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An Imaginary Parable
A King lived in a castle, behind a high wall. Whenever he tried to come out and meet his people, his tenants added more stones to the wall. So the wall got higher and higher. One day…
What does that mean? – apart from ‘Jesus is a lot better at parables than I am.’
What is modern?
A commonly asked question is: ‘How relevant can a two thousand year old religion be to a modern urban society?’ Yet, Christianity spread in towns. Towns with running water, baths, a social security system … Christianity and towns — ‘modern urban societies’ — have been together since the time of the first apostles.
Language and Translation
But it brings us to walls. Suppose the first Christians had decided they needed to repeat what Jesus said word for word? The original gospels would have needed to be in Jesus’ language, Aramaic. But most people in the Eastern Roman Empire weren’t Aramaic speakers; they spoke Greek. Greek was the ‘English’ of its day, the most commonly learnt second language.
So the gospels were originally written in Greek. Not the posh Greek learnt by the upper classes, but everyday Greek. Their writers wrote the gospels to be understood.
Equally, when Latin became the ‘everyone speaks it’ language of the Western Empire, Christians translated the gospels. They translated the gospels, in fact, into Syriac, Latin, Gothic, Coptic… the gospels were written to be understood. Christians didn’t want language to be a wall between the people and Jesus. So they translated the gospels into languages that people understood.
Paintings of biblical scenes were also often ‘translated’ into the modern dress of the day. There was no wall between the people looking at the painting and its subject. Mary, for example, was a Renaissance Italian mother, or a formally dressed Japanese mother, or…
Everyday Puzzles
The parables are puzzles, aimed at making people think. Once those people had worked through to the meaning, they might discover this parable was about them. But if the parables were puzzles, the puzzles were based on the day-to-day. Kings and emperors were an everyday form of government. Even for urban Romans, fields and farmers were within a couple of miles. Stories and poems romanticising the idyllic shepherd lifestyle were popular. Bandits attacking unwary lone travellers were a real threat.
Everyday Puzzles?
But are the parables now drawing on ordinary things?
For most of the world, less than ten percent of people lived in towns and cities. Then came the Industrial Revolution. Now, the UK, the birthplace of that revolution, has a capital city over fifty miles across. 95% of the UK population lives in urban areas. For nine-tenths of British teenagers, the only place they’ve seen a live sheep is in a ‘city farm’, an urban mini-zoo. For them, sheep aren’t ‘ordinary.’
The Wall
Is there a wall between the parables and us? One built of bricks saying, ‘That was then. We know better now.’ Or ‘anything two thousand years old can’t be relevant today.’ Do we need to put that idea aside before we can un-puzzle a parable?
Of course, bricks are almost ten thousand years old – fired bricks about seven thousand. The dice the Roman soldiers played games with are identical to the ones we play games with. The legal system in many European countries is still based on Roman law…
Why is it that the ideas we need to junk are the ones about justice and mercy, about preferring the community minded to the selfish and ambitious? The ideas about how fast a movement can spread? Bricks, dice, having a legal system – they’re fine. Showing mercy? We don’t need some two thousand year old parables for that! We know how to do that, we say (usually just before we try to destroy someone’s career over an incautious tweet).
Breaking Down the Wall
So how do we break down the wall? The first Christians translated the words of Jesus into languages people understood. If a concept or practice was unknown outside Galilee and Judea, they explained it within the Gospels.
Can we translate the stories, not just the language? To make the Gospels as relevant and immediate as they first were?
And is there a second type of ‘wall’ between us and the Gospels? The wall where we know the stories so well, the puzzle sails straight over our heads. We never apply the parable to us, to our lives. The wall we need to break down – before we can let the parable surprise us and change us.
Who benefits from keeping the Wall?
It’s not us.
Previous parable: The Dogs and the Cats (Matthew 25: 31-46)
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