Jesus’ parables and teachings as his own stories we open a window that allows a glimpse into what may have been actual experiences in Jesus’ life, telling us more about who he was as a person, giving us more insight into how he became the mysterious, mythical person who changed the world.
As the enigma of a mythical Messiah and Christ fades, we realize we know more than we know we know, and discover a more human Jesus hidden within his own story.
When I was studying biblical Greek in seminary our professor, Wayne Merritt, ended most classes with a phrase of encouragement as he smiled wryly and looked out at confused faces and glazed eyes. “You know more than you know you know.”
I offer these same words of encouragement to you as we look at a few familiar parables, teachings, and stories by and about Jesus. By making a slight shift in perspective and viewing these experiences and events as if they were actually life events of Jesus, a portrait of the man Jesus begins to appear. Then our own stories begin to emerge from Jesus’ story and we really do know more that we know we know.
Primal Story
Regardless of all the things we do not know about the historical Jesus, one thing is certain. Jesus was a storyteller. He told stories in response to questions, stories when teaching, stories about the past, stories about the future, and even stories about other stories. In the gospels his stories were rarely if ever abstract, but rather grounded in human experiences and told with the purpose of communicating some aspect of compassion, love, power, abandonment, greed, generosity, suffering, death, grace, patience, and forgiveness.
There is also a dynamic at work in the gospels in which Jesus and his stories are the main subject of a story told by someone else who has their own purposes and perspectives. The gospels, both canonical and noncanonical, all have their own passions and prejudices encumbered with vested interest in presenting Jesus and his stories in a way as to promote particular presuppositions.
What is now known in biblical scholarship as narrative criticism evolved out of this dynamic of identifying and exploring the elements and craft of storytelling in the Bible and other texts. However, before and behind the formal study of biblical stories are the stories themselves both individually as narrative units and collectively as meta-narrative which can also be understood as “primal story,” the story from which other stories grow.
In his book The Bible Makes Sense, Walter Brueggemann expands on previous assertions of German Old Testament scholar Gerhard von Rad and English New Testament scholar C. H. Dodd, that the Bible has its roots in two primal narratives—the exodus and the resurrection. Brueggemann says a primal narrative is “the most important story we know, and we have come to believe it is decisively about us.”3 He goes on to say that “von Rad has made it clear that these assertions come behind and before any reasoned theology or any apologetic concern to justify faith to outsiders.”4 In other words, the primal story is contained in every other story, past and present, and is the portal through which every other story is filtered.
Primal stories (yes, we can and do have more than one) are so powerful that they shape everything happening afterward. Primal stories also change the past by becoming a lens through which we see and reimagine everything prior to their telling. The future emanates from the primal story and the past leads up to it.
We All Have Primal Stories
The Bible is not the only place we find primal stories. We all have primal stories in our lives and communities that literally define who we are: death, birth, marriage, divorce, a love affair, achievement, failure, sickness, injury, epiphany, and abandonment. The list is endless, as are life’s experiences.
In order for people to really know who we are it is important for us to tell and hear our respective primal stories. The same is true for our knowing Jesus. The way we come to really know the person Jesus is through his stories and particularly his primal stories.
A Man Hidden in His Own Story
Of course Jesus never actually says, “This is the central story of my life from which the past and future emanate.” However, if we accept the premise that the parables and teachings of Jesus are his personal tales, we now have a collection of stories in which we can identify topics, themes, and characters. Also, the detail and care with which a story is told is usually an indicator of that story’s importance to the teller. By observing and exploring all of Jesus’ stories and teachings we begin to see common elements and can then imagine one or more of these stories as the source from which all the others come.
Emerging from the whole of Jesus’ stories and teachings are several common elements, including but not limited to healing, forgiveness, persistence, faith, kindness, fairness, generosity, and love; all grounded in compassion, but not compassion as mere empathy. Rather, the compassion described of Jesus in the gospels, splagchnizomai, which literally means “to be moved in the bowels,” the bowels believed to be the seat of love and pity. One can imagine splagchnizomai as intense, visceral emotion akin to suffering that is prompted by another’s suffering. In numerous stories of healing Jesus is reported to have splagchnizomai toward the individuals as well as crowds of people who are made whole.
Such compassion opens up vistas of hospitality, liberation, regeneration, and new life. Jesus, being fully human, can be assumed as not unlike most people in that he would have told stories which came from his own experiences, passions, prejudices, and perspectives of compassion.
A Note to the Reader
The reimagined story that follows is drawn from parables and teachings attributed to Jesus, as well as events recorded in the four gospels. The actual Scripture passages from which the story emerges appear in the appendix in approximate order of reference.
There are no chapter titles or numbers but rather pauses between stories within The Story, indicated with the Hebrew word Selah that is used throughout the Psalms and is believed to mean “pause and consider.”
I’ve written this story as an invitation for you to reconsider and reimagine both the humanity and divinity of Jesus. My invitation goes out to people who are not familiar with the Bible stories and have only heard them through other sources. It also goes out to many who have rejected traditional interpretations of the stories as religious dogma. I also extend the invitation to many people who are so steeped in the stories that they have become cliché.
Even the most clever storyteller or writer of fiction can never totally disguise or deny their personal influence on the story. And most of us have had the experience of someone beginning a story with, “I know a person who . . .” when in fact that “person” is the one telling the story. Why not imagine the same when Jesus says, “Once there was a man traveling on the way from Jerusalem to Jericho? . . .”
Selah
1. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Josephus on Jesus.”
2. Wikipedia.com, s.v. “Tacitus on Christ.”
3. Brueggemann, The Bible Makes Sense, rev. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2001), 23–26.
4. Ibid, 24.
The Story
When the sun goes down in the desert and darkness
