The Parables of Jesus

Most teaching treats a parable as a container: find the point, take it out, throw the story away. Kenneth Bailey argues the mechanism runs the other way, and that a parable is closer to a house you are invited to move into. That is what this series runs on, and the index of all twenty-six posts is further down.

The third servant was not being prudent, and the master never confirms the charge against him. Why this parable is hard, and what Bailey, Wright and Snodgrass make of the hard parts.

The tax collector does not ask for mercy in the vague sense. He asks for atonement, and the temple sacrifice is burning behind him at the moment he says it.

A man is dragged in off the street and then thrown out for what he is wearing. Why the ending is not arbitrary, and what the parable is actually answering.

The hardest parable in the Gospels. A manager cheats his employer and gets praised for it, and Bailey's reading turns on a detail most translations bury.

Jesus refuses to answer a request for justice, which is startling until you see what he thought the request was a symptom of. Why he treats it as illness.

Bailey reads the three excuses as a public insult; most commentators hear lame excuses. Why the guest list, not the excuses, answers a seven-hundred-year argument.

The parable used to build a map of the afterlife is not answering that question. What it is answering, and why the rich man never stops giving orders.

The lawyer asks who his neighbour is and never gets an answer, because the question itself was wrong. What the priest was actually weighing on that road.

Both houses take the same storm, which rules out the reading most people carry. What digging down to rock actually involved and what the foundation is.