Parables

This is an excerpt form a devotional I am currently reading called His Parables.

"The parables are brilliant verbal constructs, traps for the unwary. They begin with common things: workers, master, mustard seeds. But each parable moves in a startling way from the familiar to the unfamiliar. Workers who labor for an hour are paid the same as those who've worked all day; a despised outsider shows more compassion for a mugging victim than do member of God's chosen people. The parables catch us out, force us to admit our petty, unimaginative ways of thinking. They cannot be absorbed passively; we must participate in them. Our response literally completes the story by making it our story....

Through the imagination we enact the fundamental principle that Jeusus came to teach: we must learn to see through the eyes of others. In allowing ourselives to be transported into the experience of others, art takes us our of ourselves, teaches us compassion. And because compassion means "suffering with," the imagination has to take into account the whole of reality including the existence of evil, death, and human folly."

-Gregory Wolfe