Craig Blomberg offers solid advice on the use of parables. (542 hits)
An article by Craig Blomberg
**PreachingToday.com: What are your favorite parables, and why?
*Craig Blomberg: Simply because certain parables, like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, are used so often, I have come to appreciate some of the lesser-cited passages. Because of my heart for good stewardship I appreciate texts like the Rich Man and Lazarus, and in Luke 16, the Unjust Steward. That particular parable for many people seems to be the most puzzling of all.
**One major question about interpreting and preaching parables is whether the parables of Jesus are meant to give us one message or many. What do you believe about that issue?
*There have been wild pendulum swings throughout the history of the church in interpreting the parables, and as with many controversies, the truth often falls somewhere in between. In my studies I have tried to go back before the era of all of the Greek and Roman allegorizing of parables and other biblical narratives to the way parables of the Jewish rabbis were taken. Some of them might have been Jesus' contemporaries. Typically there were two or three or maybe four, but seldom more, key characters or details that clearly did have symbolic significance. Seldom were narrative stories of considerable detail narrowed down to just one main point, but on the other hand, it was seldom if ever the case that more than just a handful of key details had symbolism to them. The approach I have developed argues that while one may seek a big idea or a unifying proposition for a sermon, when one actually unpacks that in terms of the parables, one should understand how many main characters there are and what their relationship is. Usually one is able to find a key lesson or sub-point based on each of those characters.
**How do you carry that off effectively in a sermon? Do you tell the story three different ways for each character?
*That's one option. A study on the Prodigal Son, tucked away in an esoteric scholarly journal, did precisely that — three consecutive readings of the Prodigal, from the eyes of the wayward son and then the older brother and finally the waiting father. The conclusion was that the one main point of the story was that repentance is always possible no matter how far you have fallen, and one should not begrudge God's generosity to the wayward, but recognize that God is loving, wishing that lost sons near and far should return. When I read the end of the article, I said, " That's exactly what the parable means, but this guy can't count. That's not one point; that's three. One point for each of the main characters. "
But one doesn't have to structure the sermon that way. If people are used to a more typical three-point or three sub-point message, oftentimes successive episodes of the passage will focus on a different character in turn, and so you can combine traditional exposition moving sequentially through the passage with a focus on the different characters.
There may be other times when you want to do more classic, big-idea preaching and try to take those three prongs and combine them together. Take the parable of the two sons in , which seems to many people like the same structured story as the Prodigal minus most of the detail. A vineyard owner tells his two sons to go to work, and one day the one says he will but he doesn't, and the other says he won't but he does. I had a colleague who suggested a big idea for that passage as " Performance takes priority over promise. " In the three P words you have the three prongs of the passage summarized succinctly. I've never been able to come up with something like that for a text as rich in detail as the Prodigal Son.
**How many parables have a multiplicity of characters contributing to the main points of the story?...
