Preaching the Mystery of Faith

mixes with three measures of wheat flour and that manages to leaven all of it; a man finding a treasure in a field and selling everything he has to purchase the field (and its treasure); a merchant who finds a “pearl of great price” and sells all that he has to purchase it; and, finally, the story of the dragnet that, when thrown into the sea, collects “fish of every kind”: when it is hauled to shore, the fish have to be sorted and the good fish put into buckets. This remarkable abundance of images and stories, all found in only one chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, tells us that Jesus was not an abstract preacher but laced his preaching with rich images and provocative stories. The images and examples are drawn from the agrarian context in which his audiences in first-century Galilee lived and from the fishing industry that thrived around the Sea of Galilee, where most of Jesus’ ministry took place. As natural sto rytellers usually are, Jesus was a keen observer of human life, with all of its beauty and complexity. His metaphors and stories have a poetic and unfor gettable spirit and have worked their way into the literature of every human generation since. But Jesus was not content simply to cite ordinary examples; there is in Jesus’ parables a quality of strangeness, something out of the ordinary, that grips the imagination and triggers wonderment on the part of the hearer: the incredible bounty of the harvest (“hundred or sixty or thirtyfold”), the amaz ing size of the bush that blossoms from a tiny mustard seed, the huge amount of flour that is leavened (“three measures,” estimated at sixty pounds—enough bread to feed a village!), the radical act of selling everything one has to buy the treasure in the field or the pearl of great price. The special power of the parable is to engage the listener about its mean ing. Artful human speech, especially in stories, can appear to veil truth for those who do not engage it and yet can reveal truth for those willing to listen and ponder its meaning. Some cultures in particular relish stories that bring home to them the practical wisdom of the Gospel. Jesus did not simply lec ture his audiences but enticed them by evoking experiences they were invited to think about and try to understand. Being an effective storyteller may not be a gift that comes easily to everyone who must preach, but the lesson here

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