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Christianity retold

New Testament

Goldmines and Pearls

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Goldmines and Pearls is an adaptation of Matthew 13: 44-46

What’s God’s Nation like? It’s like someone checking out an ordinary field, and suddenly realising there’s a gold mine underneath. They’re so thrilled, they sell everything they have to buy the mining rights.

Or, God’s Nation is like a jeweller, searching the world for the finest pearls. When they found one that was uniquely valuable, they sold everything they had to buy it.

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Commentary: The Lost Van

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The Lost Van is based on Luke 15:3-6

Sheep and Shepherds

There are two main questions with this parable. Firstly, if we have to tell it to people who aren’t familiar with sheep at all, should we keep ‘sheep’? Secondly, what do we do where there’s a prevalent metaphor of ‘sheep stands for people?’ If we drop ‘sheep’ we lose the many biblical images of God (or Jesus) as the shepherd and his people as sheep. However, in the UK, ‘sheep’ has an extremely negative connotation when the word is applied to people. Calling people sheep, or sheeple, is not a compliment.

Part of this is the difference between our style of shepherding and the style of shepherding practiced in the Middle East. Shepherds in the hills of the UK will gather their sheep with the aid of a highly trained dog. The sheep will be driven before the shepherd, possibly with some sharp nips from the dog to make sure they’re going in the right direction.

In the Middle East, Jesus would have been familiar with a system where sheep learn from birth to trust their shepherd to lead the flock. The shepherd is walking in front of the flock, leading them to drinking water, to grass, to the safety of their enclosure at night. So for Jesus and his listeners, the image of the lost sheep is that of a creature who should have trusted and followed their shepherd – but instead has wandered off on their own path. Knowing sheep, it’s probably stuck in a ditch somewhere. Or it’s found its way to a high ledge with some tasty grass and is now wondering why it can’t get down as easily as it got up.

But for people in the UK, the image of sheep is primarily of a stupid animal being driven forward to places it doesn’t want to go. ‘Sheep’, or ‘sheeple’, is a byword for people going forward blindly because someone (usually a malicious someone) is pushing them to go that way. With those negative connotations, maybe it might be worth trying the parable with another image than ‘sheep’.

Children or van?

One possible image would be ‘children’ and ‘teacher’. A group of children trustingly following their teacher – that’s pretty close to the image of the sheep trustingly following their shepherd. And Jesus himself was a teacher, so that image does keep some biblical echoes. But while we’d certainly make every effort to find the lost child, leaving the other ninety-nine alone ‘in the wilderness’ wouldn’t exactly be good practice…

However, in Luke’s Gospel, Luke has Jesus tell this parable with another story – one about a woman losing one of her silver coins, her ‘rainy day money’. So in this case, Jesus seems to be thinking about valuable things. To God, sinners are valuable, not worthless. They are just as valuable as the shepherd’s sheep (their means of making a living) or a woman’s silver coin (her emergency money).

Which is why I ended up using ‘van’. They’re a means of making a living. They’re valuable. They get lost. And while they don’t have any biblical connections (vans being in short supply in first century Galilee), they do have drivers. We can hear a story about a lost van and make the connection with a lost person. We’d also realise that the other ninety nine vans-and-drivers will likely be okay while the boss is out searching.

And it keeps one of the original meanings of this parable; that even though the shepherd has a hundred sheep, he cares about each and every one. The owner of our van fleet isn’t leaving this to subordinates. He’s out there searching, towing the van back if he has to, leading his lost van home.

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The Lost Van

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The Lost Van is an adaptation of Luke 15:3-6

If a man has a fleet of a hundred vans and one gets lost, wouldn’t he leave the other van drivers to just carry on, looking for that lost van until he’s found it? And when he finds where it is, won’t he even go out himself if he has to, attaching a tow bar and bringing the van home? Then he’ll text and phone and tell people: ‘Everyone! We’ve found them! They’re okay! They’re safe home!’

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Commentary: The Smart and Stupid Builders

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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.

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The Smart and Stupid Builders

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

I’ll show you what someone’s like when they listen to me and act on what I say. They’re like someone building a house, who digs down deep and reinforces their concrete with steel. The rains come, the floods come down the street, the wind blows a gale – but that house stays standing because it was well built.

Now, someone who just listens but doesn’t do anything is like someone who builds a house but skimps on the foundations, just a little layer of concrete with no steel in it. The rains come, the floods come down the street, the wind blows a gale – and that house comes crashing down.

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Commentary: The Tree, the Fruit and the Gardener

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The Tree, the Fruit and the Gardener is an adaptation of John 15: 1-6.

Parable or Extended Metaphor?

The first problem in adapting this parable to a modern context is whether it’s a parable at all, or whether it’s a very extended metaphor. John isn’t supposed to ‘do’ parables, concentrating as he often does on Jesus’ more complex teaching for his long-term disciples – but I’d side with those arguing for ‘parable’. A slightly different style of parable, because Jesus is using the story of the vine, the gardener and the two types of branches to explain things to his disciples, rather than to provoke discussion amongst the crowd – but still a parable.

Retelling a parable – choices

As in The Parable of the Tenants , the major change in retelling this is the move away from the ‘vine’ imagery. Shifting the retelling away from ‘vine’ loses the connotations it had for the original disciples. The vine is associated with Israel; one of the things Jesus is probably saying is that he is, in some way, Israel. But the problem with keeping ‘vine’ in a modern retelling is that Jesus’ disciples would have got the connection with Israel immediately – we won’t. That connection is now only obvious to people who’ve done a lot of Bible reading or some Bible study. In a sermon, it would be something the preacher would need to tease out.

And, again, we have the problem that vines are not an everyday sight in urban Britain (where I’m writing now). For places like the UK, keeping ‘vine’ keeps the associated theology (for those who understand it), but if the listener isn’t familiar with Bible stories, it immediately places Jesus and his disciples as ‘exotic’. Other. If I hear I am the true vine and my Father is the vinedresser’, I’m already halfway to wondering what this guy is going on about, if I haven’t switched off entirely. Instead of ‘needs thinking about’, I would say we move into ‘needs footnotes’.

Which is fine, if the person listening is already in church and has access to ‘footnotes’ in the sense of bible resources or classes. Not so good if it’s someone who’s never been inside a church and doesn’t know why they should go.

Language Choices

My Greek is fairly terrible basic, but I think we do have to consider what Jesus meant by ‘true’. He is the true vine, the essential Israel, yes – but would we ever, in modern British English, say ‘I am the true Britain’? I think in colloquial English we’d be far more likely to use ‘essentially’. Jesus is the true life. Essentially, Jesus is life. One’s more theologically accurate, the other is more direct.

In the same way, while ‘abide in me’ is an accurate translation, it’s not something we’d ever say in modern British English. A colloquial Brit would use ‘stay with me’, or maybe ‘stick with me’ if they were being more forceful.

Question

Does the heightened, formal English used in most Bible translations help or hinder?

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