'"By this means he moves them": on parables and the retrieval of reserve'

Here's some support for my thesis about koans, stories, puzzles, and allusion in general, in an interesting post from catholicity and covenant:

Today's Gospel reading at Mass - Mark 4:26-34 - could lead us to reflect on Isaac Williams' Tract 80, On Reserve in Communicating Religious Knowledge.   Specifically discussing the parables, Williams quotes Chrysostom:

"Had He not wished them to hear and to be saved, He would have been silent, and not have spoken in Parables. But by this means He moveth them, by speaking things overshadowed and darkened." (Homil. on St. Matt. xiii.)

 It's a beautiful approach to the parables - "this view of a parable as a veil of the truth", discourse couched in metaphors and imagery, purposefully without explicit interpretation, to challenge, engage and entice the imagination to a deeper, meaningful reflection on the Kingdom.  And, as Williams notes, it has considerably more credence than the lazy assumption (quite contradictory of Synoptic accounts) that the parables were 'difficult-teaching-made-easy-for-plebs':

It has been said indeed that they render moral truths more plain and easy, as well as more engaging; and that this was their purpose. But is this the case?

What is more, Williams emphasises, the 'parables as veil' coheres with the mode of revelation in the Incarnation:

The circumstances attending our Lord's  birth, and the important transactions at the early period of His life, we might have expected beforehand would have been more known to the Jewish nation, instead of being concealed, like the actions of apparently obscure persons ... There is something in the thought of our Saviour's being for thirty years among men, not known and not believed on, even by those about Him, and the witnesses of His early life, very remarkable and awful. And the great pledge and seal of the truth of the Gospel, the Resurrection itself, seems in such a striking manner to have been kept back, if I may so speak, from the gaze of the multitude, from the broad light of the common day. Its great manifestations break forth, as if indistinctly, and according to the great need of certain persons, the watchful and weeping Mary, then the penitent Peter, then (the perhaps aged) Cleopas ... Surely, in all this there is something of mysterious wisdom, which it is good for us humbly to consider.

The purpose of Tract 80, of course, was to lead mid-19th century Anglicans to ask what this meant for evangelisation, catechetics, pedagogy and formation - the need to recover reserve.  Reserve is a means of orienting our imagination towards, attuning our hearts and minds to, moving us to be open to the Mystery, the Way, the strangeness of that Water, that Bread and Wine.

 In an era when much Anglican reflection on evangelisation and catechetics has been determined by Mission-Shaped Church and accessibility, by HTB and Alpha, can catholic Anglicans aid in a retrieval of reserve which might allow the Crucified and Risen One to "occupy the imagination and affections" (a phrase from Williams' penultimate paragraph) of the citizens and consumers of postmodernity?

"The Lord himself is signified" - Augustine's Christological reading of the Good Samaritan

A great post from catholicity and covenant today.  He's referring to the Church of Ireland here, but TEC has the same Daily Office reading today.  Sometimes Augustine's allegorical readings get on my nerves - but this one is fantastic!  

Today the CofI daily office lectionary NT reading for MP was the parable of the Good Samaritan.  It is appropriate, therefore, to revisit Augustine's Christological reading of the Good Samaritan, reminding us that the parable - rather than being a moralistic addendum - coheres with and flows from the Church's proclamation of the Cross and Resurrection:

A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho; Adam himself is meant; Jerusalem is the heavenly city of peace, from whose blessedness Adam fell; Jericho means the moon, and signifies our mortality, because it is born, waxes, wanes, an dies. Thieves are the devil and his angels. Who stripped him, namely; of his immortality; and beat him, by persuading him to sin; and left him half-dead, because in so far as man can understand and know God, he lives, but in so far as he is wasted and oppressed by sin, he is dead; he is therefore called half-dead. The priest and the Levite who saw him and passed by, signify the priesthood and ministry of the Old Testament which could profit nothing for salvation. Samaritan means Guardian, and therefore the Lord Himself is signified by this name. The binding of the wounds is the restraint of sin. Oil is the comfort of good hope; wine the exhortation to work with fervent spirit. The beast is the flesh in which He deigned to come to us. The being set upon the beast is belief in the incarnation of Christ. The inn is the Church, where travelers returning to their heavenly country are refreshed after pilgrimage. The morrow is after the resurrection of the Lord. The two pence are either the two precepts of love, or the promise of this life and of that which is to come.

"For Those in the Distant Country"

Here's a really lovely piece from the blog "Interrupting the Silence"; it's a sermon on today's Gospel reading, the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32).

Detail of Rembrandt’s Return of the Prodigal Son (source)

When I was in the first grade I gathered my stuff and took off for the distant country. I ran away from home. Fortunately, it was a quick trip and I was back in time for supper. In the years since then my trips to the distant country haven’t been nearly as short or uneventful. There have been casualties and losses along the way. People were hurt. Sometimes it was me, sometimes it was others. The distant country always disappointed. It didn’t give me the life I was looking for. It didn’t make me the person I wanted to be. It left me feeling lonely, empty, and lost.

There are a thousand different routes to the distant country: sorrow and loss, sin and guilt, failure and regret, the sheer difficulty of life, to name just a few. More often than not our journey to the distant country is an attempt to run away from home, ourselves, and our lives. The distant country convinces us that the life we want and the person we want to become cannot be found within ourselves. It denies that the kingdom of God is within and creates the illusion that if we can just get to a new place, a new time, a new circumstance everything will be better.

Most of us, I suspect, will at some point in our lives buy in to that illusion. We will gather our stuff and travel to the distant country. The life we want and the person we want to become, however, are found not in the distant country but through repentance. The distant country, as the younger son experienced, offers nothing but starvation and death. That’s why last week Jesus was so intense and direct in his call for us to repent. He seems to know that it’s not a matter of whether we will go to the distant country. Chances are we will. The real question is whether we will repent.

Repentance, the journey home, requires an honest appraisal of our life. We must look at who we are and who we are not, what we have done and what we have left undone, as well as the circumstances that we allow to deny us the fullness of life. Repentance is about more than right behavior and being good. Yes, sometimes we do bad things that we just need to stop doing but often we need to repent and turn away from the failures, guilt, or regrets that bind us to the past, the sorrows and losses that keep us from being fully alive, or the fears that control our lives and keep our world small.

Repentance is the choice to no longer run away from ourselves or our lives. Yet, how can we ever go home knowing what we know about ourselves, having squandered the life given us, and having spent time in the pig pens of the distant country? Surely, that was the younger son’s question when he finally “came to himself.” It was also Bob’s question.

Bob was probably in his late 70s. He had been quiet and attentive throughout the evening as I taught about the parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11-32). When I finished speaking Bob was the first one out of his chair. I could tell, as he made his way to the front of the classroom, that he was upset. “What about the bath,” he demanded. “You didn’t say anything about the bath.” I told him I had no idea what he was talking about. That only upset him more. “You know where that kid had been!” “Yes,” I said, “in the pig pen.” “And you know what he would have smelled like and what was on him.” “Pig poop,” I said kiddingly. Bob did not think that was funny. Then he went on to explain. “The son was dirty and smelly. The father would never hug him, kiss him, or put a robe on him until the son first had a bath. Why didn’t you talk about the bath?”

I told him that a bath was not part of the story, that we can never get clean enough to go home. Instead, we go home to become clean. The father receives the son as he is. He hugs him, kisses him, robes him – all without a bath. The son is immersed and washed in the Father’s love.

Bob just could not believe that, so together we read the story again. When we got to the end of the story his eyes filled with tears and he said, “All my life I thought this story said the son had to take a bath before he could go home.” I said to him, “And all your life you’ve been trying to get clean enough to go home.” He simply nodded in silence, tears running down his face.

For all the years he spent in the distant country Bob never did get clean enough to go home. Instead, “he came to himself.” He started gathering the fragments of his life, the clean and the unclean, the acceptable and the unacceptable, things done and things left undone, all that he was and all that he had. He recognized that the unclean and unacceptable parts of his life were real, but they did not have to be his final reality. In the past those parts of his life kept him from going home and exiled him to the pig pens. Now those pieces of his life would become the way home. They would become places of healing, new life, wholeness, forgiveness, love, and grace.

I don’t know what took Bob to that distant country or what he so desperately tried to wash away but I know that his story is my story and your story. We too have been to the distant country. We too have lived with the pigs. We too have washed but cannot get clean. In coming to himself Bob would ultimately have to trust the Father’s love more than he trusted the pig stink. So must you and I. After all, the Father does.

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This sermon is for the Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year C. It is based on the Parable of the Prodigal Son, Luke 15:1-3, 11-32.