Day 36: Jesus is a Captivating Storyteller

Jesus replied with this story: “A man prepared a great feast and sent out many invitations. When the banquet was ready, he sent his servant to tell the guests, ‘Come, the banquet is ready.’ But they all began making excuses. One said, ‘I have just bought a field and must inspect it. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I have just bought five pairs of oxen, and I want to try them out. Please excuse me.’ Another said, ‘I just got married, so I can’t come.’

“The servant returned and told his master what they had said. His master was furious and said, ‘Go quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and invite the poor, the crippled, the blind, and the lame.’ After the servant had done this, he reported, ‘There is still room for more.’ So his master said, ‘Go out into the country lanes and behind the hedges and urge anyone you find to come, so that the house will be full. For none of those I first invited will get even the smallest taste of my banquet.’” LUKE 14:16–24 NLT

ONCE UPON A TIME, I attended an event for Bible teachers with lots of warm, wise peers and one aloof, insecure little girl disguised as a grown woman. For whatever reason—and I’m sure there are many—she took an instant disliking to me. She pounced on something I mispronounced at lunch and laughed derisively about a point I made at dinner, musing out loud about what sort of seminary would allow me to graduate without knowing the basics of theology. (We found out later she hadn’t graduated from college, much less attended seminary, which probably fueled her poor self-esteem.) Then she lowered the boom at breakfast, after someone else at our table complimented a recent Bible study I’d written, when she declared with dripping condescension, “Well, I wouldn’t call Lisa a Bible teacher, she’s more of a storyteller.”

And to tell you the truth, for years I secretly believed her snarky sentiment, so I tried to mute my natural storytelling tendencies and communicate more like a “legitimate” academic. I wrote Greek and Hebrew words on the board during the classes I taught at church. I made graphs to analyze the chiastic structure of complex passages. And I always made sure to cite lots of long-dead theologians like Blaise Pascal, John Calvin, Charles Spurgeon, and G. K. Chesterton. But no matter how many pastel sweater sets I wore or how often I perched my reading glasses on top of my head, I couldn’t keep up the charade and ended up feeling like a fraud—like a square peg in the round hole of biblical exegesis. (Don’t get me wrong, I love to nerd out about academic concepts with my fellow theology enthusiasts, and I love learning the intricacies of Greek and Hebrew, but a jovial spirit and a love for stories is another part of myself I just can’t stifle!)

I don’t think I exhaled as a Gospel-slinger until a world-renowned scholar pulled me aside in our doctoral program at Denver Seminary and said with a twinkle in his eye, “Lisa, you need to remember that Jesus was a storyteller and stop trying to return the gift God has given you to communicate biblical truths in a colorful and memorable way.” When he pronounced the four syllables of storyteller as a joyful arpeggio—like it was something wonderful instead of a plantar wart—I felt something in my heart shift with the revelation: Jesus . . . was a storyteller.

Although Jesus was omniscient, He wasn’t obnoxious. He didn’t hold Himself at arm’s length. He didn’t expound on Torah with elite, proprietary language that only other Smarty-McTarties could comprehend. He regularly rubbed shoulders with the ’Am Ha,arez, which is the Hebrew term for “people of the land.” In good, old American Southern vernacular, we’d call them salt of the earth kinda folks. And during the first century, most of those regular folks couldn’t read, much less pronounce multisyllabic theological terms. So Jesus taught them spiritual concepts with imaginative language and metaphors they could understand. Almost half of His preaching repertoire was in parabolic form, which is just a fancy term for story.

And while the miraculous grace of the Gospel can usually be discerned in His symbolism, such as in the parable of the prodigal son, our Savior’s stories were not simple nor geared toward simpletons (many of them were shared with snooty experts in the Law, mind you!). In fact, Jesus told His disciples they were meant to be controversial—to conceal and reveal (Matt. 13:10–17 and Mark 4:11–12)! Frankly, by relegating the biblical parables to children’s Sunday school or VBS curriculums, we’re missing out on some radically redemptive truths tucked behind the translucent veils of allegory.

For instance, in the parable of the great supper in Luke 14, where God’s generosity (leaders, kings, landowners, or fathers in these stories almost always represent God) wasn’t hindered by the rejection of those in power and was instead lavished on the missed and the marginalized, Jesus was pushing back against that era’s cruel cultural bias, which catered to the elite while castigating the poor. And His social critique gets even sharper when you consider that Jesus told this particular story after watching some hoity-toity guests jostle each other in order to nab the best seats at a fancy dinner party (v. 7)!

In short, our Savior’s stories were kind of like the Superbowl or the World Cup wherein tens of thousands of people gather in a stadium to cheer for a sport, but then dramatically divide over what they want the outcome of the game to be. The parables created rabid fans and rude haters. They brought seekers and believers closer to Jesus, as well as illuminated their understanding about the kingdom of God, while at the same time sending His enemies stomping away in the opposite direction yammering on about how Yeshua’s stories either offended them or did not make sense. Although His audiences were divided, what they were not, is distracted. Because He was truly captivating in the way He communicated!

• HOW WOULD YOU explain the Gospel of Jesus Christ to a kindergartner in the form of a fairy tale?
• READ MARK 4:26–29. What do you think this story reveals about God’s kingdom purposes (“divine vegetation,” as I like to call it) being dependent upon our labor? This petite parable illustrates why it’s more biblically defensible to say, “I get to volunteer at church” than “I have to volunteer at church.” In other words, it’s a guilt-buster!
• READ MARK 12:1–12. What do you think this story reveals about God’s patience with the wicked? And how can it be theologically congruent with 2 Peter 3:8–9?