Scandalous Stories: A Sort of Commentary on Parables

By Daniel Emery Price and Chad Bird

Parables are some of the most familiar stories in the Bible, yet their interpretations and applications are anything but uniform. Scandalous Stories is a "sort" of commentary on these familiar stories that are steeped in God's offensive grace and loving mercy for sinners and saints alike.

• Language: English
• Publisher: 1517 Publishing
• Release date: Oct 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781945500831

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Scandalous Stories

© 2018 Daniel Emery Price

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher at the address below.

Published by:

1517 Publishing

PO Box 54032

Irvine, CA 92619-4032

Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data

(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)

Names: Price, Daniel Emery. | Sorensen, Erick. | Bird, Chad, writer of supplementary textual content.

Title: Scandalous stories : a sort of commentary on parables / by Daniel Emery Price and Erick Sorensen ; [foreword by Chad Bird].

Description: Irvine, CA : 1517 Publishing, an imprint of 1517 the Legacy Project, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: ISBN 9781945500824 (softcover) | ISBN 9781945500831 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Jesus Christ—Parables—Commentaries. | Scandals—Religious aspects—Christianity.

Classification: LCC BT375.3 .P75 2018 (print) | LCC BT375.3 (ebook) | DDC 226.806—dc23

All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated in whole or in part into any other language.

Scripture quotations marked (NASB) are taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995 by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. lockman.org.

Cover design by Brenton Clarke Little

1517 Publishing is a boutique publishing house focused on producing high-quality, theological resources to fuel a new Reformation. We promote the defense of the Christian faith, the distinction between law and gospel, vocation and civil courage, and the proclamation of Christ crucified for you.

Contents

Foreword

1. Every Pharisee Needs a Prostitute (Price)

2. An Unimpressive Kingdom (Sorensen)

3. Putting Down the Scythe (Price)

4. Bringing Fruit out of the Dirt (Sorensen)

5. Good Guys and Bad Guys (Sorensen)

6. Go Waste Your Righteousness (Price)

7. Who Is Your Father? (Sorensen)

8. A Dangerous World for Sinners (Price)

9. The Divine Guest List (Sorensen)

10. The Surprise of the Lambs (Sorensen)

11. Buying a Graveyard (Price)

Foreword

By Chad Bird

To begin this book on parables, let’s begin with a parable of sorts. This one is passed down to us by the third-century biblical scholar, Origen, as told to him by a Jewish friend.

To what may we compare the scriptures? They are like a very large house full of locked rooms. On the floor in front of every door is a key. But here’s the catch: the key doesn’t fit the lock on that particular door. It fits another door located somewhere else in the house. The challenge, therefore, is to gather up all the keys and begin trying them on all the doors until the exact key is found that will unlock each room. So it is with the scriptures. Because they are so obscure, Origen says, the only way to begin to understand them was by means of other passages containing the explanation dispersed throughout them (Philocalia 2:3).

If you’ve spent much time reading the Bible, you can probably appreciate the frustration implicit in this parable. It would be a troublesome piece of work, Origen says, to discover the keys to suit the rooms they were meant for. Studying the scriptures can, at times, seem like a troublesome piece of work, or (to say it more positively) a monumental challenge. Like the fellow meandering through the hallways of the large house, his pockets spilling over with loose keys, trying every door, so we walk through the scriptures, trying every key we can get our hands on to open the locked doors of challenging passages. We use scripture to interpret scripture, this verse to open that verse, this OT key to unlock that NT account (or vice versa). We cannot but feel some sympathy for the Ethiopian eunuch, who was reading Isaiah 53 while riding along in his chariot. Do you understand what you are reading? Philip asked him. And the eunuch replied, How can I, unless someone guides me? (Acts 8:30–31). Echoing that sentiment, we might say, How can we understand the scriptures unless someone places in our hands the key to unlock the door?

That, in essence, is what this book is all about: it places in our hands the key that unlocks the door of the parables. But there’s an unexpected bonus, too: the particular key that unlocks the parables turns out to be a universal key. Slide it inside not just the lock of the parables, but the miracles, the exodus, the creation account, the psalms, the apocalypse, even the wild and wacky stories from the book of Judges—and lo and behold, it fits every door. This universal key, this means of unlocking all of scripture, is not a verse, not a story, but a person: Jesus, the Key of David (Rev 3:7).

This much is beyond question, Luther wrote, that all the Scriptures point to Christ alone (AE 35:132). Or as he writes elsewhere, All of Holy Scripture, from beginning to end, points solely to Christ as our Source of grace and truth (22:124). Of course, Luther is doing nothing more than echoing Jesus himself, who, when walking with the disciples to Emmaus, interpreted to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself (Luke 24:27). We can walk through the scriptures day after day, trying every key in every lock, but unless the key is the crucified and resurrected Messiah, it will never open the door. While it is true that scripture interprets scripture, it is even truer to say that Christ is the interpretation of scripture. The Word made flesh is also the Word forged into our key.

Aha! or Wait, what?

We might suppose that if any of the rooms in the house of scripture were already unlocked, with the doors swinging wide open, it would be the parables of Jesus. After all, when teachers employ stories that compare A to B, or illustrate the abstract by means of the concrete, they’re attempting to clarify and not cloud the meaning. By using illustrations, teachers are trying to give their students an Aha! moment, not elicit a Wait, what? response. The story itself is meant to open the door to a confusing or challenging subject.

But as Robert F. Capon reminds us, that’s not how rabbi Jesus rolls. With him, the device of parabolic utterance is used not to explain things to people’s satisfaction but to call attention to the unsatisfactoriness of all their previous explanations and understandings.¹ His parables are designed to pop every circuit breaker in their minds.² And he pops those circuit breakers one by one, parable after parable, by telling the kind of stories indicated in the title of this book: scandalous ones.

We often hear parables defined as earthly stories with a heavenly meaning. But that’s not only too simplistic; it’s misleading. To begin with, the parables are not your predictable earthly story where good guys finish first, bad guys finish last, and the dashing hero rides off into the sunset with the beauty queen smiling beside him. Very often in the parables of Jesus, the good guy doesn’t get the girl; he gets the shaft. The man with a black hat receives a standing ovation, and the unwashed riffraff of society is scooped up from the gutter and plopped down at the head of a king’s table with a T-bone steak and a glass of Merlot. These may be earthly stories, but they read more like immorality tales.

Second, the parables aren’t about a heavenly, otherworldly meaning. Their subject is the kingdom of God, to be sure, but a kingdom packed with dirt and trees and water and bread and wine and truckloads of twisted sinners. The divine kingdom is a dirty kingdom, rooted in the stuff of creation. The parables don’t point up there, to celestial truisms worthy of angelic musings, but down here, to the creation infused with the promises of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world. Rather than earthly stories with a heavenly meaning, the parables are bass-ackward tales with a cruciform meaning. Luther once said that everything that belong to God must be crucified. That applies to the parables, too. They are crucified stories.

Crucified Stories

Paul wrote to the Corinthians, "For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block [Greek: skandalon] to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God (1 Cor 1:22–24). Christ crucified is a stumbling block," a skandalon. The cross of Jesus is indeed scandalous. It is a stumbling block that trips people up, elicits a disgust response, leaves a bad taste in our spiritual mouths. I mean, what kind of God would sink so low as to die the filthy death