The Christian tradition is inherently a storytelling religion. Jesus almost never expressed propositional claims about what constitutes right belief (“orthodoxy”) and rarely spoke in a didactic form apart from instructing his followers to love God and their neighbors, including their perceived enemies. He warned against the evils of hypocrisy and what we might call today spiritual abuse. But when it came to any positive depiction of what God was like or what we might expect regarding life after death might or how we are to treat one another, Jesus told stories.
On one level, this should not be surprising. Life is not reducible to a bullet-point list of facts and figures. Rather, life is narrative. Because human existence is inherently mysterious and the fullness of our identities and strivings are incomprehensible — including to ourselves — we tell stories to make sense of the world and to understand ourselves and others better. This is why Jesus also told stories to others about who God is and who we are called to be.
Admittedly not “of this world,” the kingdom or reign of God can only be likened to rich, complex, and engaging narratives expressed in parables and similes. The renowned New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine picked up on this fact in her accurate and cleverly named 2015 book about these parables, titled Short Stories by Jesus. She notes that not only were the stories told by Jesus in his time effective in communicating the sensus plenior (or “fuller meaning”) of God’s reign to the original listeners, but also so effective and necessary is the storytelling form that versions of these narratives were told and retold and retold again by his followers to subsequent generations through oral tradition until they were written down in the current redacted form we find in the canonical Gospels.
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With thanks to National Catholic Reporter and Daniel P. Horan, where this article originally appeared.
