Archives for April 2021

The Smart and Stupid Builders is an adaptation of Matthew 7.24-27, Luke 6.46-49

To Retell or Not?

The parable of the wise and foolish builders – does it really need retelling? This is always the big question about sacred stories – it’s easy to take a story and recast it, reset it, retell it. But should we?

For the wise and foolish builders, the story is still easy to understand even after two thousand years. We still build houses. We still see rock as strong and stable and sand as shifting, insecure. We don’t need theological footnotes for any of that, so there’s a strong argument that this parable doesn’t need any retelling. Why change the words of Jesus?

Except we do change the words of Jesus and we always have. Even the original Gospel writers made the decision to translate the minority language of Aramaic into more widely understood Greek. Later, the Greek was re-translated into another widely-known language: Latin. I’ve directed the readers of this website to an English translation…

But at each step on the way, writers and translators have been trying to preserve, as far as possible, what Jesus meant.

When should we retell?

Things have changed in house-building in the last two thousand years. But the question is, how much does that matter if we can still understand what Jesus did mean? Most people know he lived a long time ago.

We might choose to retell this parable when our audience is likely to wonder what a two thousand year old parable has to do with them. When we think we need to worry about casting Jesus as someone who lives only in history books, or who wandered around Galilee with a saintly expression, some remarkably clean disciples and a couple of convenient cute animals. When we only have time for one quick parable and need to let it explain itself. When we want it to sound like Jesus was telling it now.

Retelling the parable – choices

I toyed with changing ‘house’ to ‘block of flats’ and ‘foundations’ to ‘hill’ and ‘flood plain’. But all those choices would alter the parable beyond a retelling; instead of a translation, they’d alter the meaning. Jesus is telling a parable about individuals reacting (or not) to his words. A block of flats collapsing, however, impacts on more people than just the foolish builder. Likewise, one of the levels of interpretation in Jesus’ parable is that – whether you act on his teachings or not – the bad times will come. The wise and the foolish both get hit by the same storm. But if I changed things to a hill and a flood plain, even though building on a flood plain is definitely foolish, the image I’d be creating would be that those who act on Jesus’ words can sit serenely (possibly smugly) above the bad things of life.

If you live in an urban environment, you’ve probably seen building works going on. The modern technique is not to build on nice solid rock, but to make that solid foundation with a big hole, strengthening and framing steel rods or mesh and a lot of concrete. One type of shoddy building practice would be a thin layer of concrete without the steel reinforcement and that’s what I went with.

Previous Parable: The Tree, the Fruit and the Gardener

Next Parable: The Lost Van