Co-missioners,
Bruce Modahl, our newsletter editor, reviews a book for us today.
Peace and Joy,
The Crossings Community
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A Review of Thomas G. Long’s Proclaiming the Parables: Preaching and Teaching the Kingdom of God
(Published March 12, 2024 by Westminster John Knox Press; 460 pages)
by Bruce K Modahl
For more than four decades Tom Long has studied, taught, written about, and preached Jesus’ parables. With intimate knowledge of the congregations and neighborhoods the Evangelists inhabited, Long accounts for the shape these parables take from one Gospel to the next. All of it he unfolds for the reader in plain language. For example, Long introduces Luke’s parables, writing,
Luke is the gentlest, the most attractive and irenic of the Synoptic Gospel writers, Luke describes a Jesus who seeks to save all humanity, Jew and Greek alike, Unlike Matthew’s Jesus, who thunders about a kingdom on the distant horizon of history, Luke’s Jesus brings God’s kingdom home to everyday life, to the neighborhood and the dinner table, Unlike Mark’s enigmatic Jesus, Luke’s Jesus talks clearly about how God has drawn close and is at work today in the here and now. Accordingly, Luke’s parables are the most congenial in the New Testament, full of familiar, down-to-earth, emotionally rich scenes.
Long’s Princeton Seminary colleague, Diogenes Allen, wrote a book called Traces of God in a Frequently Hostile World (pub. 1981). Long trains our eyes to see and our ears to hear so we are able to distinguish those traces not only in Biblical texts, but also in our world and lives.
In his preface, Long makes a claim he will support throughout the book, that the deepest purpose of the parables is to disclose the kingdom of God, which is an event, the inbreaking of the life of God into life and history.
We are accustomed to hearing about the “already but not yet” character of God’s kingdom. The kingdom of God is at hand in Jesus Christ, but it is not as yet in hand. We await Christ’s coming again. Long inserts “on hand” into the middle of that equation. According to Long, the kingdom of God, at hand in Jesus, is an event happening all around us for which we may be on hand. The parables, Long claims, are GPS devices taking us to those places. With eyes that see and ears that hear we are on hand for these manifestations of God’s kingdom.
At the end of Long’s treatment of each parable he will show us where he has observed the kingdom of God revealing itself in our present day. For example, Long says Mark’s version of the Parable of the Sower “calls us to look for the advent of the kingdom… in places of utter failure and grinding hopelessness.” He then relates a story from the pastoral theologian Seward Hiltner about a mental hospital’s back ward that housed unresponsive patients. A group of women from a nearby church asked if they could visit patients who did not have visitors. The hospital administrator gave them permission to visit the back ward. The administrator and staff members expected nothing but disappointment.
The women began to visit these abandoned people, bringing plates of brownies, gifts of clothing, blankets, vases of flowers, and good cheer. Gradually, amazingly, the patients, said Hiltner, began to unfurl toward the touch of kindness. The mute began to speak, the frozen warmed to human touch and friendship, the unresponsive chanced an occasional smile and, miraculously, began to tell stories of their memories and hopes. The church women, unaware that they had been cast into a place of utter despair, may have taken this in stride, but the medical staff, who had long since forsaken any thought of healing, were astonished to see the kingdom harvest—thirtyfold, sixtyfold, a hundredfold. Listen! Look!
I expect it is with these “showings” that Long will encounter the greatest enthusiasm and the greatest criticism. Most of Long’s readers will rejoice upon reading of the eruptions of the kingdom of God among us and will train their eyes and tune their ears to spot similar outbreaks. These readers will see Christ’s people using Christ’s benefits for the sake of others.
Certain readers will find the stories wanting, saying they are generic good news but not so much Gospel good news. After all, a group of evolutionary humanists could have brought brownies and flowers to the back ward. Furthermore, some of the stories bring to mind “Chicken Soup for the Soul.” The essential difference is that none of Long’s accounts are manufactured. A faithful witness stands behind all of them.
From Canva
Long showers his readers with citations from literature, theologians, scientists and cultural reference, highbrow and low. Choosing three pages at random, I encountered the following: the Babylonian Talmud, 2 Baruch, Wendell Berry, Joel Marcus, Leviticus, Joel, Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” Midrash quoted by Gershom Scholem, Sara Miles memoir, and Vivaldi.
Long frequently refers to key Greek words. However, he does so in a way that does not exclude a lay reader. For example, in Luke he makes note of the word makran, meaning “far off.” Makran and related words appear many times in Luke and Acts. Long asserts that as the prodigal son went to a far country, so is humanity at a distance from God. And like the father in the parable, God in Christ runs toward us to forgive and save.
Each time the word appears in Luke’s parables Long will point out this theme. And so the reader, whether or not she knows Greek, will understand how makran serves as a ligature, sounding a theme that binds together Luke’s Gospel and his second volume, the book of Acts.
It must be obvious by now that I highly recommend this book. Long sharpens our eyesight and tunes our ears to detect the outbreak of God’s kingdom in the everyday lives of those to whom Jesus spoke the parables, and to be on the lookout for such eruptions in our own.
1 comment
Outstanding review from an outstanding reader and preacher of the Holy scriptures.0f another!