The Prodigal Reader
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Twenty years ago, I taught English and American literature at a Chinese university. My students were smart, spoke amazing English, and read literary works even native English speakers find difficult—Shakespeare, Faulkner, Joyce—all with an enthusiasm I've rarely encountered since. Victims of China's Cultural Revolution in the late '60s and early '70s—a book-burning, knowledge-squelching period of their history—these students hungered for knowledge, especially knowledge of the previously forbidden: literature, religion, Western thought. After we'd read a novel or a play, we'd discuss different ways of interpreting it. Invariably one of them would raise a hand and stand to ask the question they all had: "But what is the correct interpretation of this story?"
The literary innocence of their question amused me. Nevertheless, many years later, as a new Christian studying the Bible for the first time and similarly hungering for knowledge just beyond my grasp, I read Jesus' stories and found myself asking the same question.
I encountered the more popular of Jesus' parables during the masses of my childhood and in my family's illustrated children's Bible—the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son, the Sower and the Seeds. As a child, I didn't think about these stories very deeply, except to glean the most obvious messages: the Good Samaritan did right. Forgiveness is possible for doing wrong, if you're sorry. And being cast on rocky ground sure is bad luck.
As an adult, though, I encountered tougher parables—tales of servants burying their money and virgins with lamps waiting for the bridegroom to return. Even the easy ones of my childhood suddenly became more difficult to understand. Like the stories I teach and write, Jesus' parables not only have characters and plots, but puzzling subplots, unresolved conflicts, odd details, and unfamiliar tropes. Many begin the same way—"The kingdom of heaven is like … "—but the resulting similes are different, elusive. The kingdom of heaven is like a seed, a merchant, a net, a vintner, a landowner, a treasure, a king, a bit of yeast. What is this kingdom of heaven? I wondered. So variously described, so recognizably our world, so peopled with such scoundrels.
All the stories invited more than the obvious interpretations. As a child, I never noticed the priest and Levite who didn't help the man left for dead on the roadside. But from the cynical perspective of adulthood, they loomed larger than the Samaritan, calling church authority into question and suggesting kindness is better undertaken in the course of one's daily business than in association with some group with mixed-up priorities. When I discussed this idea at the church I was attending, people told me I read too much into the parable and steered me back to the way I'd understood it as a child. Another friend read the story as a call to the church to supplant false prophets with those in pursuit of social justice. And when my husband and I discussed the story over breakfast, we came up with other readings. In short, the more I read Jesus' stories, the more confused I became about what, precisely, I was supposed to think and do as a Christian.
Related Topics:
Bible Study, Biblical Guidance, Inspiration, interpretation, Struggles
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