levine's book vividly demonstrates the persistent power of the oppositional stance that Christians have inherited from centuries of supersessionist, anti-Jewish polemic. The Christian “default position” of positing a Jesus who is a kind of external critic of Second Temple Judaism, rather than a participant within the vibrant Jewish thought world of his time, continues to exercise a compelling influence. The “muscle memory” of nearly two millennia may simply be too ingrained to replace very easily without the constant and intentional exercise of new muscles and new reflexes.
Even an authentic and sincere exemplar of a relationship with Jews based on mutual respect and genuine love can sometimes succumb to this legacy of oppositional thinking. In some writings and homilies, Pope Francis himself can unintentionally reinforce Christian caricatures about the relationship between Jesus and the Pharisees, and by extension about late Second Temple Judaism and even about Jesus himself. In the homily “Holy Law Is Not an End in Itself,” given at Casa Santa Marta on October 13, 2014, Francis does not restrict his critique to specific individual leaders at the time of Jesus but seems to speak in more sweeping, collective terms:
Why were these Doctors of the Law unable to understand the signs of the times? … [Because they] were closed within their system, they had perfectly systemized the law, it was a masterpiece. Every Jew knew what they could do and what they could not do, how far they could go. It was all systemized. And they were safe there.Footnote 6
A similar idea appears in Misericordiae Vultus, in which New Testament polemic is uncritically repeated:
One can see why, on the basis of [his] liberating vision of mercy as a source of new life, Jesus was rejected by the Pharisees and the other teachers of the law. In an attempt to remain faithful to the law, they merely placed burdens on the shoulders of others and undermined the Father's mercy. The appeal to a faithful observance of the law must not prevent attention from being given to matters that touch upon the dignity of the person.Footnote 7
It must be stressed that although he speaks about Jesus being collectively “rejected” by “the Pharisees and the other teachers of the law,” Francis is not seeking to delegitimize Judaism. Indeed a few paragraphs later he movingly declares that “Israel was the first to receive this revelation [of God's mercy] which continues in history as the source of an inexhaustible richness meant to be shared with all mankind” (Misericordiae Vultus, §23). Instead, he is combating legalism among Christians, perhaps particularly within the Catholic Church's hierarchy. However, these and other examples that could be adduced show that even someone who enjoys deep theological dialogue and has personal friendships with Jews is not immune from unintentionally perpetuating a distorted picture of Judaism and thereby reinforcing old triumphalistic sentiments toward what he calls its “noble religious tradition” (ibid.).
To relate these observations to my first topic about the pastoral challenges in preaching and teaching the parables in the twenty-first century church, a principle from the Pontifical Biblical Commission is relevant: “Particular attention is necessary, according to the spirit of the Second Vatican Council (Nostra Aetate, 4), to avoid absolutely any actualization of certain texts of the New Testament which could provoke or reinforce unfavorable attitudes to the Jewish people.”Footnote 8 To overcome the perduring Christian tendency to envision Jesus as opposed to Judaism requires that actualizing the parables in the resurrection-faith context of liturgy and catechesis must be informed by accurate information about the “stage 1” context of Jesus' ministry within Second Temple Judaism. That is why Amy-Jill Levine's Short Stories by Jesus: The Enigmatic Parables of a Controversial Rabbi should be required reading for seminarians, teachers, and preachers in all the diverse branches of the Christian family.
