PEOPLE of GOD
16
April 2020
Parable Preaching, Our Easter Call to Conversion E
aster is the great testimony to the life and mission of Jesus Christ and His preaching. It is the victory of life over death no matter the dangers that assail us, the fears that plague us. The Gospel that Jesus preached was simply and clearly this: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). Or as Mark’s gospel tells us: “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent, and believe in the gospel” (Mark 1:14). The Gospel is always one of personal conversion in this moment so that we might enter the kingdom of God. The Christian never abandons this call to real Gospel change. We need to remember that unless each of us faces the hard reality of our own conversion of heart, nothing makes sense. Lent is a time of such profound conversion, and it is the reign of God, the rule of God’s mercy and love, that we strive to embrace. But Lent is not an end in itself, it is the preamble to Easter, a prelude and overture that makes life more meaningful. Throughout His ministry, Jesus confronted the unrepentant heart and the wayward spirit. But He always did so not with force, but with life stories that placed before each person their need for conversion of heart. He did this so beautifully and simply in the close to 50 parables He told. We know many of these by heart – the Good Samaritan,
the Prodigal Son, the Unjust Steward, the Ten Virgins and many more. Each parable takes everyday circumstances and puts before our imagination an invitation to conversion of heart. This idiom of the parable or parable preaching holds a worthwhile lesson for us today. It instructs us in how we might share this gospel, Jesus’ call to personal conversion. But how? It seems to me that we ought to look at the contexts that gave rise to Jesus preaching in parables, realizing that the parable itself is timeless. St. Asterius of Amasea, in the fourth century, described the parables as “examples enshrining holy truths” (Office of Reading Thursday First Week of Lent). In the parable of the shepherd, who leaves the 99 to seek out the one lost sheep, we see how “parable preaching” must encounter the lost soul. Asterius writes of the lost sheep or for us the lost soul: “When he found it, he did not chastise it; he did not use rough blows to drive it back, but gently placed it on his own shoulders and carried it back to the flock. He took greater joy in this one sheep, lost and found, than in all the others” (ibid.). There is an important lesson for us, especially when even now within the church we find a tendency to brutalize those we deem “traitors” (traditores), like the Donatists did of old. This should not be the case, for there is a gentleness to the ministry of the Good Shepherd
