In an essay entitled 'The Judgement of the World' Rowan Williams proposes the intriguing idea of parabolic speech as a catalyst for a new kind of life: for conversion. The parables that Jesus told have the capacity to tranform people's perceptions: of themselves and of their communities. And indeed, his own life was a larger parable of the gospel of challenge and transformation. Jesus' telling of parables and teaching his disciples how to receive them is a preparation for us of the pattern of loss and recovery of the self that we will see in his death and resurrection story.
He goes on:
The transfiguring of the world in Christ can seem partial or marginal if we have not learned, by speaking and hearing parables, a willingness to lose th eidentities and perceptions we make for ourselves: all good stories change us if we hear them attentively; the most serious stories change us radically....And if we can accept a very general definition of parable as a narrative both dealing with and requiring 'conversion', radical loss and radical novelty, it may not be too far-fetched to say that the task of theology is the exploration of parable, and so of conversion.
4 comments:
Why particularly parables? The principle quoted could apply equally to other parts of Jesus' teaching, eg: the beatitudes destroy and remake the identity of the "self made man" as much as the parable of the workers in the vineyard. No doubt there is more detail in the surrounding text: I don't want to criticise, love the phrase "radical loss and radical novelty".
Perhaps RW would argue that the beatitudes were parabolic too. Certainly, it is a feature of prophetic speech, this function of exposure or revelation. Think Nathan with David...
I wonder of Abp Williams is using 'parabolic' to mean 'poetic', as in something that remakes and completes the reader, in the way Les Murray speaks of poetry here? More poetry than narrative, perhaps?
Yes, kind of: that is sort of it. It is a speech that brings something new into being. The metaphoric, or at least analogic aspect of it is the thing... the surprising comparison.
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