his apprenticeship, likely beginning at age 12, in a trade; his many years (up to 18) toiling in a carpenter’s shop interacting with farmers, fishermen, merchants, and the like; until at age 30 he began to speak and teach in public as an itinerant rabbi, a public ministry that would last only three short years.
The time ratios here are important and worth noting. Up to six years in the community, the carpenter’s shop, the marketplace—interacting with the types of people who will one day constitute the bulk of his public audiences, hearing about their troubles and hopes, listening to their stories and conversation, absorbing their vocabulary and reference points—for every one year of teaching and communicating in the public arena. Six to one is the ratio of private preparation to public communication.
Incarnational Communications
When Jesus finally stepped into the public arena, he was an “incarnational communicator” and surely one of the most effective public communicators this world has ever seen—someone from whom any public communicator can learn a great deal. He embodied, became the personification of, the truths he sought to communicate. He was fully immersed in the community of human beings he had come to influence. And his choice of words, phrases, and illustrations put flesh upon, made intrinsically human and tangible, spiritual truths and realities so that his audiences could better grasp and accept—virtually see, feel, touch, and embrace—what he was talking about.
Note first of all the lofty and seemingly otherworldly ideas and truths that it was the purpose of his public ministry to communicate: ideas and truths about the nature and will of God, a spiritual kingdom, the foundations of happiness (blessedness), spiritual illumination, the laws of God, spiritual communication (prayer), retaliation and reconciliation, spiritual temptation, heaven and hell, the spiritual consequences of human actions, judgment and justice, spiritual direction, the power and meaning of faith, spiritual deprivation and nourishment, the agents and consequences of evil, the spiritual roots of pain and suffering, spiritual comfort, the reality and meaning of death, spiritual life and death, spiritual and temporal authority, the meaning of truth, spiritual work, self-sacrificial love, spiritual unity, eternal life, the person and work of the spirit of God—the list goes on and on, concepts and truths of a high level of abstraction, seemingly intangible and for the most part beyond the ability of ordinary folk to feel, grasp, and embrace.
But note how Jesus put “flesh” on these concepts and truths to make the seemingly intangible real and tangible. He did so by expressing these truths in words, phrases, and analogies drawn from where? Not primarily from the experience and vocabulary of the religious academy of his day but directly from the circumstances and vocabularies of those he communicated with and among whom he worked and conversed for 18 years. Words, phrases, and analogies that include salt of the earth, the light of a lamp, a cloak given away, rust and moths, birds of the air, lilies of the field, sawdust in the eye, narrow and broad gates, wolves and sheep, the fruit of the tree, houses built on sand or rock, the holes of foxes, the nests of birds, brides and bridegrooms, weddings and other feasts, patches on garments, new and old wineskins, sheep without shepherds, workers for the harvest fields, children in the marketplace, a sheep in a pit, an ox in a ditch, a house swept clean, yeast in the dough, fish in the net, good and bad servants, sowers of seeds, reapers of harvests, the size of a mustard seed, wheat in a field, weeds in a field, stony or thorny ground, landlords and tenants, workers in a vineyard, winepresses and millstones, the fruit of the vine, vines and branches, taxes to Caesar, clean and unclean cups, oil for lamps, fruitful and barren fig trees, sheep separated from goats, a child in the midst, and wine and bread. Often woven into stories and parables, such words and phrases were designed to both enlighten and provoke questions—stories and parables again drawn largely from his own knowledge and experience of the lives and circumstances of his hearers.12
Also note the nature of the venues where he met and encountered people: yes, sometimes in a synagogue or formal place of learning, but more often on a hill beside a lake, in a small boat pushed off from the shore, in a disciple’s house, at a party with tax collectors and prostitutes, in the marketplace, at a wedding feast, at religious feasts, in a garden, on the road, at a well, and in dozens of other places where he was accessible to sick people, poor people, inquirers, skeptics, critics, lawyers, scribes, priests, soldiers, tax collectors, women, and children.
This is incarnational communication, with three distinctive characteristics: (1) The communicator literally embodies and personifies the truths to be communicated. (2) The communicator has so immersed himself or herself in the community that he or she is an integral part of it, not distant from it. (3) The communication is expressed as much as possible within the conceptual frameworks and in the vocabulary not of the communicator but of the community to be influenced. It is today what communications consultants would call receiver-oriented communication.
Source-Oriented Versus
Receiver-Oriented Communication
There is an old and simple model, originating with electronic engineers, of how communication works that I have found most helpful in framing my own communication efforts on both political and religious subjects. It conceptualizes communication as originating with a source who wishes to generate a response from a receiver through the transmission of information (messages) via a medium. The communication occurs in a context that significantly influences it and is complicated by the existence of noise—competing information and messages.
The communication is further complicated by the fact that messages from the source and responses from the receiver both pass through the respective communication grids of each—defining aspects of their respective cultures, conceptual frameworks, thought patterns, and vocabularies that shape the formation and reception of the messages and feedback. When the source’s grid is significantly different than the receiver’s grid, we encounter all the challenges of cross-cultural communication, such as when oil companies communicate with Indigenous peoples, scientists communicate with politicians, or believers communicate with non-believers on spiritual topics.
Source-oriented communicators express their ideas in the way those ideas came to them (the source), in the words and phrases of the source’s vocabulary and conceptual framework, and in venues and through media with which the source is most familiar and comfortable. Such communicators often live and operate at considerable psychological, social, and physical distance from the rank and file of the public. They put much of the onus of understanding what is being communicated on the audience rather than assuming that burden themselves.
Scientists and academics, preachers and professors, and persons in positions of authority such as corporate executives and high-level civil servants tend to be source-oriented communicators. Moses and the scribes and Pharisees13 of Jesus’ day were for the most part source-oriented communicators—indeed this is generally the communication style of lawgivers. While this communication style certainly has its place and is highly effective in peer-to-peer communications, it is generally far less effective in communicating with the general public.
If you are a receiver-oriented communicator you will also have definite communications objectives and messages that you as the source want to convey in order to generate a desired audience response. But you do not start planning your communications from the source-oriented perspective of “what do I want to say?”; rather you start with “who are these people I am communicating with?” What are they like—their hopes, their fears, their attitudes, their backgrounds? What do they know or not know about me and my subject? What is their vocabulary? What are their venue and media preferences? What competing information and messages are they receiving? What will be the physical circumstances and psychological climate when and where I will be communicating with them? Then, having asked and answered these questions about the intended receivers of your communication—much easier to do accurately if you have lived and worked among them—you now proceed to framing your communication and messages with the needs and character of your
