Questions, Parables and not being “too preachy”
And how facts really don’t end the discussion
“I am the true vine. I am the gate. I am the bread of life.”
They were confused in John’s Gospel. We’re confused now. Why didn’t Jesus just say what he meant?
He did. In Matthew 5, we have the Beatitudes where Jesus tells us directly who is blessed. The list is surprising and counter-cultural. And our reaction is still, ‘What on earth do you mean?’.
Jesus speaks more specifically over the next two chapters of Matthew about being salt and light, swearing oaths, not looking at someone lustfully along with an awful lot of other practical concrete advice. This does not produce the reaction, ‘Gotcha. On it. All clear. Leave it with me’. Our reaction is normally ‘How on earth am I supposed to do that?’.
Questions Questions
Provoking questions is a feature of Jesus’ teaching. It’s not a bug, a flaw or just a consequence of the limiting factors surrounding language, text and translation. What Jesus says is often perfectly clear. But we still have questions. Good questions.
And so does Jesus. He asked a lot of questions. According to Martin B. Copenhaver, Jesus asks 307 questions in the New Testament. In fact, he asks more questions than he is asked. Apparently he is asked 183. How many of those he answers is a moot point. Very few he answers directly.
We shouldn’t be surprised to see God Incarnate asking questions. When Adam and Eve have sinned right at the beginning, God’s speeches are a series of questions.
But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, “Where are you?”
He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?”
Then the Lord God said to the woman, “What is this that you have done?”
Being the omniscient creator, God knew the answer to all of those questions. But this is how we learn, process information and get to truth: questions. Asking and answering. Some of us like asking questions, some of us discover what we think by answering questions. Questions open up discussion, rather than delay it, frustrate it or undermine it.
What Do We Question? That is the Question.
Our wider society can’t figure out if it likes questions or not. It rather depends on what you are questioning. We love to question authority and we tell people to do that all the time. The decades of deferential culture went out as Beyond the Fringe and That Was The Week That Was made questioning the default setting.
But good luck questioning ‘settled science’. You will be accused of being a ‘denier’ of some sort, the implication being that you are the very worst kind of human being in league with those who did the very worst things imaginable in the 20th Century.
There’s a strange notion here that has entered public discourse about the nature of facts – and how they end the discussion. A tweet like this from Ricky Gervais in 2014 is not at all unusual:
It’s a common debating tactic to declare the other side illegitimate because they don’t have facts, only opinions. This really is a troubling development as facts do the very opposite of ending discussion. Facts begin a discussion. Facts are the basis of the discussion.
We can discuss the fact that smoking cigarettes will probably take years off your life, or that the Battle of Agincourt was in 1415. But what do those facts mean? What do we do about smoking, if anything? What about those who smoke until they are ninety, despite having enough tar in their lungs to resurface the M6? What place should the Battle of Agincourt hold in the psyche of the nation six hundred years on? Was it even significant at the time given we lost the Hundred Years War? We can and should ask questions. Questions are good. Good questions are great.
Getting Back To Preachiness
I mention this because a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about collective worship in Church of England Schools. The Times newspaper ran a headline of the advice being to avoid hymns that are ‘too preachy’, which would be idiotic advice if true. But it’s not quite true. It’s a headline.
In short, I argued that Church of England schools can probably be more confident in promoting the Christian faith to children for reasons you can read for yourself (see ‘All Things Bland and Banal’. But let’s say that Christian headteachers are reluctant to put words or prayers and praise into the mouths of children (even though collective worship in schools is still mandated by law). What is left?
Here’s what is left: stories from the Bible. Parables of Jesus. Sayings of Solomon. Letters of Paul. Far from being ‘preachy’, these stories promote pertinent and poignant questions. The text rarely tells us who is right, who is wrong and how we should feel about any one particular passage or person. Stories are ambiguous, proverbs paradoxical.
What are we to make of Eve speaking with a serpent? Why were Adam and Eve then prevented from going back to the Tree of Life? Why did Cain kill Abel? Why did God think Noah was righteous? Were languages we now speak because of the Tower of Babel a blessing or a curse? Why Abraham? Is it okay that Jacob steals the birth-right?
Those are just some quick ones for starters. Read any story from the Bible and questions come tumbling out. They’re supposed to. It’s a feature, not a bug. The Bible is surprisingly ‘unpreachy’.
Call to Action
So my unambiguous call to action is this: put scripture at the heart of collective worship. Put time and energy into doing this well. Get students who are good at reading out loud or acting to get better using scripture. You don’t need to rewrite the text. What God caused to be written will probably do the job if translated well. Use the International Children’s Bible for really small ones.
Let the Bible set the agenda. As well as being not preachy, it’s also not very culturally specific, having been written by dozens of people from numerous communities from across the centuries. There’s no need to ‘make it relevant’. It already is relevant. It contains stories of sibling rivalries, evil kings, heroic princess, widows, witches, angels, orphans, miracles, midwives, battles, betrayals, plagues and people who eat locusts.
You probably won’t have to look far to find people both on your staff and from the local community who will be glad to make the most of these stories. Open the Book from Bob Hartman and the Bible Society sounds pretty good. I had a chat with Bob Hartman about it on a podcast last year.
These stories will stay with these children for the rest of their lives. Some they will never forget, even if they don’t realise they’ve remembered them. The stories – and the questions – may lie dormant for years, even decades.
So why not plant those seeds now? In fact, I know a story about someone who sowed seeds. You probably heard it when you were a kid. Will kids hear that story today? What will they make of it? There’s only one way to find out.
Need some summer reading? A Christian book you might actually finish? Try The Gospel According to a Sitcom Writer for some laughs, insights and frankly overdue criticisms of Pilgrim’s Progress. You’ll whizz through that in no time, so while you’re there, why not get a copy of The Sacred Art of Joking too?