By Amy-Jill Levine
Amy-Jill Levine is a Jewish New Testament scholar who brings fresh insights to bear on nine of Jesus’ parables. She does so by helping us understand them as Jesus’ original Jewish audience might have, not as moral fables or allegories, but as attempts to get his audience “to see the world in a different way, to challenge, and at times to indict” (4).
In the introduction of the book, Levine sets the stage for her treatment of the parables. She places Jesus’ parables in the context of Jewish practice in the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature. Alluding to questions of how historically accurate the gospels are, she argues that we can be sure that teaching by parables was part of Jesus’ practice.
The discussion of each parable opens with her own translation. It then engages a range of ways that the parable has been interpreted as well as identify relevant historical and social contexts. As a taste of her treatment what follows are brief summaries of her conclusions about three of the parables she examines.
About the parables of lost things found in Luke 15 (sheep, coin, sons), she shifts the focus from typical interpretations of repentance and salvation to a focus on how irresponsible those who did the losing are: a shepherd, a woman, a father. Perhaps the point is that reconciliation “requires our efforts, and from those efforts there is the potential for wholeness and joy” (70).
Regarding the familiar parable of the Good Samaritan, Levine says that after Jesus mentions a priest and a Levite, the audience then would expect the next person to be an Israelite. Instead, it is a Samaritan.
That the hero of the story would be a Samaritan would outrage Jesus’ audience then as much as if the story today was about a “Good Hamas Member” who stopped to help an injured Israeli at the side of the road. As such the parable challenges our stereotypes of our perceived enemies.
In the parable of the Widow and the Judge, Levine encourages us not to try to make the widow or the judge look good. The widow wants vengeance, the judge wants to preserve himself and so “all the figures in the parable, and we readers as well, have become enmeshed in, if not colluded with this system set up at best for a ‘justice’ … that by any other name constitutes vengeance” (244).
With that said, the parable asks us to examine our place in larger social and political systems.
Whether one agrees with her interpretations, Levine challenges readers to rethink what insights we take from the parables so that they will do for us what they did in Jesus’ day: provoke, challenge and inspire.
Paul Lewis, Professor and Chair of Religion, Mercer University, Macon, GA